book review
jdupuis | August 28, 2014"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we’re fucked...We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it. We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place."
- James Box
The climate crisis is serious, no doubt about it. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth from nearly a decade ago was a kind of rallying cry for the reality-based community but it appears that we might need another rallying cry as Gore…
jdupuis | August 15, 2014First Second Books has done it again!
They've published another wonderful science-themed graphic novel that belongs on every bookshelf.
(Of course, they publish tons of other non-science themed graphic novels too. One of my particular favourite recent ones in the biography of Andre the Giant. The Zita the Spacegirl series is also wonderful beyond words.)
This time Nick Bertozzi's Shackleton: Antarctic Odyssey brings us the history of Ernest Shackleton's crazy epic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17. And epic is about the understatement of the century in describing this multi-…
jdupuis | August 8, 2014Only rarely in my life as a reviewer do I get books that seem to be absolutely perfectly suited for me. This is certainly the case with Charles L. Adler's Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, a book that combines my love for science and my love for science fiction.
The premise is an ingenious one, one that's probably not anywhere near exploited enough in the popular science literature: use science fiction and fantasy stories as a way of elucidating science. Sure, it's been done to death in all those "The Science of X" books where X is some movie or…
gregladen | August 3, 2014So, you accept the science of climate change and global warming as legit. But you often encounter people, at family gatherings, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, at social events, etc. who don't. Do you keep your mouth shut when someone says something clearly wrong that brings the science into question illegitimately? If you do, and others are listening, then one voice, a denialist voice, is influencing people. Probably better to say something.
The problems is that the denialist schtick involves having a lot of different arguments, with absolutely no regard as to legimacy, against the…
jdupuis | July 26, 2014I have some theories about both children's books and about science-themed graphic works.
There are basically two kinds of children's books: those that are designed to please children versus those that are designed to attract the adults that buy most children's books. There are also basically two kinds of science-themed graphic works: those that are essentially regular information dump-style textbooks that mix in some funny pictures and light-hearted banter as kind of a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down and those that truly take advantage of the strengths of the graphic medium to…
gregladen | July 21, 2014JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner confusion about life arises from two main sources: the dramatic difference between…
jdupuis | May 21, 2014Extremophiles are fun! Basically, they're the biggest, smallest, hardiest and definitely the oddest bunch of beasties to be found anywhere on this planet. The Palumbi father and son team -- one scientist and one writer -- bring us this fun little book on the extremophiles of the sea.
And literally, the book covers all the various sea creatures from the oldest to the smallest, to the ones that live in scalding hot conditions to those that live in the coldest conditions, so cold that the blood of normal creatures would freeze. We see the ones with the craziest migration patterns, the oddest…
jdupuis | April 28, 2014Two recentish entries into the growing field of graphic novel scientific biographies, both very good, both suitable for a wide audience: Darwin: A Graphic Biography by Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr and Mind Afire: The Visions of Tesla by Abigail Samoun and Elizabeth Haidle.
If I had to count one of these a little bit better than the other, I would give that edge to the Byrne & Gurr's Darwin biography. It has a very amusing "Ape-TV" wrap around story conceit where an ape television program tells the life story of that strange human, Charles Darwin. As a result, the story never sags, the main…
jdupuis | February 10, 2014Sometimes a book isn't quite what you expected. And you're disappointed.
Sometimes a book isn't quite what you expected and you're pleasantly surprised.
Chris Impey and Holly Henry's Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration definitely falls into the latter category. What was I expecting? From the subtitle I was hoping the book would be a fairly straightforward account of the history of unmanned space exploration -- all the missions, how they were planned, the engineering challenges involved in getting them off the ground, the logistical challenges of keeping…
jdupuis | January 28, 2014Looking over all the books I read in 2013, there's one non-fiction book that really stands out as the best. Former astronaut Chris Hadfield's memoir An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. wasn't the deepest or most information-packed book I read last year, but it was the most entertaining and involving. And it's core message was compelling enough and it's narrative drive put it right at the top of my list.
While perhaps a bit predictable in it's "science rah rah we all need to take care of the one planet that we all share" storyline that's common to this sort of popular hero autobiography,…
jdupuis | January 7, 2014The story on Albert Einstein is pretty well known. Great scientist, had probably the best year anybody ever had in anything, made a lot of important discoveries revolutionized the way we understand the physical world.
