Science and Nature
Roger Tory Peterson: A Biography by Douglas Carlson
Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996) is often credited with having paved the way for the modern environmental movement. An avid birder since his childhood, Peterson was also a talented, professionally trained artist who combined those interests in his bird identification book, Guide to the Birds, first published in 1934. The initial book sold very well, as did his many subsequent works -- field guides not only to birds, but also to many other creatures and natural phenomena. The field guides Peterson pioneered played major roles in expanding the ranks of "conservationists" far beyond sportsmen who were concerned primarily with the wellbeing of the game species they hunted. By turning millions of ordinary Americans into amateur naturalists during the 1930s and 1940s, Peterson set the stage for other conservationists such as David Brower and Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring (1962) echoed Peterson's concerns about DDT and which "is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement in the West."
Roger Tory Peterson ... published October 1, 2007 by University of Texas Press
Two 2007 Anthologies of Science and Nature Writing
Each of these volumes offers 20 or more of the year's best articles in the genre, written by some of the most widely esteemed writers in their fields. Most entries first appeared in in venues such as The New Yorker, Wired and Harper's.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007
Edited by Richard Preston, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the author of numerous well regarded books, both nonfiction and fiction. Among the 28 selections, a few are available online, including
"Plastic Ocean" by Susan Casey and
"The Final Frontier" by John Horgan.
published October 10, 2007 by Hougton Mifflin
The Best American Science Writing 2007
Edited by Gina Kolota, for 20 years a NY Times science writer -- and the author of many successful books. Of the 20 selections in this volume, the online samplings include
"Face Blind" by Joshua Davis and
"In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming" by William Broad.
published September 18, 2007 by Harper Perennial
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Pinker's many fans and students of psycholinguistics will likely appreciate his latest offering. Many others of us, however, will slog for a couple hours -- then give up. Roger Gathman nailed it when he said in the American-Statesman that The Stuff of Thought "might end up in that category of brainy best-sellers such as A Brief History of Time -- a book more bought than read." What is Pinker up to? He sets out to show that
A close look at our speech -- our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies -- can give us insight into who we are. ... Language is entwined with human life. We use it to inform and persuade, but also to threaten, to seduce, and of course to swear. It reflects the way we grasp reality, and also the image of ourselves we try to project to others, and the bonds that tie us to them. It is, I hope to convince you, a window into human nature.
*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD
The Stuff of Thought ... published September 11, 2007 by Viking Adult
An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and
Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere by Gabrielle Walker
The author's Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge may have put her is a good position to write a book about the Earth's atmosphere, but it's Walker's superb facilities with language, narration and the entertaining character sketch that make it such a lively and absorbing read. She presents: our air ... and the scientists who discovered its properties. While we get the usual suspects (such as Boyle, Lavoisier and Van Allen), she also includes some of the equally brilliant but less well known -- and often marvelously quirky -- scientists who helped decipher the structures and functions of the atmosphere. One such specimen is Oliver Heaviside, who investigated the "electrical layer in the sky" -- and was fond of painting his nails. While Walker inevitably deals with the subject of human-caused climate change, this is no global warming screed (not that there's anything wrong with global warming screeds). It is, rather, a series of lyrical, historically grounded vignettes that illustrate a wealth of atmospheric science in ways that virtually all readers will both understand and enjoy.
An Ocean of Air ... published August 6, 2007 by Harcourt
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
What exactly would happen to the planet if all of us were suddenly to disappear? Reminiscent of Woody Allen ("It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."), Weisman skips the potentially unpleasant realities of how all of humankind could actually depart this world, and moves instead to the question at hand. Earth would not, the author shows, revert to a pristine, pre-human state, nor would it prove to have been irreparably damaged by our follies. Weisman crystal-ball gazes at post-human centuries and millennia through the lenses of reason and basic science; many of his inductions are both surprising and logically inescapable. For example, New York City's subways would flood within a matter of days, undermining and quickly toppling many NYC skyscrapers. Cockroaches would definitely not inherit our world -- they're tropical insects that would be gone from many regions after one winter without humans' central heating. And many of our proudest post-industrial creations would be atomized millions of years before some ancient Greek coins and statuary started to show their age.
