B.F. Skinner : a life /

This first major biography of Skinner is a remarkably dispassionate chronicle. In this work, appearing only three years after Skinner's death, Bjork places Skinner squarely in the context of US social, technological, and political history. Bjork shows how Skinner's work reflects the coming together in 20th-century US of several conflicting cultural practices. Bjork, a historian rather than a scientist, appropriately focuses primarily on Skinner's role as inventor and social critic. Bjork portrays Skinner's approach to social reform in terms of a science-based technology as a uniquely US approach to 20th-century problems. The book builds to a riveting and insightful interpretation of the intellectual roots of Skinner's most controversial book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (CH, Apr'72), and to the nature and reasons for the passionate outcry against that book from many US intellectuals. Skinner is seen here as a dutiful, if distant, son; a caring, if frustrated, husband; and a nurturing, deeply committed, father. Although heavily documented, Bjork's book is very readable because documentation is in endnotes. A handsome, well-indexed work, with an excellent bibliography. General; community college; undergraduate through faculty. S. S. Glenn; University of North Texas

Through his experiments with the Skinner box, his utopian novel, Walden Two, which was a best-seller in the 1960s, and his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner was probably the best-known and most controversial American psychologist. This biography describes his childhood in Pennsylvania, his graduate education at Harvard, and his research at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University, with his ultimately returning to end his career at Harvard. Skinner experimented with conditioning behavior in rats, and then argued that human behavior could also be molded through positive reinforcement. He was much criticized as a scientific determinist and some saw his work with conditioning as a kind of brainwashing that could lead to totalitarianism. But his work with positive reinforcers influenced the development of programmed instruction and teaching machines, and work with the mentally retarded, chemically dependent, and others. Often unfairly depicted by the popular press as a cold manipulator, the man behind the research is delineated in this accessible biography. ~--Sandy Whiteley

By Bjork's reckoning, the man who raised his infant daughter in a glass-encased, thermostatically controlled crib came to behaviorism not as a cold, unfeeling nihilist but as a sensitive, unhappy romantic who cared deeply about helping humanity. Raised in a small Pennsylvania town by a lawyer father whom he viewed with contempt and by a controlling, critical mother, Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) evolved into an alienated, cynical intellectual increasingly appalled by the consumerism of mainstream culture. According to Bjork, Skinner was a doting father and a lover of music (especially Wagner), who saw behavioral technology as a means to reverse global destruction and to liberate the individual from a wasteful, competitive lifestyle. While Bjork's defense of Skinner's ideas is not likely to impress his detractors, this intimate biography does provide a striking portrait of an embattled social engineer. Bjork is a history professor at St. Mary's University in Texas. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A fair-minded, insightful portrayal of the life and ideas of one of America's most controversial thinkers, by Bjork (History/St. Mary's University). Born to an undistinguished middle-class family in central Pennsylvania, Skinner survived an awkward youth. Initially keen to be a writer, he abandoned storytelling in order to pursue graduate work at Harvard, where he made his mark in a dissertation that boldly challenged prevailing trends in academic psychology. Deemed igid and fanatical but also recognized as brilliant, Skinner built a reputation as a behavioral scientist at universities in Minnesota and Indiana, where, in the postwar years, his interest in social invention first received national attention through his controlled- environment air-crib (better known as the ``baby box''). His desire to improve society through systematic behavioral control and positive reinforcement also manifested itself in two widely read books, Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the latter of which ignited a firestorm of protest, when published in 1971, for its assault on ideas dear to freedom-loving Americans. By then near the end of his career at Harvard, Skinner maintained a productive scholarly life in spite of increasing isolation, battling deafness and blindness before dying of leukemia in 1990. More engaging when discussing ideas than when probing Skinner's roots or private life, and hardly the definitive biography; but, even so, Bjork gives a clear view of an American original whom posterity could judge more kindly than did his contemporaries. (Photos)