Reviews for Avoid Boring People by James D Watson
Someone once asked me, correct before we parted the very concluding time I ever saw her, who my hero was. I had to think long and hard before answering. I didn't desire to give obvious answers like "Darwin" or "Newton" or "Batman." I had in the past expressed my admiration for Leda Cosmides, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Robert L. Trivers, for their scientific work, just I wasn't sure if they were well known enough in public to count as my "heroes." I racked my brain, every bit nosotros walked across a foot bridge over the Thames. The reply I finally came up with when we reached the end of the span was "Jim Watson."
I have read two before autobiographies of the Nobel-prize winner James D. Watson (The Double Helix, and Genes, Girls, and Gamow). E'er since I read The Double Helix more a decade agone, I have always been a big fan of Jim Watson's. I similar and admire him, partly because he appears to be i of the very few scientists who are fully consciously enlightened that scientists are driven to exercise creative scientific piece of work in order to impress girls (whereas these evolutionarily given motives ordinarily remain unconscious for well-nigh people, including scientists).
I was therefore very excited when I learned that Watson had written a third autobiography. Before I read it, however, I was puzzled past its title: Avoid Boring People. The title could be construed to hateful two completely unlike things:
1. Do not bore other people.
2. Do non associate with people who are irksome.
I could not tell from the volume'south description which Watson meant by the title, or if he meant both. I did not find out until I actually read the volume.
What was near amazing about reading Avoid Dull People is that Watson himself doesn't announced to be enlightened at all of the potential double meaning of the title. However, the disruptive nature of the title is very obvious in the book. Watson himself actually meant the second pregnant (Do not acquaintance with people who are boring, by, for example, going to a dinner party at an academic colleague's house, unless you know in advance that there'south going to be a babe there), merely Hannah H. Gray, former President of the Academy of Chicago who wrote the Foreword to the book, interpreted its title to mean the first. Apparently, she didn't read (or even skim through) the book before she wrote the Foreword!
The book is otherwise a please to read, even for someone (like me) who has read his earlier autobiographies (several times), every bit he has new anecdotes, stories, and photographs (both of people and documents) that he did non share with us before. Different the two earlier autobiographies, which cover only specific periods of his life, Avert Boring People covers his entire life (so far), from before his birth (starting with his family genealogy going back to the 17th-century Boston) through the present (the resignation of Larry Summers as President of Harvard). Equally a necessary consequence, it does not describe any part of his life in as much particular as do his kickoff two autobiographies.
The book consists of two alternating parts. First, he tells stories from a detail stage in his life (undergraduate years at Chicago, graduate years at Indiana, years spent at Cambridge every bit a postdoc, years spent as an untenured assistant professor at Harvard, etc.). And so, he gives "remembered lessons" from the particular phase of his life, earlier moving on to the next phase. The remembered lessons seem completely disassociated from the stories, except probably in Watson'south own retention, only the lessons are very, very good. They are intended for academics at various stages in their careers. I wish someone had given me these lessons when I was younger. I'm confident that all academics will benefit from learning these lessons from him, even though a few of them are specific to natural/biological scientists and nevertheless others to people who win the Nobel Prize.
I would recommend Avoid Wearisome People to all young man scientists and scientific autobiography aficionados (I am both). Even those who do not care about Watson or his life at all will benefit from his lessons. All the lessons are fantabulous, and I will go out it upwardly to the readers to detect their great insight. Still, hither'south ane lesson from the stories, non given or "remembered" by Watson himself, that young academics in any field will discover illuminating and perhaps comforting. As a self-proclaimed Watson fan, I am aback to admit that I did non know about this event in his life until now:
James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA, futurity Nobel-prize winner, and 1 of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, was initially denied tenure by his senior colleagues in the Department of Biology at Harvard Academy.
P.Southward. (12 January 2008): Every bit it turns out, Watson was a lot smarter than me (as you'd expect) and I was completely wrong. He did intend both meanings past the title. Starting time, in Chapter 5, he gives the lesson "Avert tiresome people" to mean 2. to a higher place. But then, in the last chapter (Chapter 15), he repeats the same lesson, this time to mean i. higher up. So he was conspicuously enlightened of the double meaning. This will be the concluding time I'll ever second-guess a Nobel-prize winner. Here's my remembered lesson: Avert writing a volume review before finishing the whole volume.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/avoid-boring-people
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