premise: A history of mad-cow disease by veteran science writer Richard Rhodes ( The Making of the Atomic Bomb ). Critics praise Rhodes' lucid explication of complex virology as well as his range--the book includes digressions on political and literary themes and a section on the scandal surrounding a Nobel Prize-winning expert on the disease who recently pleaded guilty to molesting a little boy.
hypothesis: Critics hated the book of the historian Richard Rhodes, which failed to explain very carefully the mad-cow disease and other digressions.