When John Perlin is wielding a shovel, you don’t want to get anywhere between him and the hole. Perlin, now in the foothills of his early seventies, is not your run-of-the-mill big-brain autodidact. Back in the early 1980s, Perlin synthesized and distilled 5,000 years of human history into one single tome, A Forest Journey, which examined the rise and fall of human civilizations based on their exploitation of timber and forests. It got Perlin on Harvard’s top 100 books. He’s also published two of the most definitive histories of solar energy ever written. Not bad for a cranky, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you curmudgeon who knows firsthand what it’s like to live under a camper shell in someone else’s Isla Vista backyard.
Before long, Perlin found himself sharing the stage at international symposia with ExxonMobil execs, schooling them on the last days of fossil fuels with his customary John the Baptist bluntness. Along the way, Perlin — now recovering from a mountain bike accident that crushed an ankle — palled around town with the late Walter Kohn, UCSB’s Nobel Prize–winning physicist; together, the two of them could out-filibuster the entire U.S. Senate. Upon their advance, bus drivers, barbers, and other captive audiences fled for their lives. And with good cause.
In stark contrast to his previous work, Perlin’s latest effort — the life and times of Eunice Foote — is almost a historical miniature, requiring only three years of John’s doggedly obsessive — or as he puts it, “crazy John Perlin” — research. Foote is easily one of the great, untold stories of both American science and feminism, and until the last few years, she barely rated a footnote in most scholarly journals. No explanation is needed; she was a woman.