SOURCE: Page, Ra. “It's the Way They Tell 'Em.” New Statesman 127, no. 4406 (9 October 1998): 47-8.

In the following review, Page criticizes the content of Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, but notes that Gould is a “great essayist.”

The trouble with science is that it's not taught properly. Unlike politics, philosophy or art, which have always been studied as socially entrenched histories of ideas, science is handed down as a string of disembodied facts, laws and dictates usually inaccurate, always incomplete and fatally amputated from the humanity that concocted them. Science students aren't likely to read a single primary text by any of the scientists they study until at least postgraduate level—Einstein is interpreted for them by Eddington, Darwin by Dawkins. The originators themselves seem increasingly anonymous and their ideas unaccountable.

Of the many science “interpreters” vying for attraction, the essayist Stephen Jay Gould is...