Welcome to The ScienceBlogs Book Club, Seed's virtual venue for hosting discussions on stimulating new titles in science, featuring reviews from across the ScienceBlogs network.
Carbon footprints, global warming, green living -- are these phrases an inconvenient truth that keep you awake at night, wondering how you can live in a more environmentally friendly way? For many people, merely contemplating these things is enough to make them give up trying to help the earth before they even start! But before you allow yourself to become discouraged, there is a book out there that will inspire you to make changes in your life that are beneficial to the earth; Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009) by Vanessa Farquharson.
This book review was originally posted by Greg Laden on Greg Laden's Blog.
previously reviewed
Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
There are two different types
of people in the world,
those who want to know,
and those who want to believe.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
In November 2002, an ancient carved limestone burial box designed to hold the disarticulated skeleton of a dead person was put on public display in Canada's Royal Ontario Museum. Although common throughout Israel, this particular box, known as an ossuary, was unusual because it was inscribed. Even more remarkable, its ancient Aramaic inscription -- "Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua" -- translated to read, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." This sent waves of hysteria through the Christian and Jewish communities, causing tens of thousands of faithful to mob the museum. But even before the ossuary was publicly displayed, experts declared the inscription to be a fraud. Unfazed by facts, the religious preferred to believe it was real. In Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land (NYC: Collins; 2008), the author, Nina Burleigh, uncovers the trail followed by forged biblical antiquities, from illegal excavations in Israel to a world-class museum in Canada.
This review was originally posted by Brian Switek on Laelaps
Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin's own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin's Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World, creationists claim that Darwin's evolutionary vision undermined the "consanguinity" of all members of the human species, thus justifying slavery.
While acknowledging the popularity of these views among creationists, Adrian Desmond and James Moore's latest book Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's View of Human Evolution does not attempt to direct refute creationist propaganda. It is not a defense of Darwin, but rather an explanation of how the famous naturalist integrated his concerns over racism and slavery into his work. Born into a high-class Whig household Darwin imbibed the anti-slavery sentiments of his family early and hung onto them throughout his life. Darwin may have had a paternalistic view that blacks, native peoples, &c. were culturally inferior to whites, but this was about as far as his racism extended. Darwin was truly revolted by slavery and the racist science of contemporaries like the creationist naturalist Louis Agassiz.
This review was originally posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on Dynamics of Cats.
As I was strolling through town a few weeks ago, I saw a flyer advertising a talk on campus by Prof. Barbara Oakley, talking about her book "Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend."
I couldn't go to the talk, due to a conflicting engagement, but the book was in my review pile, so I popped it up to the top and plowed through it.
The book is quite a fun read.
It starts off as a personal story, with the death of the author's sister, and her reflection on the life of her sister, and why she was as she was: was it genetic, environmental, due to neurological changes from severe viral illness, or some mix if all of the above.
The author leans to the genetic explanation as a root cause, with enviroment and contingent events considered as triggers or suppressors of genetic propensities.
There is some interesting discussion of brain structure, and a lot of reliance of functional MRI studies, which the author is clearly familiar with. There is also some good discussion of allele variations and correlations with various clinical syndromes, as well as the game theoretic aspect of why such propensities would persist in a population despite their apparent low fitness in many cases.
When I was growing up, I had no introduction to evolutionary theory. Sure, I assumed it was true, and I went through the usual long phase of dinosaur fandom, but I was never taught anything at all about evolution throughout my grade school education, and what little I did know was largely stamp-collecting. That all changed, though, when I went off to college.
I can't credit the schools I went to, unfortunately: most of my undergraduate education (with a few wonderful exceptions) was the usual mega-survey course, where the instructor stuck a funnel in our heads and poured in facts for a term — so more stamp-collecting. What happened to me, though, was that I was struck by two thunderbolts at almost the same time. The hot science book that was published during my freshman year was E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology, and I bought it and devoured it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was more buckets of facts, but in this case, these facts were deployed to illuminate an overarching idea about how the world works…and I found it wonderful.
The second thunderbolt was Stephen Jay Gould. He was doing the same thing, promoting ideas powerfully with evidence and rhetoric, and he was far easier to read than Wilson, and communicated even more clearly. It was also wonderful.
Of course, if you know anything about the intellectual landscape of the 1970s, you know that I had acquired as two scientific god-parents two warring camps who were hellbent against one another in a period of angry evolutionary ferment. I am the product of a broken home! It was especially tragic, because in my naiveté, I thought most of the conflict was a waste, that each side had an important perspective, and that the right answer was an appreciation of the power of selection and an understanding of the other modes of change operating over history.
I've long been interested in the battle royale that went on in that period — it's like a child's morbid dwelling on the scab of an ugly parental divorce — and in particular with that central figure, Steve Gould. Last week I was sent a copy of a book by David F. Prindle, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), so of course I had to read it.
Welcome to The ScienceBlogs Book Club, Seed's virtual venue for hosting discussions on stimulating new titles in science, featuring reviews from across the ScienceBlogs network.
Carbon footprints, global warming, green living -- are these phrases an inconvenient truth that keep you awake at night, wondering how you can live in a more environmentally friendly way? For many people, merely contemplating these things is enough to make them give up trying to help the earth before they even start! But before you allow yourself to become discouraged, there is a book out there that will inspire you to make changes in your life that are beneficial to the earth; Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009) by Vanessa Farquharson. 
is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference. 
