Passionate Empiricist

What happens when a president with a gift for rhetoric wants to increase funding for scientific research? The answer in The Passionate Empiricist is not with an increase in funding for stem cells, but the creation of the Smithsonian Institution and the US Naval Observatory. The president in question is not Barack Obama, but John Quincy Adams. Portolano (English, Towson Univ.) traces the use that Adams made of classical rhetorical theory, especially that of Cicero, in arguments over funding for science. A former Harvard professor of rhetoric, Adams was uniquely qualified in a time of great orators to model public argument on the rhetorical work of the masters. In this age where so much government funding of science is based in the military-industrial complex, it is fascinating to look at arguments for and against government funding of science at a time when such funding was not a given. Unlike many of the 18th-century Founding Fathers who were scientists in their own right, Adams was not a practicing experimenter but an ardent champion of the pursuit of science as an important value in 19th-century America. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty. -- B. Mitchell, Gibbs College of Boston (Reprinted with permission of Choice, copyright 2009, American Library Association)