When I lived in London, we had an assessment to do any leisure activity that you would not have otherwise done. My class partner and I decided to go through her oddities of London book, which landed us in the Jon Snow pub. Ever since, I've been enamored by Jon Snow. His story is not just one of life-saving epidemiology, but also the triumph of good science (germ theory!) over bad (miasmists) and real science (...still germ theory) over social prejudice. Steven Johnson would also have you believe that this story is about urbanism and the way that population density results in vulnerability (I think. More on that later.) So, pretty much no matter what you're into, this is one of the coolest stories in Western history.

And Johnson just destroys it. I spent a lot of time thinking about how this went wrong. I read a lot of popular science, and there's some classical ways to mess it up: oversimplifying to the point of boredom, getting too bogged down in the details, getting attached to a pet theme, etc. Johnson does none of those. In fact, if I were to describe the content of the book, it would seem perfect. In addition to the science, Johnson explores how contemporary science and the politics therein reacted to this discovery and opposed it, how the friendship developed between the disparate Snow and Whitehead and how Whitehead's better social skills improved his ability to really test the hypothesis well. Those sorts of themes were key to my enjoyment of Johnson's the Invention of Air, which is one of the best history of science books I've ever read.

First, I thought there was something innately boring about the discussion of Victorian sewage. But I'm the sort of person who loves pedantic details and I have enough medical training that I am unimpressed by extensive discussion of unmentionable topics. I think there was just no organization to what was happening. And as a result, every 25 pages or so, for no clear reason, Johnson would start repeating one of his key themes, not really apropos of anything but because it had been a long enough time since a central thesis that I think he forgot what he'd already said.

The other problem was that the backend of the book was a mess. After an extremely in-depth exploration of very specifically the broad street pump outbreak of cholera, Johnson tries to expand to discussing urbanism in general and his thoughts are completely discombobulated. Included within this chapter are: But urbanism is good for the environment even though no one used to believe that, and Johnson and his family certainly will live in a city and he loves cities and this is the global city, but urbanism is bad if there is terrorism and terrorism is relevant because it could be bioterrorism, but vaccines will work against bioterrorism and they won't work against conventional terrorism, so it'll probably be a bomb and also, there's this idea of mutually assured destruction but what if a lone actor gets their hands on a nuclear bomb? With about that degree of organization between thoughts.

All of this disorganization happening at the end of a reasonable chapter about how Jon Snow made a physical map to prove his point, which Johnson used as an opening to discuss how critical graphics are in science and then did not include said map. And yes, it's 2017 and I had a smart phone handy to google it, but come on.

(This book is shockingly dry, given that its about a water pump.)