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sanity and madness. In the face of his close andscholarly microanalyses, he never loses sight ofthe broad humanistic nature of the literary en-gagement with psychological suffering. Lucidand readable throughout, his style is refreshinglyfree from literary-critical jargon.

Readers in the history of science and medicinemay also have a few regrets about Thiher’s book.First, it reveals several glaring historiographicalgaps (e.g., no citation of the publications of OttoMarx, George Mora, Henri Ellenberger, or Wer-ner and Annemarie Leibbrand in the chapter onGerman Romantic medicine). Second, reflectinga preoccupation of literary criticism today,Thiher adopts a thoroughly linguistic model ofreality: madness is essentially a textual tropecharacterized by “a fall from language,” a char-acterization that a good many clinicians and his-torians—to say nothing of psychiatric suffer-ers—may find sterile and intellectualistic. Third,Thiher’s book consists of a chronological pre-sentation of a long sequence of writings in whicheach work is given its requisite paragraphs. Withall linear intellectual-historical presentations,however, the danger looms of digressing into akind of catalogue. For this reason, the most bril-liant explorations of the shared terrains of liter-ature and medicine in the past decade have inmy judgment been works that concentrated ingreat descriptive and analytical depth on a singlechronological period, works such as Louis A.Sass’s Madness and Modernism: Insanity in theLight of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought(Basic, 1992) and Juan Rigoli’s Lire le delire:Alienisme et litterature en France au XIXe siecle(Fayard, 2001).

Nonetheless, Revels in Madness is an admi-rable and highly successful conspectus and thefirst single-authored synthetic study of its kindin a generation.

MARK S. MICALE

Peter Pesic. Seeing Double: Shared Identities inPhysics, Philosophy, and Literature. 184 pp., il-lus., notes, index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2002. $24.95 (cloth).

Peter Pesic has written a very entertaining shortbook that interweaves the historical developmentof philosophical, literary, and scientific notionsof individuality, identity, and indistinguishabil-ity. From the perspective of a historian of sci-ence, the book seamlessly combines an accurateand well-referenced history of atomic theories ofmatter with literary and philosophical accountsof identity. This makes the history all the moreentertaining and informative, not to mention

philosophically well grounded. From the per-spective of a philosopher of science, while thediscussion is kept at a popular level (as Pesichimself warns), the author provides excellentreferences for readers wishing to delve deeperinto the contemporary philosophical debate.

Pesic begins his narrative by identifying twobasic notions of individuality in Homer: individ-uality as an exchangeable commodity (individ-uals ultimately possess no “primitive thisness”by means of which they may, in principle, bedistinguished) and individuality as a sacrament(individuals ultimately can be distinguished bymeans of a “primitive thisness” knowable onlyto the gods). These notions are then tracedthrough the philosophical literature in debatesbetween Greek atomists and Aristotelians andthe development of atomic and corpuscular the-ories of matter from the Stoics to Descartes andNewton. Notions of identity and individualityare discussed in the philosophical contexts ofLocke and Leibniz and in the literary contexts ofthe case of Martin Guerre (a sixteenth-centurycase of mistaken identity) and the works of Dos-toyevsky and Conrad. Pesic then discusses thefurther development of atomic theories of mat-ter, culminating in the distinguishability he findsinherent in the ontologies of Newtonian particledynamics and statistical mechanics. The nextstage of the story involves the development ofclassical field theories from Newton to Maxwell.Here Pesic observes that wave identity is differ-ent from classical particle identity as manifest inthe phenomena of interference, a point that be-comes crucial to his subsequent discussion of thedevelopment of quantum mechanics. Central tothis discussion is his claim that the simplest ex-planation of quantum interference phenomena isin terms of an ontology of nonindividuals, ob-jects possessing what he refers to as “identical-ity.” The book ends with a brief discussion ofthe development of quantum field theory and therole “identicality” plays in it.

From a philosophical perspective, the centralclaim of the book is that positing identicality forquantum particles is simpler than positing an in-principle unobservable classical “primitive this-ness.” One can argue with this claim. One mightmaintain that quantum particles are individuals(each possessing a “primitive thisness” that meta-physically distinguishes one from another) andthat they do not in all circumstances possess de-terminate properties (in particular, determinatepositions). One might in addition argue thatproperty indeterminateness can ultimately be as-sociated with the structure of the phase space ofa quantum system in comparison with that of a

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classical system. Technically, the latter forms aBoolean algebra, whereas the former forms anon-Boolean lattice. In both cases, the notion ofan individual can be interpreted as remaining thesame. Hence, in one respect, such a “propertyindeterminateness” thesis is more simple thanPesic’s “identicality” thesis in that it remainscloser to classical notions of individuality.

