Measuring earthquakes, regenerating brains and conquering space.
RICHTER'S SCALE Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a ManBy Susan Elizabeth Hough Princeton Univ. 335 pp. $27.95
If you asked Americans to name a single seismologist, most would almost certainly name the same person: Charles Francis Richter, the man who devised a scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes across the globe. In her new Richter's Scale, Susan Elizabeth Hough explores his personal and professional arc, which began at the turn of the 20th century and ended in 1985.
This thoughtful, well-researched book explores a central question: why Richter -- an admittedly quirky, plainspoken scientist -- became so much better known than some of his more accomplished colleagues. Many earthquake researchers believe that fellow Caltech seismologist Beno Gutenberg deserves just as much credit for developing the Richter scale, and even Richter himself acknowledged in a 1979 interview that the label "somewhat underrates Gutenberg's part in developing it for further use." But as Hough notes, public scientific acclaim often involves a paradox: Some of the most gifted scientists "are not necessarily the ones who make the most profound, or the most enduring, contributions. Nor are they necessarily the ones whose contributions capture the public imagination, or the ones whose contributions have the largest societal impact." Richter's ability to communicate his findings with a general audience through the press, Hough demonstrates, gave him the kind of public profile that cemented his position in the popular lexicon.
The fact that Hough is a seismologist herself shows in her mastery of the science underpinning Richter's work and occasionally in her prose, which includes more than a few clich?s. But the author deserves credit for delving into Richter's letters, poems and scientific papers to understand her complicated subject. She not only explains that he was an avid poet and nudist but shows how this "nerd among nerds" found his first intimate circle of friends within the nudist colony he frequented with his wife. Above all, Richter's Scale provides an honest assessment of a researcher who, when faced with a radio show caller who asked him what to do about her fear of earthquakes, replied without missing a beat, "Why don't you get the hell out of the state?"
-- Juliet Eilperin
THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain ScienceBy Norman Doidge Viking. 427 pp. $24.95
Not long ago, the suggestion that parts of the human brain could take on functions "controlled" by other parts was scientific blasphemy. In The Brain That Changes Itself, psychiatrist Norman Doidge chronicles the experiences of researchers and patients that he says prove the brain's "plasticity" -- its unique ability to recover from injury or even disuse. The brain is not the hard-wired machine that science once supposed it to be, Doidge shows, but a continually changing organ with an amazing power to rejuvenate itself.
Most of us think of brain recovery in terms of restoring movement to stroke victims. Doidge, who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Toronto, goes well beyond that, showing how people with autism, compulsions and even the motor and memory lapses of old age improve dramatically through therapies that "rewire" their brains. A scientist with a magician-like mirrored box that ends the torture of phantom-limb pain in amputees, a woman plagued with a constant loss of balance, a man whose son helps him recover from a stroke by teaching him the way we would teach a baby -- all link scientific experimentation with personal triumph in a way that inspires awe for the brain, and for these scientists' faith in its capacity.
Unfortunately, in describing such quests, Doidge relies too heavily on narration and editorializing. When he lets his subjects speak, his iconoclastic scientists and triumphant patients tell their stories better than he does. In describing stroke recovery, Doidge spends pages on a researcher's troubles stemming from his work with monkeys -- which, though appalling, sacrifices space better spent on the man's rather considerable achievements. In his heavily Freudian chapter about how learned experience affects love, Doidge dwells too long on pornography addiction and sexual deviance, clouding an otherwise fascinating, even moving story on the physiology of emotion.
Overall, however, The Brain That Changes Itself is a valuable compilation of work that seeks to prove the unsung adaptability of our most mysterious organ. Readers will want to read entire sections aloud and pass the book on to someone who can benefit from it.
-- Elizabeth Williamson
