NF

Fun to read, made me want to have a better grounding in early AmHist. Mind still reeling from contemplating the history of oxygen levels on the Earth and how determinate it's been for all living things. ( )

I chose this book because Joseph Priestly invented seltzer water, and since I'm obsessed with the stuff, I thought it would be interesting to know where it came from. He did and was so much more. This book covers 18th and early 19th century politics in Europe and the burgeoning US, religion, and scientific advancement and how the three intertwine. It discusses Priestly's friendship with Ben Franklin, his contributions to chemistry despite being an amateur scientist, and eventually gets around to his role as founder of the Unitarian church. My main complaint of the book is that it doesn't go deep on any one of the topics, regularly bringing the reader out of history to give -- at length -- a modern framing. After reading this book, I feel as if I read a good article about Priestly and would like to read a whole book about him. ( )

This book was such a random discovery -- ran into a copy at the Unitarian used book sale (wow. I just realized how appropriate that is), and picked it up because it hit a trifecta of my history interests -- science, the American Revolution, and heresy. I did not expect the book to frequently take an ecological approach to biography, which of course makes sense given the nature of some of Priestley's discoveries -- and I loved it.

I took pages of notes as I was reading -- on Priestly and Franklin, the Enlightenment, the nature of progress, ecology, chemistry, the founding of Unitarianism. So much of the material in this book was right up my alley, but still somehow information I hadn't run into before -- or at least not fully synthesized. My favorite bit was definitely the section on the Carboniferous, which I don't think I'd ever heard put together fully that way before. It blew my mind.

Favorite quote: "Necessity may be the mother of invention, but most of the great inventors were blessed with something else: leisure time." ( )

Wow. A very thoughtful look at a little-known British scientist/thinker at the end of the eighteenth century. I liked Johnson's approach to history, his thoughts about progress, and his linkage between Priestley's ideas and contemporary American politics. And I had no idea Priestley figured so prominently in the letters between Jefferson and Adams! ( )