Weisman spoke with Michael Krasny on KQED.
The World Without Us ... published July 10, 2006 by Thomas Dunne Books
Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson
This is the first full-length bio of one of the world's most influential primatologists -- by an author who's collaborated extensively with her for the last 13 years (Visions of Caliban, [1993]; two edited volumes of her letters, first published in 2000 and 2001). Underscoring Goodall's scientific accomplishments, Louis Leakey said of her findings, "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human."
Though she's best known for her work in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park and the Jane Goodall Institute, she's become increasingly active in broader environmental and social spheres as well; she now travels 300 days a year, speaking and writing on behalf of a variety of causes relating to her primatological work. Among those is an effort to spread awareness of the environmental devastation caused by humankind's unmindful eating habits. Goodall contributed a superb audio diary on that subject to the Boston NPR program On Point shortly before Thanksgiving 2005.
Jane Goodall ... published November 15, 2006 by Houghton Mifflin
The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind by Marvin Minsky
One of the world's most widely esteemed authorities on artificial intelligence serves up bite-sized pieces of his take on what, exactly, constitutes human "thought." Some may find Minsky's seemingly fragmented presentation to be off-putting at first glance, but his touch is deft, and getting past his format's novelty is both easy and worthwhile. More to the point, his almost aphoristic prose and graphics style reflects the substance of what he's got to say: that what should properly be understood as "thought" consists of much more than uniform, linear logic. Rather, it involves many kinds of processes -- a "cloud" of them -- even including emotional states such as love or shame. Says Minsky, "[W]e have so many ways to accomplish each job that we can tolerate the failure of many particular parts, simply by switching to using alternative ones." Trying to encapsulate Minsky's ideas within this website's abbreviated parameters is a bit silly at best; fortunately, his MIT Web page features links to a draft of this book and a variety of other materials.
The Emotion Machine ... published November 7, 2006 by Simon & Schuster
Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine
by Richard P. Sloan
A Columbia behavioral medicine prof spotlights the surprisingly widespread encroachment of religion on American medicine. Training a critical eye on the large and growing body of studies purporting to find medicinal benefits in religion, Sloan says, "Most of them are extremely weak and inconclusive." The author also points out some ugly side effects and unintended consequences resulting from attempts to blend medicine and religion. If one prays fervently but does not get well, has one been rejected by God? Might a physician's use of his or her already limited patient contact time to address religion constitute an abuse of the doctor-patient relationship? Attempting to blend religion and medicine is bad for religion, too, Sloan argues. By trying to impose scientific measurement on that which can't be empirically measured, he says, those who would drag God into the laboratory inevitably erode religion's transcendence.
Blind Faith ... published October 31, 2006 by St. Martin's Press
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006
edited by Brian Greene
No guestroom (or bathroom) will be complete without the current installment of one of the most enlightening and important annual "best of" anthologies on the market. In twenty-five superb essays, many of America's finest minds weigh in on an incredibly wide variety of subjects: ideas that matter, articulated in generally excellent prose. Many of the collected essays are available online; here's a good sampling:
Natalie Angier's Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore;
Drake Bennett's Dr. Ecstasy;
Daniel Dennett's Show Me the Science;
Mark Dowie's Conservation Refugees;
John Hockenberry's The Blogs of War;
Gordon Kane's The Mysteries of Mass;
Charles Mann's The Coming Death Shortage;
Chris Mooney's The Dover Monkey Trial;
Dennis Overbye's Remembrance of Things Future;
Jessica Snyder Sachs's Are Antibiotics Killing Us?; and
Josh Schollmeyer's Lights, Camera, Armageddon.
Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 ... pub'd Oct. 11, 2006; Houghton Mifflin
The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine
A neurobiologist and psychiatry prof at UC-San Francisco has drawn heavy fire from some quarters for this book, which examines evidence that the male and female brains might be fundamentally different. Some of her critics insist that any structural brain differences are trivial and that "nurture" plays a far more prominent role than the "nature" they accuse Brizendine of overstating or misunderstanding. Says the author,
Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground, and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn't told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviors. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction. ... There is no unisex brain. ... Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values, and their very reality.
The Female Brain ... published August 1, 2006 by Morgan Road Books
Grayson by Lynne Cox
One of the world's greatest long-distance swimmers recalls a day over 30 years ago, when during her morning dip off Seal Beach she briefly adopted a baby whale she dubbed "Grayson." The creature had started following Cox after being separated from its mother en route to feeding grounds in the Bering Sea. She knew that if she couldn't facilitate a mother and child reunion, the baby whale would almost certainly die.
Cox shows that in addition to being a remarkable athlete, she's a solid storyteller as well. Her knowledge of the sea sparkles through her prose, and she sustains suspense deftly in the service of her lean narrative.
And it would seem that she's as globally engaged as she is athletic and articulate. She swam the Bering Strait in 1987, playing an important symbolic role in the thawing of the Cold War. In 1994, she swam in the Gulf of Aqaba off Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In both cases, she was later included at peace treaty signing ceremonies.
Grayson ... published August 1, 2006 by Knopf
My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's
Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy
edited by John Brockman
The incomparable Mr. Brockman once again assembles some of the planet's greatest minds for yet another of his Olympic-class parlor games (much as he did for two recent collections, What We Believe but Cannot Prove and Intelligent Thought). This time physicists are disproportionately represented, since these intellectual all-stars were asked to focus their meditative energies on Albert Einstein. While none of the scientists here are as famous as Einstein, many are giants in their fields:
John Archibald Wheeler,
Lee Smolin,
Richard A. Muller and
Maria Spiropulu, to name a few. In addition to generally accessible discussions of physics, there are also earthier, sometimes slightly off-kilter reflections on or relating to Einstein. For example George F. Smoot of Berkeley Lab confides, "Once, needing suspenders for a tuxedo, I went shopping and found a limited choice of patterns: boring geometric, Marilyn Monroe, and Albert Einstein. After much thought, I settled on the last."
My Einstein ... published July 25, 2006 by Pantheon
A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
by Cordelia Fine
Cordelia Fine, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University, is both entertaining and thought-provoking as she recounts dozens of experiments with human behavior (including the infamous Milgram experiment) that reveal our brains to be constantly feeding us boatloads a self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited nonsense in order to help us carry on in the world as we find it. Says Fine,
[Y]our unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence. It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. Your brain is vainglorious. It's emotional and immoral. It deludes you. It is pigheaded, secretive, and weak-willed. Oh, and it's also a bigot. This is more than a minor inconvenience. The fleshy walnut inside your skull is all you have to know yourself and to know the world. Yet, thanks to the masquerading of an untrustworthy brain with a mind of its own, much of what you think you know is not quite as it seems.
A Mind of Its Own ... published July 17, 2006 by W. W. Norton
Shadow of the Bear: Travels in Vanishing Wilderness by Brian Payton
Bears and humans have shared compelling relationships for tens of thousands of years; they're still integral to our imaginings of "wilderness" -- and to our efforts to gauge the health of the planet. Here Payton goes in search of eight bear species:
black,
brown,
sun,
giant panda,
spectacled,
sloth,
polar, and the now extinct
cave bear.
Unsurprisingly, all surviving species except the black bear appear to be headed for extinction this century. While watching polar bears, Payton wonders,
[W]ill we take the necessary steps to save them and their environment? Will urbanites forgo their SUVs in favor of public transit? Will voters stop electing politicians who are contemptuous of science and international cooperation? Even as we contemplate these questions, our window of opportunity to save the polar bear is closing.
