The Ice Finders : How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age [Hardcover]

Edmund Blair Bolles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1999

The surprising story of three ambitious men and how their clash of egos, ignorance, and imaginations led to the discovery of the Ice Age. Louis Agassiz (18071873), extraordinary Swiss scientist and professor, conceived of the Ice Age and then spent decades trying to persuade other scientists he had not gone mad. Charles Lyell (17971875) was his centurys most influential geologist and a master politician among his fellow scientists. His scientific principles said an Ice Age was impossible, even after his eyes showed him it was real. Elisha Kent Kane (18201857), an adventurer trapped for two winters at the top of Greenland, wrote a poetic description of a harsh and frozen landscape. His reports portrayed previously unimaginable great ice and set the stage for the storys unexpected outcome.The discovery of the Ice Age is one of sciences greatest and least-known stories. Like James Watsons The Double Helix and Dava Sobels Longitude , The Ice Finders shows that, for all their boasting about reason, scientists are driven by their passions and obsessions--human traits that actually advance the evolution of scientific discovery.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Edmund Blair Bolles is investigating a mystery: human creativity. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule for even the most intelligent machines; but with human minds, the rules change. Sometimes the rule is as true for us as for any computer, but every once in a while it's Ignorance in, insight out.

The example Bolles looks at is the Ice Age. Nowadays it's familiar to every schoolchild, but this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of just how wild an idea it once was. Earth-girdling floods seemed both reasonable and biblical, volcanoes unusual but not unknown. But a mile-thick sheet of ice covering much of the North Temperate Zone only 20,000 years ago was beyond anyone's experience or imagination.

The professor and the politician of Bolles's title are Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell, two of the most famous geologists of the 19th century. The unusual character in Bolles's story is the poet: Elisha Kent Kane. To call Kane a poet is both over- and understatement: he was a celebrity, a romantic, a self-promoter, a mediocre explorer, and a particularly poor leader of men. He was also a dreamer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition, and found the far north very different from his (or anyone else's) expectations: "dreams in, nightmares out." Yet it was Kane's bestselling book about his travels that brought the reality of great ice into the minds of laypeople and scientists alike: writes Bolles, "He is the one who made the Ice Age imaginable." --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly

This is an entertaining, often irreverent, history of the scientific discovery of the Ice Age. Bolles is fascinated by the way in which scientific knowledge advances. He challenges the notion that it proceeds in a rational and orderly manner, always building on previous knowledge. People, he claims, "learn unsuspected things, pulling knowledge, like rabbits, from empty hats," and often, convincing scientists of a new idea is more a matter of politics than of science. As an example of this theory, he weaves together the biographies of three important players in the great Ice Age debate. Bolles focuses on Louis Agassiz, the naturalist who first theorized the Ice Age in 1837, but was unable to persuade the scientific community to accept his findings for almost 20 years. Second is Elisha Kent Kane, an adventurer and poet whose report on his journey to the north of Greenland in the 1850s provided the popular imagination with the vision of immense seas of ice at the Pole pouring great rivers of ice into the Atlantic and Greenland seas. Finally, Bolles writes of Charles Lyell, the great Scottish geologist whose book The Principles of Geology ignored the possibility that glaciers were capable of changing the earth's surface, and who resisted the notion of the Ice Age for many years after Agassiz had theorized about it. A master politician among his colleagues, once he was convinced of the theory, it became more widely accepted. Bolles claims that it was only the interaction among these three individuals, and many others who are mentioned in passing, that led to a lasting new understanding of the world in which we live. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430306
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430300
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,818,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > History > Ancient > Prehistory

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a bargain!, December 5, 1999

By 

Robert Unferth (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ice Finders : How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Hardcover)

Edmond Bolles book "The Ice Finders" is a real treat, perhaps the best I've read this year. In this tale of the discovery of the concept of "Ice Age", Bolles weaves together the story of three people of different times and places. We are treated to three biographies of people who played important but very different roles forming a new view and understanding of the world-a view we carry to this day to such an extent it's hard to imagine anything else.

Bolles displays for us an intellectual adventure I'd never thought about before, as well as ego trips, and quixotic expeditions. And what a cast of characters including Charles Darwin, the Lowell's of Massachusetts, Ralph Emerson and others who add great spice to the stories. The book is intellectually stimulating, entertaining and fun. Here is a piece of history I knew nothing about until reading Bolles book. What a bargain-all in one book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lively Reading, December 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ice Finders : How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Hardcover)

I'm only moderately interested in the history of science, but I love stories about people, and this book is full of great people stories. Besides the three main ones in the title, many minor figures in the story are also well drawn and keep the story moving. I especially liked the German geologist Leopold von Buch and a Scottish newspaper editor, Charles Maclaren. Von Buch shouts insults at Agasiz as he presents his Ice Age theory and he wears high button shoes while he hikes in the mountain. The book has one vivid scene after another and makes the people walk again. I loved it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering the Ice Finders, December 31, 1999

By 

Rod Layman (Toronto) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ice Finders : How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Hardcover)

This book is a unique blend of story-telling, biography, and science writing. Blair Bolles has done his research well. He captures the passions of Kane, Agassiz, and Lyell with a style that is sharp, thorough, and accessible. There is lots to learn here, but only a pleasant effort required. The pages turn themselves as the reader follows Kane across the polar ice, and the scientists Agassiz and Lyell through several decades of meetings, debate, and discord. At the end of it all, we appreciate the courage and tenacity of Kane, who barely survives. We marvel at the life work of Agassiz and Lyell, who, in spite of those around them, and almost in spite of themselves, shaped the way we think about our world today. Well done!