Hard on the heels of Denver author Joy Hakim’s celebrated “The Story of US,” a spirited and riveting account of U.S. history — follows her “Story of Science” trilogy in the same unorthodox mold.
Her anecdotal storytelling combines quirky, compelling insights with solid research. At the Battle of Concord, for example, an elderly woman known as Mother Batherick turned over six surrendering British redcoats to David Lamson, the African-American leader of a nearby Yankee squad.
In “Einstein Adds a New Dimension,” the latest installment in “The Story of Science,” readers learn that humans have wavelengths (too small to measure), and that nuclear-bomb scientist Otto Frisch played the piano once a week for Los Alamos, N.M., radio station KRS.
— Claire Martin, The Denver Post
Q: Teachers and students love your approach, so why aren’t your books replacing conventional texts in public school classrooms?
A: Well, the norm is to do what was done last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Textbook companies and school boards don’t like change. But some schools are using my books, and my books are really popular with home-schoolers and at private schools, which don’t have that relationship with the big textbook publishers.
Q: What sorts of questions are you asked by students who’ve read your books?
A: Well, I visited an eighth-grade classroom on Maryland’s Eastern shore recently. The kids had read “Newton at the Center” and were well into “Einstein Adds a New Dimension.” They were really excited, reading and talking about black holes, dark matter, space exploration — good stuff for anyone, but especially for young minds.
Q: Why is that?
A: Hardly anyone teaches today’s physics. And that is outrageous because the ideas of quantum mechanics, relativity and modern cosmology underlie our times. It took several hundred years before the Copernicus idea that the Earth goes around the Sun made it into classrooms. It’s more than 100 years since Einstein had his miracle year, writing five famous papers. But his ideas still aren’t even in school vocabularies — with a few exceptions.
Q: And why is that?
A: Really, because there are three publishers who supply virtually all the kindergarten through 12th grade textbooks. It has nothing to do with education. It’s all business — a $4 billion-a-year business. Once, Doubleday asked me to write a history of Virginia, and offered me $250 for a sample chapter. It was one of the best things I’ve ever written — there was action, there was humor (toward the end of his life, Patrick Henry was daffy). I got a phone call from someone who said, “Sorry, we can’t use your chapter. It doesn’t sound textbook-y enough.”
Q: Not soporific enough?
A: Yes, most textbooks are sleep-inducing. But good history is exciting reading; it’s about heroes and villains and true adventures. We have a reading crisis and yet we give kids textbooks that are boring and full of errors.
Q: What’s an example?
A: In early accounts of the Amistad rebellion — the slave ship that was taken over by the slaves — historians said that Cinque, the rebellion leader, went back to Africa and became a slave trader. But that story was wrong. It came from a book by a writer whose editor told him to change (it) to make it more dramatic. . . . Books have mistakes, and you need to make corrections — but the revisions rarely get made in textbooks.