Shadow of the Bear ... published July 11, 2006 by Bloomsbury USA
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley
No less than Francis Crick's eminent partner James Watson says of this book and its subject, "Matt Ridley's Francis Crick perceptively and warmly recounts the extraordinary life of the twentieth century's most important biologist." Given Crick's towering scientific stature, fascinatingly multifaceted life, and Ridley's scientific background and award-winning credentials, this book was doomed to excellence.
Most people who recognize Crick's name associate it with his co-discovery of DNA's molecular structure. But he was also involved in other inquiries including those involving neurobiology and speculation about natural origins of religion (Daniel Dennett came out with an important volume on that subject a few months ago.) Crick died only two years ago, and there will doubtless be further -- and more massive and probing -- biographies to come. It seems unlikely, though, that any future biographers will improve on Ridley's blend of scientific expertise and flair for writing elegantly direct prose that non-specialists can understand.
Francis Crick ... published June 13, 2006 by HarperCollins
Bones, Rocks and Stars:
The Science of When Things Happened by Chris Turney
How can we know reliably when the Shroud of Turin was fabricated or the pyramids were built or an ice age began or the dinosaurs died out? Through many ingenious methods, explains geologist Turney, who rose to worldwide prominence when he provided carbon dating expertise for the team that discovered "hobbits" in Indonesia. He shows some of the techniques used to ascertain with steadily increasing accuracy the ages of objects and events in time scales ranging from those that apply to human history to those by which the age of the universe may be measured. Some of these include radiocarbon dating, dendochronology (tree-ring dating), pollen stratigraphy, and ice core sampling. He also takes the opportunity to inveigh against the teaching of creationism in the classroom. Turney's personal website offers a brief, congenial audio introduction to his book.
Bones, Rocks and Stars ... published June 8, 2006 by Macmillan
Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley,
Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel N. Shurkin
Because of William Shockley's role in the development of the transistor (for which he won a third of a Nobel Prize) at Bell Labs, it's said that he "put the silicon" in Silicon Valley. Considering his historical significance -- and his numerous headline-grabbing, crackpot pronouncements -- it's a little surprising that this is the first Shockley bio. "Broken genius," indeed. He was born with a vile temper and often behaved monstrously toward those around him. After alienating virtually everyone with whom he worked in the early development of electronics, he used his interest in eugenics to disgust pretty much everyone else on the planet as well. For example, Shockley advocated such measures as sterilizing everyone with IQ's under 100, and he stated publicly that African-American IQ's were 15 points lower than those of European-Americans. Shurkin's a Pulitzer Prizewinner, and it shows. His excellence as a reporter and storyteller, combined with Shockley's multifaceted historical significance and personal awfulness, make this volume one of the fastest, most interesting (if thoroughly appalling) reads I've seen in a long time.
Broken Genius ... published June 8, 2006 by Macmillan
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed
The Way We Think edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley
Published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' most important book, The Selfish Gene, this volume features essays by some of the world's most widely respected thinkers (such as
Daniel Dennett,
David Deutsch,
Steven Pinker,
Philip Pullman, and
Michael Shermer)
addressing Dawkins' ideas and influence. Richard Dawkins has been called "Darwin's Rottweiler"; in coversation with Bill Moyers on the PBS program NOW he said, "Among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know. And that, of course, as you know is accepted by responsible educated churchmen, as well as scientists." He responded with an all too obvious meme (a term he coined) when asked if the world had changed after 9/11:
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!
Richard Dawkins ... published May 1, 2006 by Oxford University Press, USA
What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers
On Science in the Age of Certainty ed. by John Brockman
Brockman's one of the world's truly remarkable people -- almost certainly its greatest intellectual impresario. He asked 120 of the planet's sharpest folks (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson) to write a few words about that which they believe but can't prove. The responses are available online; one of my personal favorites was that of Randolph Nesse, which begins,
I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove. I am dead serious about this. People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations.
