Steven Johnson (1)Anmeldelser

A very informative account of the London 1850s cholera outbreak. The author presents the facts well and rounds them of with well-placed literary examples from Dickens. There are good comparatives with evolutionary biology on how a society functions.
All in all a very important book and definitely commendable.

Great start of a book but the author doesn’t carry through a d doesn’t justify the title which seems to promise cimpleteness.

The book is a fun romp across connected technologies and how they enabled each other leading to deep changes in culture and society.

The author reviews the key factors which drove up life expectancy and how they came to be. The story is a perfect “science” communication piece because the author takes apart these factors into what it really rakes for knowledge to become life saving practice.

There are many important things to note:
- how culturally we celebrate wars so much more than health innovation which saves lives
- how we believe that private sector delivers results in health innovation when it is mostly been able to deliver distribution
- how health innovation is so much more complicated than the science alone because how it translates to policy makes all the difference
- how dogma even in the science community can make it hard to deliver health

Basically the vision of how science impacts health in the public is so different from what actually happened and how technology impacted life expectancy. Pretty much everyone should be aware of this history, particularly in a pandemic.

Good health needs passionate evidence based drivers, and a practical public policy translation…

This book connects inventions with social movements in a way that formed many moments of epiphany for me. It was delightful and thought-provoking, but it's not a gripping book; I had to force myself back into it a few times because the excitement wasn't quite there (and I was reading Six Of Crows at the time), but every time I went back in I was glad I did.

It may give you a sense that, sometimes, the world really does make sense, and it will make history seem just a little bit smaller and more closely intertwined.

I have mixed feelings about this one. I enjoyed the first part of the book, for the most part, when he was just talking history. Toward the end, and after the original source of the disease was revealed, it took an eye-rolling turn. I wish I would have just stopped after the history and skipped the global warming, fear mongering, and treatise on cities = good; country = ignorant people who can't stop having kids. (Dear author, I live in Arkansas by choice and am from Oregon by birth. I have 9 children. I'm also really smart. Sorry I don't fit your narrative.)

The author is a preachy humanist/environmentalist/atheist annoying pain in the &%#%@# so it's hard to take some of his future solution ideas very seriously. Just give me the facts...let me figure out my own response to them.

Hillbilly Me did manage to math enough to figure out that this epidemic was far, far worse than the one we're supposedly currently experiencing. The COVID death rate for England and Wales at the time of my figurin' was .00002%, while the rate for cholera was .0003%. Both are pretty miniscule, but one death is enough to investigate the cause and make reasonable and intelligent changes.

Regardless of my over the top, too personal feelings of dislike for the author, I love books like this that are chockfull of history. While I don't believe in macro-evolution, micro-evolution has always fascinated me. I found his ideas about inconsistencies among various cultures regarding alcohol adaptation/resistance especially interesting. I also had to chuckle at so much of the ignorant thinking in those days and wondered if the board of health was so worried about the air, why were they sending people in to so intimately investigate? When I read about the ignorance of past science, it makes me wonder how many of our fantastic and innovative ideas will one day be viewed as ignorant? Ha!

Some fascinating histories, plus a strong underlying theory on how we get to these "Big Ideas".½

Pretty well done, and helpful to me as I struggle with my own indecisiveness around long-term decisions. Loses the thread a bit at the end, although I appreciate the humanistic approach he outlined.

I like Johnson’s style. You get the whole story, but he’s got an underlying theme to give the whole thing form and meaning. An enjoyable read and you know a whole bunch about this interesting turning point in history by the end.

This book was absolutely MADE of context, in a way that I found incredibly satisfying. At its most basic level, this is the story of cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery (finally) of how cholera is transmitted.

But it is the how, yes? How this happened that is fascinating, and Johnson is all about placing this moment in its proper contexts -- from economics, sanitation, city planning, dominant scientific paradigms, communication, the medical profession...

Sometimes all these layers of context can cause some circling back that may cause impatience if you're just trying to get to the payoff, but for the most part, I was delighted.½

Like James Burke, whose “Connections” series ran on BBC and PBS in the late 1970s, Steven Johnson is interested in how one thing leads to another. Ideas are built on other ideas, often in surprising ways.

Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, “How We Got to Now,” was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.
The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes.

As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning.

Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be.

We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare.

One of the finest books I've read

I enjoyed this book a lot. An interesting story about how one dramatic heist changed global law and economics.

I love micro-histories like this. The close up look at something specific, like a disease, is always interesting. I got a little hazy on the connections he was trying to make at the end regarding nuclear disaster, but overall this was a really informative book.

Cholera: not just something you perished from while playing Oregon Trail! Once thought to be caused by miasma/foul air, the 1854 cholera outbreak in London was a turning point in humanity's understanding of the disease and its spread. Intrepid physician John Snow fought an uphill battle against local authorities who were convinced cholera was spread by noxious sewer gases and could not be persuaded otherwise...until Snow drew up a map of victims' homes and their relationship with the Broad Street water pump.

