Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) Paperback – Illustrated, 16 Sept. 2015

This book is humourous and very informative. Really enjoyed it.

I will begin this review by saying that at it's core, the book presents some good ideas concerning narrative and literary structure that are applicable to science writing, both for academic and non-expert audiences. Olson is clearly experienced and uses a number of anecdotes to illustrate his points. However, this is where the good points end.This book was condescending, enormously self-aggrandising and a very long way from succinct. For someone who claims to understand innately how to make something compelling and readable, Olson spends a ridiculous amount of time labouring every obviously cherry-picked anecdotal evidence from his own life about how fantastic his format is. This has the effect of making the book almost unreadable; poorly structured and very irritating. I haven't started a book that I've not then finished in a very long time but this really tested my resolve.Olson ends the book, which I have to say was a real struggle to get through, with an uncharacteristically brief discussion of how learning this technique takes decades of concerted effort, which leaves the reader wondering why he even bothered to write this ill-considered book.Don't buy it. The only message you need is that the ABT format is a good way of structuring a point. "_____ and _____ but ____ therefore ____"

Best scientific communication book ever. A very simple method, with powerful tools.

Received and read.

Loved every page. Highly entertaining and so practical to apply to everyday writing. Who knew science needed Hollywood! Randy’s ABT model has changed my life!!

Having spent half a lifetime as a career scientist, and achieving professorial tenure at a prestigious US university, Randy Olson had an epiphany. Fascinated as to why there is such a huge lack of public understanding of how science works and what has been discovered, Olson set out on a decade-long quest to discover the reasons and address the root causes.As Olson says in his latest book ‘Houston We Have a Narrative’, “science now faces problems with scientific research (false positives and a bias against null results) and with science communication (delivering boring presentations at best, unintentionally fostering antiscience sentiment at worst). Underlying both is a lack of narrative intuition”.Olson’s intuitive insight evolved through a series of films he has made since leaving academe. The critically acclaimed ‘Flock of Dodos’ deftly exposed the creationism – evolution debate, while ‘Sizzle’ put the comedy spotlight on global warming. And in his previous book ‘Don’t be such a Scientist’ one finds the seeds of inspiration for the present work.What Olson learned from these varied forays in communicating science was that most scientists are lousy at story-telling. With a few notable exceptions that are given ample highlight in ‘Houston …’, scientists are poor communicators that neither enlighten their peers, engage the media nor inspire interest or fascination from the public. This general failure to explain science successfully is a much bigger issue than some ivory-tower brouhaha. It lies at the heart of many of the major issues facing humanity today, and plays directly into the hands of those who would manipulate and capitalize on public confusion.In ‘Houston We Have a Narrative’ Olson provides the background, the rationale and the narrative tool templates for addressing this major shortcoming: “Science is permeated with story. Both the scientific method and the communication of science are narrative processes. Yet the power and structure of story are neither widely taught nor openly advocated.”In developing his thesis, Olson has worked with an eclectic group of gifted colleagues with very different areas of expertise. They have workshopped their novel science story-telling approach with disparate groups, from undergrads to senior researchers and from the Arctic Circle to the tropics. Needless to say, Olson’s ideas have been well and truly ‘field tested’. The result, ‘Houston We Have a Narrative’ is eminently readable and enlightening, indeed entertaining, and I have no hesitation in commending it to scientist and non-scientist alike.Lyndon DeVantier, PhDAuthor (with Catherine Cheung) of ‘Socotra A Natural History of the Islands and Their People’

good storylining templates, insightful analogies to movies, easy to understand and useful for any scientist that seeks to communicate complicated findings