books i'd like to read
jdupuis | March 27, 2017For your reading and collection development pleasure...
It's been a while since I've done one of these posts, kind of seeing what's on my mind a little in the science-y and tech-y book world and kind of a way to help me remember what I want to pick up. It's also been a while since I've actually reviewed a book, but I do think I'll be getting to some of the backlog fairly soon in some mass group posts.
In any case, some books I'd like to read, ones that I've not acquired yet but probably will soon.
The Politics of Fear: Médecins sans Frontières and the West African Ebola Epidemic. Edited by…
jdupuis | October 21, 2016Every once in a while, I'm happy to use this blog to throw my support behind a worthy project. And there's nothing like children's science books about women in science!
Check out the Kickstarter for Science Wide Open: Children's Books about Women in Science, and consider joining me in helping this amazing project come to fruition.
Science Wide Open: Children's Books about Women in Science
When children ask questions, their whole world becomes their experiment
Kids ask a LOT of questions. The inquisitive star of Science Wide Open is no different! Her questions about how the world works guide…
jdupuis | September 6, 2016It's been quite a while since I've done one of these posts, that's for sure. But since we're at the start of the new school year, I thought it might be fun to highlight some recent and forthcoming books about science and technology and especially how they intersect with the human condition. Climate change, critical thinking, new horizons, threats to privacy...and more.
These are all books on my list to get at some point, either to catch up on books from earlier this year or books that are yet to be published.
Enjoy!
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel…
jdupuis | April 28, 2013hardly ever does The Globe and Mail books section every Saturday feature more than one, maybe two, books that I'm interested in. They're pretty heavy on the Canlit side, with a heavy helping of the kind of public affairs books that don't really do it for me. The mystery roundup feature is usually my best bet. Well this week there were three -- count'em three -- books that really piqued my interest. And a pretty diverse bunch too, one physics, one horror fiction and another environmental non-fiction featuring the kind of intersection between food, science and policy that I find so interesting…
jdupuis | August 3, 2012This one is a little less on the strictly amusing side and a little more on the useful and thoughtful side for a Friday Fun post, but sometimes it's worth mixing things up a bit.
I've mostly not read these books myself but I am in the middle of the Christensen/Eyring book right now. And they all look very useful and interesting, if only as a springboard for disagreement and debate. A little bit of end-of-summer reading is always a good thing!
Without further ado, from OnlineUniversities.com, the 10 Best Books on the Future of Higher Ed.
Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money…
jdupuis | October 31, 2011Another list of books for your reading and collection development pleasure.
Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities by Richard A. DeMillo
When academics get together to talk about the future, they talk mainly to each other, but the American system of higher education has many more stakeholders than that. Over the course of months, the intended audience for what was now clearly becoming a book manuscript shifted noticeably from my academic colleagues to a more general readership--parents, students, taxpayers, elected officials, employers, decision makers at all levels…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…
jdupuis | August 18, 2011The New York Review of Books has a great group review of some recentish books on everyone's favourite Internet behemoth: Google.
And they all look pretty interesting! (And I may have featured a couple of these before.)
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (ISBN-13: 978-1416596585)
In barely a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca-Cola or GE; it has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy. How did that happen? It happened more or less in plain sight. Google has many secrets but…
jdupuis | May 30, 2011A very, very long time since I've done one of these...
For your reading and collection development pleasure:
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-…
jdupuis | March 1, 2011The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (TILoHL) by Rebecca Skloot was far and away the top science book of the year in my Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year post from last month. In that post I took all the Best Science Books 2010 posts and tallied up the books with the most mentions. TILoHL was mentioned in 41 out of the 60 lists I found. The next highest was 17 mentions for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
So, a pretty decisive victory. TILoHL was by far the best reviewed science book of the year.
What was interesting to me was…
jdupuis | January 3, 2011I've been doing this for a few years now, last year, 2008 and 2007 and it seems like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year. I really enjoy seeing other people's reading lists (like here, here and here) and enjoy adding my own to the mix.
So, below you'll find a list of all the books I started in 2010. In other words, it'll include a few books I'm still reading as well as a few that I've abandoned. I've been recording every book I've read since 1983 and on my other (mostly lapsed) blog I've been occasionally transcribing the list on a year by year basis. I've…
jdupuis | December 23, 2010Although it is perilously close to way too late, but you do have time to rush down to an actual, honest-to-goodness bookstore (or perhaps get an ebook from an estore) and maybe pick up one of these titanic suggestions from Ethan Gilsdorf on Tor.com. All great stuff for the geek in your life.
Hint, hint.
Anyways, here's what Gilsdorg suggests with his descriptions at the original post:
My Best Friend is a Wookiee: One Boy's Journey to Find His Place in the Galaxy by Tony Pacitti
Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters
We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots…
jdupuis | December 20, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov
Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix by Claire L Parkinson
How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey
Lake Views: This World and the Universe by Steven Weinberg
The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by…
jdupuis | November 4, 2010More for your reading and collection development pleasure.
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (ISBN-13: 978-0307269935)
As Wu's sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century--radio, telephone, television, and film--was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive…
jdupuis | November 3, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure. It's been so long since I last did one of these listings, I actually have another one coming up in a day or so.
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. (ISBN-13: 978-0262014472)
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community--a community of Wikipedians who are expected to "assume good faith" when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture.
Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared,…
jdupuis | October 25, 2010You know, there just aren't enough useless holiday excuses to give books to people.
Giving books as presents has to be one of my all-time favourite things to do in life -- especially the opportunity to give books to my family!
So, it seems that Neil Gaiman has a really, really good idea.
I propose that, on Hallowe'en or during the week of Hallowe'en, we give each other scary books. Give children scary books they'll like and can handle. Give adults scary books they'll enjoy.
I propose that stories by authors like John Bellairs and Stephen King and Arthur Machen and Ramsey Campbell and M R…
jdupuis | August 10, 2010Now that's an attention-getter!
It comes from Ted Chiang's Big Idea post on John Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's a promotional piece for Chiang's latest book, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which is about artificial intelligence.
For those of you that haven't heard of him, Chiang is one of the real breakout science fiction writers of the last two decades or so; his stories have consistently won both awards and the highest praise from reviewers and critics. This is his longest work to date. (His first collection is Stories of Your Life and Others, which has many of his most famous…
jdupuis | May 31, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure:
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller
"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers--including 137, which describes the…
jdupuis | May 5, 2010It's been quite a long while since I've done one of these. Here are some recently noticed books that look interesting from either a collection development or a professional development point of view.
Fans, Friends And Followers: Building An Audience And A Creative Career In The Digital Age by Scott Kirsner
An essential guide for filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, and other creative types. "Fans, Friends & Followers" explores the strategies for cultivating an online fan base that can support your creative career, enabling you to do the work you want to do and make a living at it.…
jdupuis | June 13, 2009It's been quite a long time since I did one of these posts, but as the summer reading season approaches I thought I'd highlight a few interesting items that are coming out soon.
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Amazon.ca)
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far…