PositiveScienceJackson recounts Tyndall’s fascinating life with impressive clarity. By keeping his focus so tightly on Tyndall the man, however, he loses the opportunity to draw key conclusions about Victorian science more generally. Tyndall mixed scientific celebrity with risk-taking and experimental finesse. His movements between the lecture theater, the laboratory, and the mountains, to say nothing of his social climbing, tell us what it took to make authoritative statements about nature at a time when the cultural value of science was vehemently debated ... Roland Jackson’s admirably complete biography is the first serious biography to appear since a patchy production appeared in 1945 ... It’s about time.