What We Believe But Cannot Prove ... published February 28, 2006 by Harper Perennial
The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the
Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries by Shannon Moffett
A Stanford medical student, now in her final year, took three years off to hobnob with some of the most renowned figures in neurosciences and related pursuits in an effort to find out why we are we. Moffett offers a judicious blend of good storytelling and some of the most credible current thinking about the natures of "brain," "mind," "self," etc. Among the professionals we meet is Dr. Roberta Glick, working to remove a bullet from patient's brain while trying to minimize damage to surrounding tissue. Moffett also interviews such leaders in their fields as John Gabrieli, Robert Stickgold, a Zen monk by the name of Norman Fischer, and Christof Koch and his now-deceased partner Francis Crick. Among the more amusing findings of the latter two researchers was a brain in which one neuron's sole function was to respond to Jennifer Anniston-related stimuli. The book's arranged so that one can get intermittently immersed in some fairly serious neuroscience -- or skim those sections and stick with the less technical narrative threads.
The Three-Pound Enigma ... published January 20, 2006 by Algonquin Books
Categories On the Beauty of Physics
by Emiliano Sefusatti and Hilary Thayer Hamann
Featuring 39 chapters dealing with 39 different concepts essential to any understanding of physics ("Acceleration," "Angle," "Angular Velocity," "Antimatter," "Wave/Particle Duality," etc.), this volume brings physics to the non-physicist, presented in conjunction with samples of art and literature that mesh with and help convey the salient ideas. Say the publishers,
Categories -- On the Beauty of Physics is the first in a series of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary educational books that will use imagery from emerging and well-known artists, and information from a variety of disciplines -- categories -- to facilitate the reader's encounter with challenging material. Categories ... is not a physics textbook, it is a book about physics that uses literature and art to stimulate the wonder and interest of the reader. It is intended to promote scientific literacy, foster an appreciation of the humanities, and encourage readers to make informed and imaginative connections between the sciences and the arts. The book can be used as a cooperative learning tool through which people (especially educators and students) can engage in academic and value-oriented discussions.
Categories On the Beauty of Physics ... published January 2006 by Vernacular Press
The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt
Had British mathematician Alan Turning retired at age 25, his place in history as "the father of computer science" might already have been assured. Then, less than a decade after the 1936 work that earned him that distinction, Turing won an additional spot in the history books by developing a device that could break the Enigma machine's codes. Even his death was remarkable: he died after biting into a poisoned apple.
The author, an acclaimed gay novelist, would seem to have been an excellent choice to explore the integral roles that homosexuality and homophobia played in Turing's life and death, and David Leavitt's slim biography is readable and accessible without giving the problems Turing solved short shrift. This is not the definitive Turning biography, however; that distinction falls to Andrew Hodges' Alan Turning: The Enigma (1983). Leavitt's book, though, seems a better bet for the general reader. His prose is succinct and lively, his pace necessarily swift, and his storyteller's craftsmanship abundant.
The Man Who Knew Too Much ... first published December 12, 2005 by W. W. Norton
A People's History of Science by Clifford D. Conner
Forget the Great Man theory of scientific history -- Isaac Newton and other "hero-savant" scientists stood not on the shoulders of giants, but on "the massive foundations created by humble laborers." The author shows how humankind's greatest scientific advancements were actually the doings of ordinary people going about their business and improving their crafts. He concludes by calling for a re-democratization of science:
Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. The problem to be solved is whether science, technology, and industry can be brought under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy, so that all of us can collectively put our hard-won scientific knowledge to mutually beneficial use. I am confident this can be accomplished, but will it? If so, there is reason for optimism. If not well, to paraphrase Keynes, "In the not-so-long run we're all dead."
