Science for Sale

Washington-based journalist Daniel S. Greenberg (The Politics of Pure Science) delves further into his favorite issue in Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Debunking science industry and policy myths left and right, Greenberg combines archival research and interviews with scientists and politicians in the know to explore why and how research has happened in the postwar U.S. "[B]ecause the politics of science is registered in money awarded or denied... [m]oney will serve as a diagnostic tool for our study," says Greenberg. He goes on to describe the sycophancy, backbends and, sometimes, dishonesty practiced by researchers, and the willingness of some government scientists to keep their mouths shut when it behooves their bosses. A disturbing, compelling and well-researched conspiracy story of the "I knew it!" variety. (Univ. of Chicago, $35 520p ISBN 0-226-30634-8; Sept.)

As President Bush tries to make up his mind over the stem cell controversy, the issue remains headline news. The Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy, edited by social ethics academics Suzanne Holland, Karen Lebacqz and Laurie Zoloth and third in MIT's Basic Bioethics series edited by Glenn McGee and Arthur Caplan, gathers 20 essays by scholars (including the editors) of theology, biology, medicine, medical and bioethics, philosophy and other disciplines. Françoise Baylis discusses the National Bioethics Advisory Commission's recommendation that stem cell research be federally funded. Rabbi Elliott N. Dorff analyzes the debate through a Jewish theological lens. Thomas B. Okarma, president and CEO of Geron Corporation, a biotechnology corporation that initiated stem cell research in 1996, offers "A Primer on the Technology and Its Medical Applications." Others weigh in with Christian, Roman Catholic, historical, feminist, social justice and public policy perspectives. Three illus. ($70 288p ISBN 0-262-08299-3; paper $29.95 -58208-2; Sept.)

Darwin's competitor for proving a theory of natural selection was stuck in the Spice Islands, malarial and enjoying a less hulking reputation than his colleague did. In Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life, Peter Raby (Samuel Butler) shows that, save for these setbacks, Wallace might have been our man on evolution. Like other biographers before him, Raby, who lectures on Drama and English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, describes the disastrous fire that consumed four years' worth of specimens Wallace had collected in the Amazon, the essay that Wallace sent to Darwin revealing his ideas about natural selection, Darwin's rush to publish his ideas first, Wallace's ongoing but lesser achievements, his long, energetic career. Though boasting no original material (Wallace's life is an open book), Raby's accomplished study is the first in some years and adds greater insight into this likeable underdog's personality. (Princeton Univ., $29.95 352p ISBN 0-691-00695-4; Aug.)

From early, career-establishing Vogue magazine work like The Spilled Handbag (Theatre Accident) of 1947 through his images of bones and other detritus (Bone Landscape, 1980) to his recent pictures of cuttlefish, Irving Penn has masterfully evinced the secret lives of objects. Ninety-eight of Penn's greatest images (45 color, 50 tritone, 3 duotone) are assembled in Still Life, a publication personally supervised by the artist. Still making funny, strange and lovely editorial photographs for Vogue and other magazines (an ant crawls on a melted Brie; a mannequin gazes out from under a bell jar), Penn also continues to experiment in his personal work: components of traditional still-life paintings like skulls, fish, paintbrushes and dice, for instance, arranged artfully and bizarrely, shot in black and white. (Little, Brown/Bulfinch, $85 144p ISBN 0-8212-2702-5; Sept. 7)

Scrolling Credits

Although best known to TV viewers as LeBeau on TV's Hogan's Heroes (1965—1971), Robert Clary has written a new memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary, offering a much more sobering view of WWII, as he recounts his 31 months in German concentration camps as a Jewish Parisian teenager. After liberation, he began singing in nightclubs and, as a protégé of Eddie Cantor, won a position in the revue New Faces of 1952, which also featured newcomers Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde and fledgling writer Mel Brooks. Decades later, his popularity among daytime viewers as a regular on soaps The Young and the Restless and Days of Our Lives helped promote his recording career. Although flatly written at times, Clary's tale of survival is inspirational. (Madison Books, $26.95 256p ISBN 1-56833-228-9; Nov.)

Prolific biographer Marc Shapiro's Susan Sarandon: Actress-Activist offers fans of the Oscar-winning actress the first full-length biography of the star of Thelma & Louise, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dead Man Walking, The Hunger, Bull Durham and others. Charting both her film work and her liberal political activism with husband Tim Robbins, the author of J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter gets the dates and names right in this workmanlike effort, but there's very little insight from such a distance (the bibliography lists one interview for the book—and that's with ACLU executive director Ira Glasser). The filmography and TV/documentary credits at the end are sketchy (i.e., film title, year and Sarandon's character's name). (Prometheus, $26, 250p ISBN 1-57392-928-X; Sept.)

October Publication

In Nothing to Fear: FDR in Photographs, Roosevelt biographer Hugh Gregory Gallagher pays homage to the beloved president. The succinct text is secondary to the more telling photographs, which portray FDR alone, with his family and alongside heads of state. Besides photos of young Franklin on horseback with his father and images of FDR and Eleanor greeting wounded WWII vets, Gallagher assembles revealing photographs of Depression-era poverty, some familiar (like Dorothea Lange's depiction of an anonymous migrant woman) and others new. Similarly, this collection includes famous FDR photos, as well as many never before published. (Vandamere, $26.95 176p ISBN 0-918339-56-1; paper $16.95 -57-X; Oct.)

September Publications

Wrongly sentenced in 1909 to life in the brutal Leavenworth prison, the first federal prison in the U.S., Frank Grigware busted out and hijacked a train with several other convicts. For 24 years, he evaded the law, ending up in Canada as a family man and mayor of a small town. Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West, by four-time Pulitzer-nominee Joe Jackson (coauthor of Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America), recounts Grigware's saga, J. Edgar Hoover's manhunt and the international tensions that arose when Canada refused to hand Grigware over to the U.S. B&w photos. (Carroll & Graf, $26 418p ISBN 0-7867-0897-2; Sept. 22)

Challenging "the belief that if technology were introduced to the classroom, it would be used; and if it were used, it would transform schooling," Stanford education professor Larry Cuban (Teachers and Machines) provides a jargon-free, critical look at the actual use of computers by teachers and students in early childhood education, high school and university classrooms in Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Combining an historical overview of school technologies with statistical data and direct observation of classroom practices in several Silicon Valley schools, he concludes that, "Without a broader vision of the social and civic role that schools perform in a democratic society, our excessive focus on technology use in schools runs the danger of trivializing our nation's core ideals." (Harvard Univ., $27.95 (256p) ISBN 0-674-00602-X; Sept.)