Notions of simplicity aside, Pesic’s discussionis penetrating and provocative. (Elsewhere, hehas demonstrated that the Hilbert space formal-ism of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics can bederived from a set of postulates that can chari-tably be interpreted as stipulating “identicality”for quantum particles.) The topics of individu-ality and indistinguishability are at the heart ofmuch debate in the philosophy of physics. (In-deed, Pesic’s discussion could be extended to thefield of spacetime physics, where the ontologicalstatus of spacetime points plays a central role indebates stemming from Newton and Leibniz andextending to current theories of quantum grav-ity.) Pesic has provided a well-rounded historicalintroduction to the subject.

JONATHAN BAIN

Jelle Z. de Boer; Donald T. Sanders. Volca-noes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Ef-fects of Major Eruptions. 320 pp., tables, illus.,maps. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2001. $29.92, £19.95 (cloth).

Does the world need another book about vol-canic eruptions and the havoc they wreak? Theanswer, for this book, is an emphatic “yes,” es-pecially for the general reader. At first glance itmight seem to cover much of the same groundas Alwyn Scarth’s Vulcan’s Fury: Man againstthe Volcano (Yale, 1999). Indeed—and not sur-prisingly—both books discuss some of the sameeruptive episodes, those of Vesuvius in A.D. 79,Iceland (various years), Krakatua in 1883, MontPelee in 1902, and Mount St. Helens in 1980.However, Volcanoes in Human History presentsfour episodes not discussed in the earlier book,and there is in general more on the geologicalbackground and on the biological, climatologi-cal, and ecological consequences of the erup-tions. While there are naturally some shared ref-erences, this book tends to have more secondaryrather than primary references and relies moreon sources written in English.

The strengths appear quickly in a first chapterthat introduces terms for volcanic products andprovides an introduction to plate tectonics, itsrelation to volcanism, and the settings where vol-canoes occur. Each chapter includes a clear di-

agram of the tectonic setting and a detailed mapof the volcano in question, showing the volcaniccenter and the location of flows and slides. Dis-cussion of the tectonic settings is detailed andenables the reader to gain a feel for the dynamicsof the region. There is more technical informa-tion in this book than in Scarth’s volume, in-cluding geochemical and geophysical data whereappropriate.

As examples of more and less familiar erup-tions, Jelle de Boer and Donald Sanders choseKrakatua (1883) and Tambora (1815). Both werein Indonesia (where Boer grew up) and influ-enced climate conditions around the world. Theeruption of Tambora, although more violent andemitting a much larger volume of material, oc-curred at a time when global communicationswere far less developed than when Krakatuaburst forth and thus has remained less known.The authors provide a capsule history of the is-lands of Indonesia and of their governance andeconomy at the times of the eruptions. For botheruptions the immediate and long-term geologi-cal, sociological, biological, and economic ef-fects are traced. There was tremendous loss oflife from the eruptions and associated tsunamis.There were worldwide effects as well: climateand rainfall disruptions that led to failed harvestsand the epidemic spread of cholera and other dis-eases in weakened populations. Political bodieswere destabilized by famine. Similar results arediscussed for the other eruptions.

The authors have sometimes included folk-lore, legends, poetry, and prose inspired by thevolcanic paroxysms. There is a glossary ofterms. The method of handling references willbe cumbersome to those accustomed to sciencestyle, although the intent is probably to bereader-friendly and not interrupt the text morethan necessary. At the end of the book, for eachchapter, there are sections for the relatively fewendnotes, a list of references cited, and a list ofrelated readings. While this system works withineach chapter, it is tedious to discover whether aparticular source is cited—a situation exacer-bated by the noninclusion of authors in the in-dex, which is reserved for those mentioned inthe body of the text. Nonetheless, besides beinginteresting to read, Volcanoes in Human Historyclearly demonstrates that volcanism, and geol-ogy as a whole, should not be of concern onlyto geologists and that history is important.

SALLY NEWCOMB

Alan W. Hirshfeld. Parallax: The Race to Mea-sure the Cosmos. xviii � 314 pp., illus., figs.,