I was surprised to find this book about a devastating, feared and deadly disease to be so enjoyable. I learned a great deal about not only cholera, but also 19th-century urban sanitation, medicine and municipal infrastructure. The final chapters revealed some fascinating things with respect to urban vs. city dwelling and, having now come through the other side of the global COVID-19 epidemic, were freakily prescient regarding potential future viruses. I love that there is now a pub named "John Snow" right next to location of Broad Street pump. Highly recommended for fans of narrative nonfiction.

When I lived in London, we had an assessment to do any leisure activity that you would not have otherwise done. My class partner and I decided to go through her oddities of London book, which landed us in the Jon Snow pub. Ever since, I've been enamored by Jon Snow. His story is not just one of life-saving epidemiology, but also the triumph of good science (germ theory!) over bad (miasmists) and real science (...still germ theory) over social prejudice. Steven Johnson would also have you believe that this story is about urbanism and the way that population density results in vulnerability (I think. More on that later.) So, pretty much no matter what you're into, this is one of the coolest stories in Western history.

And Johnson just destroys it. I spent a lot of time thinking about how this went wrong. I read a lot of popular science, and there's some classical ways to mess it up: oversimplifying to the point of boredom, getting too bogged down in the details, getting attached to a pet theme, etc. Johnson does none of those. In fact, if I were to describe the content of the book, it would seem perfect. In addition to the science, Johnson explores how contemporary science and the politics therein reacted to this discovery and opposed it, how the friendship developed between the disparate Snow and Whitehead and how Whitehead's better social skills improved his ability to really test the hypothesis well. Those sorts of themes were key to my enjoyment of Johnson's the Invention of Air, which is one of the best history of science books I've ever read.

First, I thought there was something innately boring about the discussion of Victorian sewage*. But I'm the sort of person who loves pedantic details and I have enough medical training that I am unimpressed by extensive discussion of unmentionable topics. I think there was just no organization to what was happening. And as a result, every 25 pages or so, for no clear reason, Johnson would start repeating one of his key themes, not really apropos of anything but because it had been a long enough time since a central thesis that I think he forgot what he'd already said.

The other problem was that the backend of the book was a mess. After an extremely in-depth exploration of very specifically the broad street pump outbreak of cholera, Johnson tries to expand to discussing urbanism in general and his thoughts are completely discombobulated. Included within this chapter are: But urbanism is good for the environment even though no one used to believe that, and Johnson and his family certainly will live in a city and he loves cities and this is the global city, but urbanism is bad if there is terrorism and terrorism is relevant because it could be bioterrorism, but vaccines will work against bioterrorism and they won't work against conventional terrorism, so it'll probably be a bomb and also, there's this idea of mutually assured destruction but what if a lone actor gets their hands on a nuclear bomb? With about that degree of organization between thoughts.

All of this disorganization happening at the end of a reasonable chapter about how Jon Snow made a physical map to prove his point, which Johnson used as an opening to discuss how critical graphics are in science and then *did not include* said map. And yes, it's 2017 and I had a smart phone handy to google it, but come on.

*(This book is shockingly dry, given that its about a water pump.)

This is assigned as a text for a class this term. Not great prose but an interesting concept.

Enjoyable and interesting read about the cholera outbreak in London and the men who helped trace back to the source in the early days of understanding microbiology . I

An interesting read about the investigation of the cause of the cholera outbreak in London in 1854. Very engaging.

An interesting quick read about some of the creations that have spawned huge changes in our world. A nice snippet of looking at history through a different lens. I had never thought about the huge impact that the creation of glass has had.

Fantastic!

pick up with Chapter 4 Serendipity

Recommended by Jen - great example of narrative nonfiction, fascinating story, and a great new perspectives on what it means to be urban.

Another highly readable book. Johnson is an excellent synthesizer, and if that sounds patronizing it shouldn't. He does his research and, even better, thinks imaginatively about what he's discovered. For me, the good ideas in this book weren't new, but they were well explained and sometimes brilliantly presented. His opening, for example, that links Darwin's coral reefs to urban statistics to the stories of HDTV and YouTube manages to be beautifully focused and sprawling in implications at the same time. Worth reading, certainly.

A somewhat gross dive into mid-19th century London's SOHO district where Cholera spread rapidly around the Broad Street pump. One researcher, the self-made but eminent pioneering anesthesiologist, Dr. Snow, was already following water as the vector for the disease, while an Anglican neighborhood priest was collecting information for his own report. The narrative takes a while to get to how these two came to work together and how while the findings that the water from the pump was the vector was not widely accepted or lauded at the time it was the first real step away from the intuitive miasma theory and came into its own well before the end of the century.

Interest collection of essays of varying quality and verbosity.