| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David Strauss. Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 333. $45.00.

Percival Lowell is best remembered today as the maverick astronomer who a century ago made a case for intelligent Martian canal builders. To contemporaries, he was also famous as an ethnographically minded traveler who informed his fellow Americans about Occult Japan (1894) and The Soul of the Far East (1888). In this engaging biography, David Strauss argues convincingly that both careers were rooted in Lowell's identity as a Boston Brahmin half-heartedly rebelling against his elite background and that both were shaped by his allegiance to the cosmic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 1

This argument shapes the structure of the book. Rather than follow a chronological line from birth to death as most biographers, Strauss divides his story into three thematic sections. Part one explores Lowell's elite Boston world, detailing his genteelly bohemian chafing at its restraints, his erratic submissions to its expectations, his periodic exiles to the Far East and Arizona to escape it, and his eventual recreation of its ethos in far-away Flagstaff. Strauss demonstrates how Lowell's peripatetic life and shifting careers sprang from ambivalence toward his Brahmin base; he further shows how both Lowell's early investigations as amateur anthropologist in Japan and Korea and his later researches on the even more exotic terrain of Martian "civilization" can be understood in the context of Lowell's concern to reinvigorate what he saw as a declining elite and what was certainly a changing one. Part two lucidly explicates Lowell's Spencerianism. At Harvard College, Lowell swallowed whole Spencer's evolutionary synthesis of all sciences with an enthusiasm that never thereafter wavered. Lowell "read" Japanese culture through the lens of Spencer's racial hierarchies. Spencer's version of the nebular hypothesis (as origin point of all evolution) led to Lowell's eccentric conviction that Mars must have evolved an advanced civilization. . . .

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