Adventures in Ethics and Science

Free to a good home: science books!

Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel on July 12, 2006
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Loyal ScienceBlogs reader Dr. Kim D. Gainer is moving to a newly-renovated office (Yay!) that is smaller than her current office — which means that some of the goodies on her bookshelves are in need of new homes.

That’s where you come in.

She writes:

If folks would like any of these books, they should e-mail me at kgainer@radford.edu, and I will ship them out to them, no strings attached. There is no fine print to this offer! I will cover the postage (media rate, of course, so people shouldn’t expect the books to appear via next day FedEx). I simply want these books to do the most good.

Here are the books she’s hoping to relocate:


Attenborough, David. Life on Earth: A Natural History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979 (hardcover). – TAKEN

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. NY: W.W. Norton, 1987. (paperback) – TAKEN

Dudley, William. Genetic Engineering: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 1990. (paperback) – TAKEN

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. NY: W.W. Norton, 1981. (paperback) – TAKEN

Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life. NY: W.W. Norton, 1989. – TAKEN

McCollister, Betty, ed. Voices for Evolution. Introduction by Isaac Asimov. Berkeley, CA: The National Center for Science Education, 1989. (paperback) – TAKEN

Sagan, Carl. Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. NY: Random House, 1979. (hardcover) – TAKEN

Shapiro, Robert. Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. NY: Bantam Books, 1987. (paperback–pages yellowing, presumably not acid free paper) – TAKEN

Thomas, Lewis. Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. NY: Viking, 1983. (hardcover) – TAKEN

None of them is more recent than 1990, but some of them are classics. (Note that Dawkins, Gould, and Sagan are represented, and a prospective school teacher might want to snag Attenborough’s Life on Earth for his classroom.) They are all in excellent condition except for the Shapiro paperback, whose pages are yellowing.

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Comments

  1. #1 Kim Gainer
    July 12, 2006

    I have a taker for Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker. One down, eight to go.

  2. #2 Kim Gainer
    July 12, 2006

    Both Gould books are gone, given a home by someone at Seed Magazine itself!

  3. #3 iGollum
    July 12, 2006

    I’d shout out for the Sagan but I suppose asking for you to ship it to Europe would be pushing it? Belgium, specifically…

  4. #4 Kim Gainer
    July 12, 2006

    Broca’s Brain is gone (so to speak). That’s four down, five to go.

  5. #5 Kim Gainer
    July 12, 2006

    Now the Lewis Thomas and Robert Shapiro volumes have been claimed.

    Sorry, iGollum. Somebody had already claimed Broca’s Brain before you posted.

  6. #6 Monado
    July 12, 2006

    Consider going to bookcrossing.com, giving yourself a nifty user name, and registering the the books to give them unique IDs… Then people can use the Web sites to record the books’ travels…

    e.g. http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/1584994

  7. #7 Kim Gainer
    July 13, 2006

    I have found good homes for all the books, and I’d to thank everyone very, very much. I was having trouble facing the fact that I have run out of space both at home and the office. Some books I was able to let go of fairly easily. They went into a box in the hallway outside my office, and most quickly vanished (although a few passersby ADDED books, volumes which, fortunately, were also for the most part ‘adopted’). Other books, however, I cherish so much that I am reluctant to relinquish them. Even though I am an English professor, it is the science books to which I cling so. Genetic manipulation, evolution, anthropology and paleoanthropology, medical and scientific ethics–these fields fascinate me, perhaps because they figure in current cultural debates in which REASON AND SCIENCE MUST PREVAIL. The Medieval and Renaissance eras are the literary periods in which I specialize, but, although I have the greatest respect for these eras, I am glad to live in a society that was fundamentally shaped by the 17th and 18th centuries. (To me the 17th century, which saw the growth of–gasp!–’materialism’, i.e., the practice of seeking for natural explanations for physical phenomena, marks the true Renaissance.) Anyway, what I am saying in my long-winded way (“Pro-fessor,” chortles Captain Jack Sparrow) is that you folks have helped me ease the pain of biblioseparation.

    Dr. Free-Ride, could you go ahead and remove my e-mail address from the original post? (I don’t want an address trolling program to snag it! By Darwin, I hate trolls of every variety (except Tolkien’s).

  8. #8 Rev. BigDumbChimp
    July 13, 2006

    Whoa, that bookcrossing thing is pretty interesting. Thanks for the heads up. I’m constantly getting rid of books that I’ve had for a while and don’t need to keep around.