Opening Skinner's Box, Ch 1 & 2.

So this book we're reading appears to be an overview of numerous popular psychological experiments of the 20th century.  I did not realize this fact until after I had complete chapter one.  I had been expecting a long analysis of B.F. Skinner's experiments, and figured that chapter one would be just the beginning.  I was quite surprised when the topic was suddenly switched from Lauren Slater sitting in Skinner's daughter's house, considering eating a 10 year old chunk of chocolate to Stanley Milgram's experiments on authority.  But that was my own fault for not understanding fully what the content of the book would be.

However, I had no reason to expect this book to be written in such a poetic fashion.  It was so poetic, in fact, that it appeared contrived.  There were two lines that stood out to me, and while I do not have the book handy in front of me as I write this in a coffee shop a block from my house, I will provide the gist of her statements.  The first example occurred early in chapter one, where Slater apparently visualized Skinner and his girlfriend parking in front of whatever lake happened to be located nearby, taking off their clothes and then skinny dipping.  Who even thinks of such a thing, especially for someone who has got to be 50 years older than you.  The other example was just a needless use of descriptive dependent clauses; Slater talks about her daughter who is yelling out "obscura", which happens to be the title of the chapter.  The last sentence of that chapter is something along the lines of "I pick her up with my hands, my <adjective> and <adjective> hands.  I say <adjective> because I don't remember the exact adjective used, and anything I would thing of would just embarrass me and the author.  My knowledge of grammar is informal, but I believe you can drop the dependent clause from a statement, and the statement should still be grammatically correct.  "my <adjective> and <adjective> hands" is the dependent clause, so Slater says that she picked up her daughter with her hands, a statement which seems blatantly obvious to me.

As far as complements go, I like the premise of the book; it is good to hear the first hand accounts of the subjects from various experiments-very interesting, in fact, but the fact that people have complained that Slater misquoted them is upsetting...