Books
gregladen | May 26, 2011When wildebeest, such as those famous for crossing the Mara River in Tanzania during their annual migration, run into a crocodile or some other danger it is often the first time they've seen that particular thing. This is because most wildebeest don't live very long so many are on their very first migration. One wonders what would happen if you killed all of the wildebeest migrating in a particular year and set new ones out on the landscape to take their place. Would the migration continue?
Probably not, initially. Something like this did in fact happen on the Botswana-South Africa-…
gregladen | May 25, 2011I'm going to have more to say about this topic and this book at a later time, but I wanted to get a notice of it out for Migration Week. Bird Migration and Global Change by George W. Cox addresses the issue of impact on bird populations under conditions of global warming.
This is an authoritative and scholarly book that is totally accessible to the interested bird-oriented or climate/conservation-oriented audience. After several very important context and theory chapters, the author divides the world's migratory birds into major categories (such as "Northern Hemisphere Land Birds: Short…
gregladen | May 24, 2011As part of Migration Week (inspired by this post), I'm covering migration related books (mainly having to do with birds). How Birds Migrate by Paul Kerlinger (with Illustrations by Pat Archer), Second Edition, is an affordable, up to date (2009 publication) comprehensive and intelligently written book. It is written for the general public but is not dumbed down.
The thing about bird migration is that there are many facets to the behavior. There are different kinds of birds, with respect to the nature of their flight, body size, etc (think albatross vs. hummingbird). There are many kinds…
gregladen | May 23, 2011Here is a short list of what you should read this summer in science and science related topics. Some are old, some are new. There is a lot missing from this list, I'm sure, but the summer is short here in Minnesota and we'll be busy with the corn, so there is not much time.
The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living by Eaton, Konner and Shostack. An oldie but a goodie. Read it as a pragmatic science book rather than a self help guide.
The Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding (Kaufman Field Guides) ... a bird book but not an ID guide. More…
sastyk | May 23, 2011Summer is just about here, and you need some summer reading. Light. Fuzzy. Delightful. Amusing. Perfect for the deck chair or the sand. Nevermind the fact that you are a low-energy, transitioning, cheap, homseteading type, and your deck chair is probably planted on your porch, and the sand is the local playground sandpit - hey, it is summer, you've got to kick back with a book. But what book? The contemporary equivalent of _The Devil Wears Prada_ isn't exactly the stuff of anti-consumerist legend. He may not be that into you, but since really you are both into your garden, who gives…
gregladen | May 22, 2011These are the kinds of books you get if you are either a scientists studying bird migration and related issues, or a very serious bird geek. The first two can be obtained at very low prices used, but the third will set you back at least 50 bucks US$ if you want a used copy. Note the spread of publication dates. It is not the case that the oldest book is out of date in all respects: Quite the contrary. Alerstam reviews theory and ideas that have not been revisited or revised to any great degree. Also, it is interesting to see how changes in the field develop over a decade or so. In any…
gregladen | May 21, 2011On the Wing: American Birds in Migration is a children's book suitable for up to Middle School or thereabouts. Remarkably, this ten year old volume is actually fairly accurate and comprehensible, covering most of the major aspects of bird migration, discussion ecological patterns, mechanisms, and methods used to study the phenomenon.
It is written and illustrated by Carol Lerner, who has prodcued well over a dozen anture related books of similar (high) quality including Butterflies in the Garden and Backyard Birds of Summer. Since these books are all at least ten years old you can find…
gregladen | May 20, 2011On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, edited by Sue Boinski and Paul Garber is a compendium of academic research on ... well, on how and why animals travel in groups. Notice of this book is a fitting start to a series of reviews of migration-related books that is part of Migration Week on GLB. (For an overview of the Bigness and Vastness of bird migration in particular, see A Question of Migration.)
Group movement is only rarely migration, though the two phenomena are overlapping subsets. An example of group movement that demands some explanation is that found in chimpanzees…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2011One of the stranger concepts in Tolkien's writings is that of "High Elves". Why are these elves high? It has nothing to do with drugs, though in the Tolkien Society we used to joke about them smoking lembas. And it has nothing to do with stature, though nobility and body height go together in Tolkien, nor with elevation above sea level. I've got an idea.
