I grew up in a small town outside Boston,
called Marblehead, and spent a not-so-productive childhood dreaming, in more or less equal proportions, about a career as a professional basketball player
and as a sailor on a whaling ship.
Alas, it was not to be. I ended up a journalist and eventually became the chief science writer at the Boston Globe. From newspapers it was on to
magazines and eventually to books. The magazines ranged from journals that died before they ever saw a news-stand to such perennials as The Atlantic
and The New York Times Magazine. The stories ranged just as broadly. I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic on the science of dreams and how
Freud had it all wrong, and I wrote the first story on "the French paradox," about how it is that the French gulp down croissants and paté but manage
somehow to have only half the rate of heart disease that Americans do.
For about a decade now, I've concentrated almost exclusively on books. The first was on psychology — Madness on the Couch, it was called, and
it looked (critically) at Freud's legacy. Next came Down the Great Unknown, the true story of one of the epic adventures in American history.
A one-armed ex-soldier named John Wesley Powell led a band of nine novices down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, in rowboats. None of the men
had ever seen a rapid.
For four years, I've been roaming the back streets of the art underworld, first tagging along after thieves and then venturing a few steps further up the
social scale to forgers' garrets.
When I'm not writing, I spend considerable time trying to civilize a houseful of dogs. The leader of the pack, at present, is a 140-pound Great Pyrenees
with a pathological fear of loud noises. Blue combines the noble appearance of a carved lion with the temperament of a hummingbird on speed.
My next book will be a return to my roots (I have a master's degree in math, from MIT). It's about Isaac Newton and Leibniz and
the Royal Society — the story of a quarrelsome band of geniuses in powdered wigs and knee-length breeches who helped create the world we know today.
The backdrop is Europe during the black plague, and the Great Fire of London, and Louis XIV in high heels and gold-embroidered waistcoat at Versailles.
This was the cusp of the modern era. Witches and demons still haunted the night, and science was struggling to be born. These earliest scientists found
themselves caught between old and new, in one breath setting out new laws of nature and in the next cowering in fear of the devil.
