book review
grrlscientist | January 22, 2007If you are like most people, you wonder about the existence of god, if there is an afterlife and whether there is any meaning to life. Certainly, our thoughts regarding these matters profoundly influence our behavior and our lives. But when there are so many conflicting faiths, how can any person know which one is the best? To work through these questions, you will be interested to read The Path of Reason: A Philosophy of Nonbelief by Bruce Smith (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse 2006), which tells the personal story of the author's intellectual journey from the Bible Belt to atheism.
In this well-…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007I absolutely loved this book, Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (New York: Perennial, 1990). Even though the book was published 16 years ago, I cannot understand how I could have missed it. But thanks to my friend, Coturnix, who sent the book to me, I had the priviledge to finally read it, so I include a review of it here. Not only is the prose surprisingly rich and evocative, but this book is probably one of the best examples of the new genre, LabLit -- short for Laboratory Literature -- which deals with real-life scientific themes without being science fiction.
This interesting story is…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2007Liberal media, my ass! If you believe that the majority of the mainstream media (MSM) is a bastion of "liberal" reporting, then you need to open your mind and read Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (New York: Free Press, 2006). In this book, the author examines the press coverage of the Bush administration during that turbulent year between September 2004 and September 2005.
Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who researches and writes extensively about media, politics and pop culture, and is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In Lapdogs, he unflinchingly…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2007Have you ever wondered what is the inactivation temperature of the avian influenza virus? How far a flea can jump? How long a royal albatross incubates its egg? How many stomata are on the leaf of a geranium? How many ommatidia are in the compound eye of a dragonfly? If these and other questions keep you awake at night, now you can find the answers that you seek in a new book, Amazing Numbers in Biology by Rainer Flindt (New York: Springer Verlag, 2003). Basically, this delightful book is the Guiness Book of World Records for the natural world.
Even though much of this data has long been…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007tags: birds, book review, conservation, Hawai'i
Conservation is all about saving endangered species, right? Well, not always. In this book, Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawai'ian Island by Mark Jerome Walters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), the author tells the heartbreaking story of how people who were fighting to save the endangered `alalâ, the Hawai'ian raven, Corvus hawaiiensis, actually hastened the bird's extinction in the wild.
The `alalâ is the Hawai'ian name for a sacred bird; a indigenous raven that is honored by Hawai'ians as a guardian spirit that…
grrlscientist | December 26, 2006Do you believe in curses? Do you believe that a diamond can be cursed? Well, regardless of your opinion, you will be interested in this book, The Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem by Richard Kurin, which reads like part mystery, part historical narrative. This book details the journey of a large blue diamond from a mine in India to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.
The Hope Diamond's story begins when the French adventurer and gem dealer, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, purchased a crudely-cut 112-carat blue diamond in India. Or was this celebrated diamond actually…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2006I don't have kids, but every so often, I am tempted by a children's book, and this year, I found myself fascinated by one special book, Flotsam, by David Wiesner (New York: Clarion Books, 2006). This book uses incredibly detailed watercolor paintings to depict the delightful story of a young boy who is hanging out on the New Jersey shore. The boy discovers an underwater camera and develops the film, and the resulting pictures send the child on an amazing journey through a fantastical undersea world.
The story begins with the protagonist, a scientifically-minded young boy, busily examining…
jstemwedel | November 22, 2006As promised, I bring you some gift recommendations for kids who are into math or science (or could be if presented with the right point of entry). The first installation: books.
Books are the best. They don't need batteries or assembly. They don't have lots of little parts that will end up strewn on the floor (or lost under the couch). You can read them alone or read them with others.
You can buy 'em new, but you can also find some amazing books at used bookstores, or garage sales, or library sales. And of course, if you have a library card you can partake of an astounding number of…
mementomori | September 25, 2006When it comes to reading, I am new to the field of medical biography, having specifically avoided it for over 20 years just as the mailman of old eschewed taking long walks on his day off. Mercifully, enough time has passed that I no longer toss my popcorn into the inky depths if a patient of mine says hello to me at the movie theater. I am more comfortable integrating medicine into my personal life than I was during my residency, which we commonly referred to as the "Bataan Death March." I no longer leave the hospital ward via an obscure stairway at a speed that makes jackrabbits green…
jstemwedel | August 30, 2006
A couple years ago, I taught a freshman seminar class called "Matters of Life and Death". In the course, we looked at philosophy, anthropology, medical ethics, literature, and film to try to get some insight to how our awareness that our lives are finite influences how we live those lives and how we understand what kind of meaning they have.
And, about once a week, one of my freshmen would ask, "Why are we spending so much time in this class talking about death?" (Supply your own rant about inability of eighteen year olds to draw good inferences from course titles.)