A People's History of Science ... published November 9, 2005 by Nation Books
The Discoveries by Alan Lightman
One of America's finest scientist-writers explains 25 of the 20th century's most important scientific papers so that laypersons can grasp their essence and consequence. Lightman's lucid, polished explanations precede reprints of the original works that first brought the breakthroughs to light. Most of us will, of course, find the papers themselves largely impenetrable, but Lightman helps us see glimmers of their brilliance. In an epilogue, he addresses the question of why we should make the effort:
The ancient Oracle of Apollo at Delphi warned petitioners, "Know thyself." Although the wise oracle was probably referring to the psychological and moral self, we might extend the recommendation to the physical self as well. Or even to all life on the planet, the mission of biology. And perhaps, since living substance is a part of nature, we might say, "Know nature." Know trees, know rocks, know raindrops, know elephants, know amoebae, know stars.
The Discoveries ... first published November 8, 2005 by Pantheon
Life as We Do Not Know It by Peter Ward
Having argued persuasively in Rare Earth (2000) that "intelligent" life in the universe might begin and end at Earth, a University of Washington paleontologist now explores the possibilities of life existing in forms so different from those we know that we might not even recognize them as "life." We're far from alone in the universe, says he, and the diversity of life forms is far wider than we'd formerly guessed. Ward concludes,
Loneliness is a terrible thing. It brings a responsibility that may be beyond our species and a responsibility to the great arc of Terroan life that we have dominion over. Surely there is more than one way to make life, as we and already showed in our laboratories. Are there aliens in existence? That question is already answered in the affirmative. [ ¶ ] We are beginning to know life as we previously did not know it.
Though Ward doesn't shy away from the current, mainstream science that grounds his basic contentions, he has a flair for making himself not only understandable, but genuinely enjoyable for the general reader.
Life As We Do Not Know It ... published November 3, 2005 by Viking Adult
The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2005
edited by Jonathan Weiner and Tim Folger
The 25 selections here provide fast, temporary relief from the unintelligently designed cosmologies now popular in Jesusland and its benighted outposts. Nearly half of these pieces originated in the New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Sherwin Nuland, Bill McKibben, and Jared Diamond are among the better known contributors. The range of topics is delightful: from deep-sea microbial life to the Columbia disaster to human biological enhancement "therapies" -- to 22 other offerings in this smorgasboard for the engaged mind. If there's anything that unifies these articles (other than the understanding that evolution is real), it's the wit with which the vitally important information -- no less than that which defines the reality-based world -- is presented. Among my favorite passages is one from Natalie Angier's "My God Problem -- and Theirs," originally in The American Scholar:
Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the the American population, and the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a personal God. (Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in personal immortality, which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.)
Best American Science & Nature Writing 2005 ... pub'd Oct. 5, 2005; Houghton Mifflin
Universe edited by Martin Rees
As coffee table or guestroom books go, there's simply no beating this one for sheer, mind-boggling magnificence -- which is as it should be, since the subject is the universe itself. Both the astrophotography and the artists' renderings are relentlessly, jaw-droppingly spectacular, and the accompanying text is succinct yet highly informative -- in terms laypersons can readily understand and apply.
We've all seen some memorable Hubble photos, but browsing through hundreds of such interstellar masterpieces -- here superbly reproduced and presented -- is exhilirating. Dorling Kindersley, the British publisher behind this stunner had already won lavish praise for previous offerings in its "Definitive Visual Guide" series, Animal (2001) and Earth (2003). This one will prove a helpful and deeply inspirational guidebook for virtually all amateur astronomers, from the casual, naked-eye beginner to the dedicated and well-equipped deep-sky observer. Those not yet bitten by the astronomy bug, will be, after spending a little time with this awe-inspiring volume.
