This is a memoir. There are lots of memoirs around these days. Once upon a time only the memoirs of the great or notorious were published, or those who moved among them, or participants in great circumstances. From these memoirs we learned about the inner lives of these unusual people or inner events of unusual and historic circumstances. But memoirs these days come from all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances. What do we learn from this memoir?

Robert Greenler might be known to readers of this Journal as the author of Rainbows, Halos, and Glories, which has been the best book on optical effects in the sky for the 20 years since he published it. He is currently retired as Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he taught for 35 years. His primary area of research was the infrared spectroscopic investigation of the structures of molecules adsorbed onto metal surfaces. Along the way Greenler worked for a short time for the now defunct Allis Chalmers Company; he was present practically at the creation of UWM as a research university and himself helped create the interdisciplinary Laboratory for Surface Studies there. He spent two periods 20 years apart at the South Pole (and one at the North) studying ice-crystal-based atmospheric optical phenomena. He organized and for 25 years directed The Science Bag series of public science programs on the UWM campus, which have been attended by more than 120,000 people. He was president of the Optical Society of America. He gave a Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street in London, continuing a tradition begun by Michael Faraday in 1826.

These and other details of Greenler's life we learn from this smooth and elegantly written memoir. But it's not the events of Greenler's life that are the primary value of this book. It's Greenler's ruminations about the events.

With the luxury of hindsight overlooking the choices that brought him to these events and their outcomes, he ruminates about industrial versus university research, about military and civilian funding of research, about the hard choices NSF program directors must make between sustaining funding for aging scientists and start-up funding for the young. He modulates the value of opening up new areas of research against doing careful work within established areas, probes the value of confidence in going straight into research problems with available resources versus exhaustively reading and preparing. He talks about the rewards of following playful scientific curiosity in unexpected directions. And he is eloquent about responsibilities of scientists to the public.

Who needs to hear these things? A comment of Greenler's on aphorisms provides one good answer to this question (p 172).

The problem with an aphorism, even if it contains the distilled essence of great experience and summarizes great understanding, is that it is only understood by someone who has gone through most of that experience and has struggled with the understanding. It may summarize an insight, but it can't teach that insight to someone who doesn't already almost understand it.

What's true of aphorisms is true of memoirs as well. The audience with whom Greenler's memoir will resonate most deeply is other scientists with a good deal of experience behind them. But I think there's a lot here for a young scientist too. Coming into science with a new Ph.D. in the 1950s, when jobs and research funding were plentiful, Greenler has had more flexibility in his career than many young scientists will today. But because he had so many opportunities, and ruminates so wisely about them, he may be able to help young scientists see down roads before they have to commit themselves to them.

And what of "the general public" whom nontechnical books about science and scientists are always supposed to appeal to? I think the general public might grow impatient in learning more about Robert Greenler and his friends and colleagues than they planned to. But I will copy two chapters of this book and distribute them to my nonscientist friends. Greenler's chapter on "Just Playing" extols by splendid example the way exuberant youthful curiosity persists in the working lives of scientists. His chapter on "Basic Research" consists chiefly of a long published response to the editor of Bee Culture magazine, who had editorially accused research scientists of arrogance and indifference to the public who funded their research. Greenler's response to this charge, which is a frequent and important one, is as concise and sensitive as any I have ever read.