I don’t believe I have permission to republish here, but my review of Helge Kragh’s book, Higher Speculations: Grand Theories and Failed Revolutions in Physics and Cosmology is available in Centaurus 53 (2011): 342-343, or online here (paywall, but if your library, like mine, doesn’t subscribe, you can see a scan of about 1/3 of the review for free).
I was very happy to get the chance to review the book, because Kragh’s industriousness, his technical understanding, and his interest in a wide array of subjects make him one of the most exciting historians of physics working today. My review makes quite a bit of the fact that the volume feels like more of an outline of a future history than a filled-out history along the lines of Kragh’s Cosmology and Controversy (1996). So it contains a lot of discussion of how these sketches could be pulled together into a more synthetic account. I would like to repeat a point I make at the end of the review, which is that this is intended more in the vein of engagement than criticism. If you’re interested in putting the latest multi-verse scenarios into the context of the longstanding history of physical speculation, this is your book.