Universe ... published October 3, 2005 by DK ADULT
John Muir: Magnificent Tramp by Rod Miller
One of the most renowned early environmentalists and a co-founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir probably could have been a success at anything he set his hand to. Mechanically inclined to a preternatural degree, he was a prolific inventor. When he concentrated business acumen and extraordinary tenacity, he could make money quickly. Theodore Roosevelt revered him, and he was a big hit with the ladies.
None of that seems to have impressed him overmuch, though; his interests lay rather in the appreciation, study, chronicling, and preservation of nature. This fine little biography illuminates Muir the naturalist, but also provides a comprehensive look at the other sides of what was a long and exceedingly eventful life. To keep him in context, the book is organized by aspects of Muir, rather than by pure chronology, and that structure works well here. While Miller freely acknowledges that his is not a scholarly work, it's hard to imagine a more efficient or agreeable introduction to a man many people think of as a naturalist-saint.
*Also available on Audio CD
John Muir ... published May 12, 2005 by Forge Books
Wandering Home by Bill McKibben
The man widely credited with first bringingglobal warming to wide public attention goes for a little walk: 200 miles in three weeks, from his home in Vermont's Champlain Valley, west across the southern tip of Lake Champlain, and on to New York's Adirondack Mountains. Along the way he finds lives and local economies that give him reasons to be hopeful about our capacity for living harmoniously with nature.
Wandering Home adds an encouragingly upbeat (if too brief) coda to the superb body of work McKibben's produced in the 16 years since the publication of his epoch-making The End of Nature (1989). He's not only one of the world's best nature writers, he's one of the best in any genre. His prose is vivid and polished but not showy, he makes his points simply and deftly without belaboring them, and above all he tells a good story. My personal favorite MicKibben is The Age of Missing Information (1992), in which he contrasts 24 hours on a mountain with 24 hours of cable TV.
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD
Wandering Home ... published April 12, 2005 by Crown
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
As scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave the world its first atomic bomb. A decade later, the U.S. government stripped him of his once substantial political power, essentially for having been a mainstream liberal intellectual in the 1930s -- a potential hanging offense in the McCarthy Era. But Oppenheimer's story is much more than a martyr's tale, as this weighty but fast-paced bio shows.
Oppenheimer's complexities and contradictions make him a fascinating study. He was deeply troubled about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he'd tried to stifle colleagues' discussions, before Hiroshima, of how The Bomb should be used. He was excommunicated in part because of his advocacy for nuclear containment and against a U.S.-Soviet arms race, but when those laudable efforts helped put him on the witness stand, he named names. Oppenheimer's personal circumstances were often turbulent, as well, but Bird and Sherwin succeed in drawing the threads of his life together with a satisfying sure-handedness.
American Prometheus ... first published April 5, 2005 by Knopf
Conflict in the Cosmos by Simon Mitton
Fred Hoyle (1915 - 2001) was one of the 20th century's best-known scientists -- and one of its most controversial. Although it was Hoyle who coined the expression "Big Bang," he rejected that explanation of the universe's origin. While his BBC radio broadcasts brought physics to the masses, his pronouncements often struck colleagues as so far-fetched (or simply loony) that some of his peers demanded airtime to rebut him.
Their motivations were not always pure. Says the author of this sure-handed biography,
Fred Hoyle completely transformed British astronomy in the quarter century beginning about 1950. By turns, Fred Hoyle startled and charmed his public with a copious stream of new ideas, implausible theories, and an innovative approach to research. ... He regarded the entire celestial realm -- the universe and all its contents no less -- as being within the compass of his enquiries. Naturally, this would bring him in conflict with those members of the academy who had a strong sense of ownership of their respective specialties.
Hoyle, a great popularizer, would have appreciated the fact that Mitton makes much of Hoyle's science accessible to non-scientists. Mitton also delves into some of Hoyle's many quirks and paranoias -- which, of course, help make this sturdy bio of one of the world's most important cosmologists eminently readable.
Conflict in the Cosmos ... published March 25, 2005 by Joseph Henry Press
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