BOOKS LINK SCIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE

by Bruce V. Lewenstein

A key cultural element of postwar America has been the interweaving of science and technology into all aspects of culture and politics. Books have played a crucial role in this interweaving, linking the public and science. The increasing presence of science books on prize lists and best-seller lists, beginning in the late 1970s, suggests that science is now fully a part of American culture.

For example, looking at the list of Pulitzer Prize winners since 1945, science books appeared infrequently until the late 1970s. But from 1978 to 1984, five science books won, all in the "general nonfiction" category (which had been introduced in the early 1960s). Showing the links between books and other aspects of culture, the late 1970s and early 1980s have also been labeled a time of a "science boom" in magazines and television shows. Even after the boom in magazines and television waned, science remained strong in the book area, appearing on average every other year since 1985. Prizewinners automatically become prominent in the intellectual community. Moreover, through their use as undergraduate textbooks and touchstones for editorials and columns (among other routes), they become part of everyday American culture.

Other books important to broader culture can be identified through best-seller lists. Again, science is clearly important. Even books that weren't strictly "science" books may have sold well because they used the mantle of science for authority, though few scientists would recognize the material in them (a great many self-help books and pop psychology books fit in this category).

A difficulty in using these lists as a measure is the changing nature of the "best-seller." In the early post-war years, best sellers were prose texts (what the editors of Publishers Weekly called "reading" books) addressing issues of public interest. Typical sales of top best sellers would be in the low hundreds of thousands. By the early 1980s, best seller lists had been taken over by self-help, cooking, and cartoon books, sometimes selling as many as several million copies.

Nonetheless, we can see some patterns in best sellers. Sex and adventure were big sellers in the early years. Books with a clear authorial presence, such as Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man or the various books by Carl Sagan, make the list. But relatively few "explanatory" books appear on the list, especially as top-ten books. In terms of numbers, most of the science-oriented volumes had sales in the region of 100,000-200,000 hardcover copies, with a few reaching up to 500,000. The first breakthrough came in 1980 with Sagan's Cosmos, which sold 900,000 copies in its 50 weeks on the bestseller list. As a result, Sagan received a $2 million advance for his novel, Contact, which at the time was the largest advance ever given for a fiction book that wasn't even in manuscript.

Another breakthrough came in 1988, when Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time sold 729,000 copies in its first year, then 410,000 more in the following year. But most science-oriented best sellers remained in the low hundreds of thousands of copies until the 1990s. By then, despite rumors to the contrary, it had become clear that books were not dying. The numbers were going up. Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence sold 400,000 copies in 1995 when it was fourteenth on the best-seller list; it sold more than 300,000 copies the following year, yet failed to break into the top-30 list.

Prizewinners and best sellers become part of general cultural lore. Sagan was famous as much for his appearances on the "Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" as he was for his actual writing. Hawking was clearly famous, in part, for his ability to work through his disability as well as for his writing (many people have questioned whether Brief History of Time has actually been read by many of its purchasers). Nonetheless, these books are important because of the status they acquire in public culture. They create a common bond in conversations, they set agendas for future debates, they become a shared experience for huge numbers of people. If we are to understand the place of science in culture, we must understand the role of science books in creating that culture, a role that may be based as much on the existence of the books as on the arguments or beauty of the texts.

We must also understand the place of books that are neither "important" nor "best sellers," but which are widely used, especially in certain middle-class elements of society. Some examples include series like the Time-Life Nature books and glossy publications from the National Geographic Society. These books were popular precisely because they constituted a cultural tie to science, a claim that the readers were partaking of an important cultural resource. Another common form is the bird-watchers' field guide, most notably the Peterson's Guides. These books are especially interesting for their ability to bring citizens into science, or at least into natural-history observation. The development near the end of the 20th century of "citizen science" projects based in ornithology points to the importance of understanding books that connect people directly with nature.

A few books have occupied a challenging middle ground, speaking to multiple audiences in multiple ways. James Gleick's Chaos (1987) is primarily a general description of current developments in a fascinating area of science, and thus fits securely in the "popular science" genre. But Gleick's book also brought together for the first time a set of disparate work that had never previously-even among the intellectual community-been seen clearly as a single coherent field. Thus it was, in some ways, a founding document for a field of science that is today characterized by its own institutes, meetings, journals, and so on.

Coming shortly after Sagan's Contact novel and at about the same time as Hawking's Brief History of Time, Gleick's book also helped demonstrate the changing nature of the relationship between the scientific community and books. Beginning with a series of autobiographies subvented by the Sloan Foundation in the late 1970s, senior scientists had begun to see books as a way to address the public directly without violating the norms that held their community of professional colleagues together. This new generation of "great men" of science discovered that books provided a way to make broad philosophical statements.

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Bruce Lewenstein is associate professor of communication and of science & technology studies at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. These remarks are excerpted from "What Makes a Science Book Become a Best Seller?" presented at the 2001 AAAS meeting in San Francisco. Copyright © 2001 by Bruce V. Lewenstein.