It's always a good day when a new book arrives at the door, but I've been a little worried lately as a number of books that were shipped weeks ago hadn't turned up. With only one or two exceptions they all came today (pictured above beneath the Christmas tree), and four of them are review copies that I'll be writing about soon. Being that I'm in the middle of Michael Novacek's newest book Terra it might take me a little while to get to some of the heftier titles in the stack, but here's what came and what you can expect to be featured here soon;
- Wolf Empire: An Intimate Portrait of a Species by Scott Ian Barry (who is speaking at the AMNH on the 11th of this month)
- Creature by Andrew Zuckerman (which came with Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Aldeman & others.
- The Evolution of Artiodactyls edited by Donald Prothero and Scott Foss (I've been anxious to get this one for a while).
Two other books arrived that I will probably read and not review (unless readers would like me to review them);
- Why People Believe Weird Things:Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer
- An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn & Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935 by Ronald Rainger
Some of the books will be quite easy to get through and will be posted soon, others may have to wait until my schedule frees up a little bit during the finals and the subsequent winter break, but they'll all get featured in turn. I'm just happy to have a stack of shiny new reading material to dive into, although my term paper on predatory behavior in non-human primates has to come first as I need to present on it tomorrow.
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I'm looking forward to your reviews of Artiodactyls and Wolf Empire, and especially An Agenda for Antiquity, if you can find time for a brief review of it.
I re-read Why People Believe Weird Things a while back, and I felt kinda underwhelmed. It came off rather, well, flat, in a way I find difficult to describe. While I'd still recommend it, particularly to a person just getting involved with skepticism, reading it again didn't revitalize me the way The Demon-Haunted World did when I returned to it, a few months ago.
I'd be curious to hear your impression of it, although you certainly don't have to write an in-depth review. Don't you have a book of your own you're supposed to be writing, anyway? ;-)
Black; I generally feel the same way about Shermer's book. It's alright, but I'm not overly wowed (and it doesn't hold a "candle" to Sagan's book, har har). Among other things, I disagree that many of the people in the book that he describes are making Type I OR Type II errors where you're either embracing a fallacy or rejecting a truth; it really takes some of both, each group he looks at doing both but perhaps doing one before the other.
I've only got about 100 pages to go so I might write up some brief impression when I'm done, but like you said it's not as engaging or revitalizing as The Demon-Haunted World was. I also received a copy of Peter Bowlers Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons yesterday, but even that is so far a little disappointing (especially since it's a scant 200 pages long, which is a bit short for a book wanting to cover evolution v. creationism from the 1600's through today).
And yes, I should be working on my own book (I'm actually going to do a bit of that tonight over the false choice of "Are we closer to chimpas or bonobos?"), but I've got a term paper due first. It's important to wow my prof. as he's helping me get into anthro (maybe, if the administrative gods allow), so I don't want to let him down. He also wants to get me out to Africa to do some real field world and faunal analysis, so that's my priority this weekend. I don't want to put you too far behind when we start off in January now, do I? :)