But.
But somehow he never seemed to get on board with quantum theory. Relativity was his thing and somehow he could never get his mind around the whole god playing dice statistical nature of reality in the quantum world. To me at least, this flaw, this blind spot seemed endearingly human. Hey, if Einstein can have a such a weakness, they're hope for the rest of us in an…
jdupuis | December 9, 2013As I've often said, there are two kinds of science-themed graphic novels. The kind that's usually more fun reading are historical or biographical in nature, like a couple of my favourites Feynman or Logicomix. Generally in this species of graphic novel, the actual science content kind of takes a back seat to the historical or biographical narrative. In some ways, I think those are easier to do than books that try to very directly convey scientific information via the comics medium. These often end up as little more than regular textbooks with funny pictures, kind of boring and dry but…
jdupuis | December 2, 2013Some capsule reviews of books I've finished over the last little while, in the spirit of catching up.
van Grouw, Katrina. The Unfeathered Bird. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 304pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691151342
This is a seriously beautiful coffee table-sized scientific illustrations book on birds. Basically the idea of the book is to explore birds through drawings mostly of whole or partial skeletons but also some of musculature and "plucked" bodies. A bit odd, a bit creepy but breath-taking. The book opens with a very general section on what birds have in common and then goes into…
jdupuis | October 17, 2013Chris Turner's The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada (website) is a book that absolutely must be read by every Canadian interested in the future of science and science policy in the country.
And the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government is wagering that that's a pretty low percentage of the population. If Susan Delacourt and Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are to be believed, the strategy that the Prime Minister is using focuses on an emerging coalition of western Canadians and new Canadians and suburbanites in eastern…
jdupuis | October 4, 2013Nikola Tesla is a science rockstar. How can you tell? Like any great rockstar, he's dead. And he has a rock band named after him. He's wild and colourful. He epitomizes the mad scientist. He was flamboyant and yet strangely ascetic, he was fond of spectacle and showmanship yet also a bit of a hermit. He was a prodigious inventor and scientist, perhaps unparalleled in his own or any time. He's inspired web comic wars, even. And a Indigogo campaign to raise funds for a museum. And a Kickstarter for a graphic novel adaptation of his life. (Yes, I supported both...)
In fact, his out-sized…
jdupuis | September 18, 2013It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…
jdupuis | September 13, 2013Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson's book The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future is pretty obviously not a science book. Rather, it's a book about Canadian politics. But of course here in Canada these days, it's hard to talk about science without talking about politics at least a little. This book is interesting from a science policy perspective since it endeavors to give insight into the deeper rationale behind the current Conservative government's actions. In a sense, it asks, "What kind of Canada do Stephen Harper and…
Reading Diary: How to fake a moon landing: Exposing the myths of science denial by Darryl Cunningham
jdupuis | August 27, 2013Darryl Cunningham's How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial is a bit different from most of the graphic novels I've reviewed in this space. Most of the earlier books I've reviewed have been biographical or historical in nature with the more expository ones at least having some fictional narrative wrapped around the scientific content. I guess you could say there's quite a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down a bit more smoothly.
This book however is really nothing but exposition with just enough bare-bones narrative to keep the facts rolling. It's a series of…
jdupuis | August 19, 2013I've been mostly on vacation for the last little while so I've fallen a bit behind on writing the book reviews I feature here on the blog fairly regularly. In fact, there might even be a few books that, ahem, have been sitting around read and unreviewed for perhaps even longer than the last month or so.
I thought I'd use this post as a bit of internal incentive to actually get the damn things written.
I'll take a crack at listing some books here. I'll go with those that are read but unreviewed, in process of being read (or that I intend to start very soon).
I'm also listing those that are on…
jdupuis | August 9, 2013Albert's Ideas helped build spaceships and satellites that travel to the moon and beyond. His thinking helped us understand our universe as no one ever had before.
But still, Albert left us many big questions. Questions that scientists are working on today.
Questions that someday you may answer...by wondering, thinking and imagining.
So ends the incredibly wonderful children's book On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein with words by Jennifer Berne and pictures by Vladimir Radunsky.
Aimed at a preschool audience, this book tells the story of Albert Einstein's life in lively and…