Books In Brief

bagpipes and an assortment of drums, African, Caribbean and Genekrupa. There’s something for everyone here: haunting ballads, comic interludes (a tic-toc metronomic chase in a medieval dungeon reduces the audience to a state of hysterical laughter, why I can’t explain—and you’ll have to see it for yourself), plus the fast change of pace and mood that is the substitute in every successful revue for the advancing story line in most dramatic plays. All this and musical excitement, adventure and discovery, too, make Minim! a show you shouldn’t miss.

The Cautionary Scientists, by Kenneth S. Davis (Putnam $5.75). This is a book which is good as factual reconstruction of an era of scientific history and interesting as character analysis of its two subjects of study: Priestley and Lavoisier. But it is rather simplistic and melodramatic about the causes of the political event, the French Revolution, which undid both scientists. There is a nice apposition in the choice of Lavoisier and Priestley for this comparative study: they knew each other, learned from each other, competed with each other. They were born into and remained loyal to the social classes that collided in that bloody confrontation of mutual stupidities which was the French Revolution. Lavoisier rode the tumbrils a condemned aristocrat; Priestley, his melancholy bark to permanent American exile, a condemned man of the people. Their crime? Treason both. These two founding fathers of modern chemistry were something more than disembodied beings haunting sulphurous laboratories on bold alchemical pursuits. Passionate chemists, they were engaged deeply in political concerns, so fully indeed that even their great discoveries (in pneumatic chemistry) seem the fruit of minor preoccupations.

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bagpipes and an assortment of drums, African, Caribbean and Genekrupa. There’s something for everyone here: haunting ballads, comic interludes (a tic-toc metronomic chase in a medieval dungeon reduces the audience to a state of hysterical laughter, why I can’t explain—and you’ll have to see it for yourself), plus the fast change of pace and mood that is the substitute in every successful revue for the advancing story line in most dramatic plays. All this and musical excitement, adventure and discovery, too, make Minim! a show you shouldn’t miss.

The Cautionary Scientists, by Kenneth S. Davis (Putnam $5.75). This is a book which is good as factual reconstruction of an era of scientific history and interesting as character analysis of its two subjects of study: Priestley and Lavoisier. But it is rather simplistic and melodramatic about the causes of the political event, the French Revolution, which undid both scientists. There is a nice apposition in the choice of Lavoisier and Priestley for this comparative study: they knew each other, learned from each other, competed with each other. They were born into and remained loyal to the social classes that collided in that bloody confrontation of mutual stupidities which was the French Revolution. Lavoisier rode the tumbrils a condemned aristocrat; Priestley, his melancholy bark to permanent American exile, a condemned man of the people. Their crime? Treason both. These two founding fathers of modern chemistry were something more than disembodied beings haunting sulphurous laboratories on bold alchemical pursuits. Passionate chemists, they were engaged deeply in political concerns, so fully indeed that even their great discoveries (in pneumatic chemistry) seem the fruit of minor preoccupations.