Books by two leading Cambridge academics have been listed as contenders for the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize, an award named in honour of the 18th century lexicographer and widely seen as the UK’s most prestigious literary award for non-fiction.
Books by two leading Cambridge academics have been listed as contenders for the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize, an award named in honour of the 18th century lexicographer and widely seen as the UK’s most prestigious literary award for non-fiction.
This year’s award saw a record number of entries and the long list is dominated by titles that focus on science and history.
On the list are Pompeii by Mary Beard (Profile Books) and Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara (Oxford University Press). Professor Beard and Dr Fara account for two of the four women writers on the 19-strong long list.
Beard is Professor of Classics and Fellow of Newnham College. Fara is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Senior Tutor and Fellow of Clare College.
Beard’s Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town has been acclaimed as a robust and highly readable excavation of one of the most famous disasters in history - when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The book busts many of the myths – including the notion that the entire population of Pompeii was wiped out in a single day – and paints a gripping picture of life in a noisy, messy, cramped town.
With a string of books under her belt, starting with Rome in the Late Republic (1985), and with a much-loved blog in the Times newspaper, Mary Beard is determinedly popularist, regularly takes part in Radio 4’s Any Questions? and acted as an adviser to the BBC television series, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire.
In a recent interview she admitted that she had been planning to write a book about Pompeii “for about 30 years”. Her special gift as a writer, speaker and broadcaster is her ability to bring classical scholarship bang up to date, finding wonderfully inventive parallels between the ancient world and popular culture, never mincing words or fighting shy of provoking heated debate.
Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History reflects her enduring interest in the history of science, and is the most recent of her books designed to reach wide audiences. The most controversial is ‘Newton: The Making of Genius’, while the one that has won most accolades for its title is ‘Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks’.
Committed to widening access and raising aspirations, she has also written a book for teenagers, Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science, which brings into the spotlight some remarkable women frequently eclipsed by their much-better known male peers.
Fara is a regular contributor to Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In our Time’, and has also appeared in several other radio and TV programmes. She is currently acting as consultant for an ambitious BBC series on the history of science. Praised for its questioning of the notion of science as a smooth onward march towards truth, Fara’s ‘Science’ sets major scientific landmarks into a context of belief systems and world views stretching back over the past four thousand years.
Like Beard, Fara is fascinated by the big picture and is determined to bring research and scholarship to the general public. Her latest book demands no scientific knowledge and appeals to both sides of the Arts-Sciences divide. She takes us on a journey back to the Babylonians who developed the 60-minute hour, the seven-day week and the 360 degree circle. Rebutting notions that real science began only recently, she introduces us to the astrologers and alchemists whose observations, techniques and laboratories created the foundations for future generations of investigators.
Fara also re-visits the grandees of science – Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein among them – to reveal their telling relationships with contemporary society and politics. She shows them to be far from the lonely geniuses portrayed in history books, but susceptible to the very human faults of obfuscation, jealousy and opportunism like many scientists before and after them.
The Samuel Johnson award, which is sponsored by the BBC, will be judged by a panel chaired by Jacob Weisberg, one of America’s leading political journalists.
The short list will be announced in late May and the winner of the award and the £20,000 prize will be announced on 20 June. Last year’s winner was The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury).
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