Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
The title to this book is rather misleading in two ways because for one, there's nothing backward about it really. There are almost thirty sections which deal with advances in science or, mostly, with inventions. They begin with asking what life was like before the discovery, and how the change came about and was developed. The other way is that it's less about science per se, than it is about invention.
The chapters are short but fascinating, and they cover a wide variety of topics, from smart phones and DNA profiling, to assembly lines and gunpowder, and textiles and steam trains. The book doesn't shy away from naming the inventors, so we see, unusually, several women mentioned as well as some people of color. Unfortunately people of color do not appear in the illustrations very much. Those consist mostly of white folk. I'm not sure why.
Some of the inventors might not seem familiar to you, for example if you think that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb (nope!), or that William Hoover invented the vacuum cleaner. Nope. Had the original inventor of a practical home vacuum cleaner not sold everything to Hoover, we might well be spangling the rug today, not hoovering it!
This book was fun, knowledgeable, and nicely-illustrated by Wilson. I commend it as a worthy read.
