book review
grrlscientist | May 9, 2006In 2001, the US Fish and Wildlife Service published their survey results of fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation and estimated that there are 46 million bird watchers in the United States, making it the second most popular hobby in that country. According to a report by the New York Audubon Society, there were only a dozen bird festivals but in 1993, when the report was published, there were more than 250 every year throughout America. Why is watching birds so popular? Several reasons include the fact that birds are easily visible everywhere that humans go, and birds tend to do…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2006Some of you, dear readers, have probably wondered where I have been hiding these past few days. Well, besides being busy with teaching a conservation genetics course, I was also, unexpectedly, reading another book so I could publish the review here as soon as possible. Last Monday, Darksyde, co-author of Daily Kos, asked if I wished to take a quick look at their new electronic book ("ebook"), Kosmos: You are Here by Steven Darksyde and Mark Sumner (DevilsTower) (2006), whose sales will support the annual Kos convention. Being the audacious book whore that I am, combined with having never read…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2006What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "Dust Bowl"? Like most people, I learned about the Dust Bowl in my high school history class. But even though I attended high school last century (iieee!), as I recall, my textbook devoted perhaps one paragraph to this event before moving on to other, more important events, such as the stock market crash and the banking failure, the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal, and World War II. In fact, except for my astonished sadness after reading John Steinbeck's literary rant, The Grapes of Wrath, I never gave the actual event much thought.…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2006I first learned about this book, Club George: The Diary of a Central Park Bird Watcher (NYC: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), when the author, Bob Levy, was interviewed recently by Brian Lehrer on the local National Public Radio affiliate, WNYC [mp3, 17:54]. After that interview concluded, I poked around on the internet, found the publicist's contact information and emailed him, requesting a review copy of the book, which he was happy to provide.
Club George is the story of the relationship that developed between a human and a wild bird, the transformation of a focused career man into a devoted…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2006tags: Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding, Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen, book review, art, books
Several weeks ago, a good friend of mine who is an aviculturist, businessman and art collector, emailed to tell me about a book he had just purchased. Usually reserved, his praise was so effusive that I contacted the publisher immediately to obtain a review copy. A week later, the carefully bubble-wrapped and packed book arrived in the mail; Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding: The Art of Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen (2006, Eagle Mountain Publishing, Eagle Mountain, Utah. Click image for larger view in its…
grrlscientist | April 10, 2006As many of you know, I read and comment here about avian influenza fairly often, and you also know that I like to review books as a way of staying in touch with the publishing world without resorting to a life of crime to support my book habit. So I was interested when the publicist at Thomas Dunne Books kindly offered to send a copy of their new book, The Bird Flu Pandemic: Can It Happen? Will It Happen? How to Protect Yourself and Your Family If It Does (Paperback) by Jeffrey Greene and Karen Moline (2006). I will not belabor my issues here because I truly dislike writing bad reviews, but I…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2006Birding Babylon -- does the title of this book sound familiar to you? If so, then you, like me, are one of thousands of people who have been reading the author's blog with the same name. Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq by Jonathan Trouern-Trend (2006, Sierra Club Books), is one of only a handful of published books out there that began as a series of entries "posted" on a public blog instead of a proposal sitting on an agent's desk. But even when it was "only" a blog, excerpts were quoted in the media and the author was interviewed at least once (by National Public Radio) while…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2006According to an opinion poll from late 2004, only 13% of all Americans think that humans evolved without any guidance from an all-powerful divine being. In view of this surprising lack of knowledge, I think it is essential that the public is presented with more details about evolution, and this is exactly what this book strives to accomplish. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth on 12 February 2009, Niles Eldredge, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, designed a wonderful traveling exhibition that documents and discusses the development of Darwin's…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006The Seed Media Offices recently sent a book to me to review. This book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (2006, Harper Perennial) is edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge. The book is a collection of essays written by more than 100 scientists and other leading scholars in response to the question, "What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?" Each essay is blog-length, ranging between five and approximately 800-1000 words, so it makes for interesting thought experiments that you can easily read and contemplate while…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006Like something ripped bleeding from headline news, Intuition (2006, Dial Press) by Allegra Goodman is a timely story about scientific fraud. Even though the pivotal point of the story is one event, it is Goodman's careful and empathetic exploration of the relationships between the researchers and their families that is the most compelling aspect of this story.
When the story begins, it is a snowy afternoon at the fictional Philpott Institute, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The talented and ambitious postdoctoral researcher, Cliff Bannaker, has failed to produce publishable results…
grrlscientist | February 27, 2006
How important it is to walk along, not in haste, but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out
Yes! No!
-- Mary Oliver
Almost everyone has heard about "Darwin's Finches" -- those dark little birds that live on the Galapagos Islands. But most people don't realize that Darwin didn't set eyes upon those birds until nearly the end of his five year journey. Additionally, when Darwin first stepped aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831, he was neither an ornithologist nor a professional scientist; instead, he was a 22-year-old beetle collector and an amateur naturalist with only a smattering of…
grrlscientist | February 20, 2006Even though Michael Ruse is an evolutionary philosopher, he also is a self-described deist, so I probably should have been ready to be disappointed. Instead of saving my hard-earned money, I optimistically purchased his book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005, Harvard University Press), with the expectation that it would explain the history that underlies the conflict between science and religion regarding the origins of life on earth, particularly as it is being acted out in science classrooms in America -- which it did accomplish. Kinda. Sorta.
In this book, Ruse defines and explores…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2006Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
-- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
You can't identify an atheist simply by looking at them and in fact, your group of friends probably includes at least one atheist in their number. Even though belief in some sort of supernatural being is the dominant philosophy in the Western World, atheism still persists. Why? This book specifically addresses these questions, and many more;
What, precisely, is atheism, and why is it misunderstood so thoroughly?
Do atheists believe that human beings evolved through blind accident from…