Review of reviews: Books

Book of the week

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret

by Seth Shulman

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(Norton, $24.95)

Alexander Graham Bell must have lived most of his adult life in shame, says science journalist Seth Shulman. Though the Scots-born inventor created the first working telephone in March 1876, the principal innovation behind the device appears to have been stolen from a rival. Two weeks before his eureka moment, the 28-year-old Bell had traveled to Washington to defend the vaguely worded patent application he had filed for his unproved invention. When he returned to Boston, his research took a sudden turn. Putting aside the magnets and batteries he had been experimenting with, Bell began using a cup of liquid to register sound waves as electronic impulses. Not only did the new contraption work. It looked exactly like a drawing that Elisha Gray, an Illinois engineer, had sent to Washington just four weeks earlier.

Shulman takes no joy in exposing Bell as a fraud, said Adam Forrest in the Edinburgh Sunday Herald. Bell remains in the author’s eyes a visionary and a generally ethical man. But Bell left behind a damning notebook with a drawing closely resembling Gray’s, and once Shulman spotted Bell’s sudden shift in method, he followed his suspicions. The Telephone Gambit “succeeds splendidly as an edge-of-your-seat historical tale,” said Marjorie Kehe in The Christian Science Monitor. While the hunt for clues never yields a piece of evidence more compelling than the notebook, Shulman presents a colorful behind-the-scenes drama. If Bell stands guilty of a crime, his excuses include “an alcoholic patent clerk, some unscrupulous attorneys, and a beautiful young woman” the inventor longed to marry.

Suspense isn’t Shulman’s strong suit, said Mark Coleman in the Los Angeles Times. Every time the main story “builds up a head of steam,” Shulman yanks readers back into a narrative about his own research. Stranger still, he never pursues his vaguely outlined hypothesis that primary responsibility for the apparent patent fraud may rest with Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Bell’s principal backer and future father-in-law. Regardless of who the principal culprit was, The Telephone Gambit “proves beyond a reasonable doubt” that Bell has long enjoyed more credit for inventing the telephone than he deserves.

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them

by David Anderegg

(Tarcher, $24.95)

The first known use of the word “nerd” was harmless enough. The inimitable Dr. Seuss dropped it into a semi-nonsensical line in his 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I’d sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too.” Soon enough, though, “nerd” came to define something no kid wanted to be. Its actual definition has had shifting boundaries, says child psychologist David Anderegg. Today it connotes “some combination of school success, interest in precision, un-self-consciousness, closeness to adults, and interest in fantasy.” The lack of self-consciousness particularly unnerves other people, Anderegg says. It makes the rest of us feel obliged to keep informing the nerds that they’re nerdy.

Anderegg’s book is just the right kind of smart, said Rachel Hartigan Shea in The Washington Post. Its “breezy” tone strengthens the earnest argument at its core. To Anderegg, the nerd stereotype is not just a fleeting playground obstacle. It represents a particularly American strain of anti-intellectualism that has plagued the culture since Ralph Waldo Emerson endorsed the idea that Americans were “men of action, not men of reflection.” Even on the playground, Anderegg says, the nerd label remains potent enough to change the course of some children’s lives. This, in turn, may affect the nation’s capacity to compete in a global economy. “Consider this terrifying statistic” from Anderegg’s cache: In 2004, U.S. colleges graduated more sports-exercise majors than electrical engineers.

Parents apparently will need to play a major role in burying anti-nerd prejudices, said The Economist. Anderegg says he counsels the parents of his young patients that they can’t be mocking bright misfits while expecting good grades from their own children. He also tells “a funny and moving story” about trying to convince one stubborn couple that they needed to buy jeans for their teenager instead of exposing him to constant ridicule by sending him to school in tracksuit pants. Considering broader steps, Anderegg suggests that anti-smoking ad campaigns provide good models for what a pro-nerd marketing effort could achieve, said Teresa Budasi in the Chicago Sun-Times Web site. And how about offering more brainiacs the big-money scholarships that star athletes now get? “I’d say those are a couple of good places to start.”