The Third Culture

Книга на английском языке.

This book is a series of interviews by an Anglo-American literary agent with 17 of his clients and fellow-travellers, namely, science popularizers who believe that the likes of Stephen Hawking and Steven Jay Gould have replaced the traditional 'literary intellectual' in helping the educated public make sense of the larger world. The thesis is certainly persuasive at a crude level: Whenever a non-fiction best- seller is written by an academic, it tends to be by a natural scientist, not a humanist or social scientist. But as might be expected, this represents only a small percentage of all the natural scientists who consider themselves to be in Hawking's and Gould's league. Indeed, an article appeared last March in the liberal American weekly, New Republic, accusing Brockman of letting his fascination with cutting-edge science cloud his business sense. As it turns out, most science popularizations are financial flops.