According to Robert Foster's 1978 book Complete Guide to Middle-earth, Tolkien uses the term as a synonym for the Eldar. These were a subset of the original Elven population who accepted a summons to join the gods in their brightly lit…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2011In the car yesterday I listened to two excellent narrations of Lovecraft short stories. And I marvelled upon re-encountering the opening paragraph of "The Picture in the House" from 1919.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on…
gregladen | May 10, 2011A lot of paleolithic diet and exercise books, many how to be a hunter-gatherer guides for the suburbanites, and numerous biologically-based-sounding self-help volumes based mainly on woo have been produced since The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living was published in 1989. To my knowledge, none of the subsequent books has been as useful or as well done, even if TPP requires some updating.
I'm not recommending the book as a self help guide, but rather, as a way of linking the scientific evidence for human diet and activity, based mainly on…
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
drorzel | May 9, 2011While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…
sa smith | May 2, 2011Imagine a book I would write. On viruses (what else?).
Now, instead of it sounding like it was written by a chimpanzee who learned English from watching 'Waynes World' and 'Waynes World 2' on a loop + 4chan, imagine it was written by an articulate, science-literate human.
That is 'A Planet of Viruses', Carl Zimmers latest book. For a 'review', the only thing I need to say to this crowd is that the writing is just as fantastic as everything Carl writes, plus its on a topic that I love (and you all are probably interested in, if you read ERV).
There is another bonus for the Internet-Induced-…
pharyngula | April 23, 2011I am looking forward to reading Anthony Grayling's new book, The Good Book, with considerable anticipation — I've ordered a copy (it's not as if it would be easily available in Morris!) which hasn't arrived yet, but what has arrived are teasers from Grayling himself. Here's a Q&A about the book that might have you itching for a copy as much as I am.
WHEN AND WHY DID YOU BECOME AN ATHEIST?
I was brought up in a non-religious family, and when I first encountered religion it simply seemed incredible, no more believable that the fairy stories and Greek myths that I had read and enjoyed as a…
gregladen | April 20, 2011Description and identification of birds, or anything else, can be done in a rote manner with straightforward reference to details. If information about enough details is available, the identification will be accurate. But as humans we hardly ever do that sort of thing. If you ask someone to describe a car they saw recently, they will not refer to the angle of the back end or the overall dimensions or the specific layout of the headlights and tail lights. A person who does not know the make and model may say something like "It's a hatch back" or "It's an SUV" and in so doing provide…
gregladen | April 15, 2011Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams is a new book on the science of squid.
I wondered at first why a popular science book would be named after a legendary creature (the Kraken) but when I read the book and also read up on The Kraken it became clear that the legend is the squid only barely disguised as myth.
Well, not all Kraken are real ....
.... but the ones seen by ancient Europeans (after all, the word "Kraken" is probably based on the word for octopus) may well have been giant squid washed up on shore, which for a long time was…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2011I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and demons and tricksters, and it failed to interest me much. Usually I don't review stuff I don't like here, since I prefer to offer the Dear Reader recommendations. But this book suffers from an interesting weakness that I can't remember coming across before, and I thought I might say something about…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2011
Birger Johansson is an awesome guy. We've never met, but he's one of Aard's most prolific and witty commenters. And then, out of the blue, he suddenly tells me that he's got some free shipping to spare on Amazon and sends me a hoard of books, a DVD and a graphic novel! THANK YOU BIRGER! I hereby grant you an Earldom and the right to be called Birger Jarl!
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Douglas Adams 1987.
The Skinner. A Spatterjay Novel. Neal Asher 2002.
The Devil You Know. A Felix Castor Novel. Mike Carey 2006.
Halting State. Charles Stross 2007.
The Grimrose Path. A Trickster…
pharyngula | March 30, 2011Sikivu Hutchinson has a new book out, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, which I have just ordered for myself. You fortunate people in LA, though, could also go hear the words straight from her mouth: she'll be be speaking at Revolution Books on 3 April. Apparently they've moved since the last time I was there: they're now located at 5726 Hollywood Blvd. You should go, if you can, or at least pick up a copy of her book — she's one of the strong sharp voices of modern atheism.