Even though death is an…
jstemwedel | August 23, 2006Like a bunch of my ScienceBlogs SiBlings, I read Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard's book, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development. As I am not a trained biologist of any stripe (and haven't been enrolled in a biology course since the 1980s), I'll give you my impressions of the book from the point of view of a curious non-expert.
Nüsslein-Volhard describes the aim of the book as follows:
I have written this book for all those who are curious and who would like to understand the processes of life a little better without having to deal with highly specialized knowledge. It is for those who…
mementomori | August 23, 2006Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death
by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
If there is one topic in America that will always be voted "Least Likely to Be the Source of Light-Hearted Banter Around the Dinner Table," it is death. According to the voting, the second-place finisher in this election is funerals. When it comes to politics we may be ready to unsheath our verbal swords and attack everyone, even Grandma, but when it comes to death - mum's the word. Death is taboo to the tongue. This is unfortunate in my opinion because given the likelihood of kicking the bucket on this…
jstemwedel | July 31, 2006
How a Seed Grows by Helene J. Jordan. Illustrated by Loretta Krupinski.
This is a nifty science book for little kids. Our favorite thing about this book is that it's all about getting empirical.
After some unassuming storybook text (with lovely illustrations) about different kinds of seeds and the different kinds of plants that grow from them, the book gets down to business and lays out an experiment for the young reader to do: Plant a dozen bean seeds and see what happens to them over time.
After planting the seeds, each in its own eggshell or other container, and watering them daily, on…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2006A bookseller in Seattle who was a friend of mine often told me that his customers really wanted a durable and reasonably-priced field guide that focused on Washington State birds and was targeted specifically to beginning, visiting and relocating birders. Finally, after years of breathless waiting, that book, Birds of Washington State, by Brian Bell and Gregory Kennedy was recently published (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine, 2006).
In short, Birds of Washington State is the most user-friendly bird field guide I've seen. It has a sturdy softcover that allows the user to quickly and easily flip through…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2006An informed public and open debate is vital to a healthy democracy, but they depend upon free access to the facts. A free and fair media is indispensable to democracy because they are the only institution that can regularly question the president and other public officials. However, not everyone thinks that the American media has been doing their job recently. One of those people is Helen Thomas.
Thomas is a journalist who has covered Washington news for more than 60 years. In her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public (NYC:…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2006Everyone knows that the dinosaurs went extinct after a giant meteorite smashed into earth 65 million years ago, creating a huge dent in the planet's surface just off the Yucatan peninsula, but did you know that there was an earlier, even more dramatic, mass extinction event? That apocalyptic event occurred approximately 252 million years ago, at the Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary, and it wiped out nearly 95% of all living species on earth, but unlike the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction, the PT mass extinction cause(s) remain mysterious. In his book, Extinction: How Life Nearly Ended…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2006Do you remember the amusing anecdote, "Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it!" Well, one could also say something similar about helping birds that are in trouble. Until now, that is. While the rest of us were talking, Laura Erickson went to work researching and writing a book about this topic; 101 Ways to Help Birds (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2006).
This attractive and affordable 284-page trade paperback is engaging and educational, balancing important information with relevant and interesting personal anecdotes about birds. It is well-researched with an…
grrlscientist | May 25, 2006I've awaited this book of poems for years, and now it's finally published! Shannon Borg's first published book of poetry, Corset (Cincinnati: Cherry Grove, 2006), is now available and as soon as I learned it had been published, I eagerly requested a review copy from the publisher.
This book contains 43 collected poems, some from the author's dissertation and others that were originally published in a variety of poetry journals, and these poems are divided fairly evenly between three separate parts in the book. Despite the wide variety of topics explored in these poems, they all focus on the…
grrlscientist | May 23, 2006After paging through a typical field guide to the birds of North America, most people become intimidated by the many hundreds of bird species that are pictured. When one considers the myriad different plumages for juvenile, immature and adult birds, males versus females, and seasonal plumage differences, the possibilities increase into the thousands. Suddenly, a pleasant and relaxing morning spent identifying a few birds becomes stressful, daunting, impossible. In fact, faced with such a task, it is easier to give up before even getting started. This is where Pete Dunne's Essential Field…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2006Did you read "coming of age" books when you were in high school? If so, what did you really think of them? Like most people, I read these books but I was unique among my peers because I never liked them, even when I was "coming of age". The authors of those books always struck me as being pathetic self-involved crybabies with no purpose in life beyond whining about "being misunderstood" by the world because the people around them wisely refused to indulge their every desire -- most of which were utterly ridiculous anyway. So I initially hesitated when one of my contacts at Houghton Mifflin…