Books
sciencewoman | November 6, 2009Taking a break from the science-y books and from the donor requests, this week Minnow and I want to share one of our new favorite books. This is the first book that we've checked out of the library that Minnow is still talking about more than a month after we returned it. In fact, she and I love this book so much that our Amazon wish list is delivering a Christmas present early and our very own copy is on its way to us right now.
Without further ado, we present Sally and the Purple Socks by Lisze Bechtold:
If you watched through to the end of the video, you saw that at the end of the book, I…
terrasig | November 5, 2009
Some readers may be aware that Rebecca Skloot is about to release her much-anticipated book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a story that is about much more than the black Southern woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the most famous human cancer cell line. (Crown, 2 Feb 2010, preorder here).
HeLa cells, as they are known, have played a role in the development of vaccines for polio and cervical cancer, the part of last year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen, and the PhD thesis 20 years ago of a certain natural products pharmacology blogger.
Having been…
laelaps | November 2, 2009
It has been a little more than a month since I announced my forthcoming book on paleontology and evolution, Written in Stone, and I have been hard at work on the manuscript. As it stands now the book is about 3/4 complete. Provided everything stays on schedule I should have a first draft of the whole book finished in about a month.
But finishing the manuscript, while of primary importance, is not my only concern. I am a virtually unknown science writer publishing my first book through a relatively small house. That means that I cannot sit idly by and expect lots of people to take interest in…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2009
I receive a fair number of books to review each month, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog.
I should point out that (sadly!), my book reviewing days may be (possibly) ending soon because I will be relocating to Frankfurt, Germany in two weeks. According to my experiences, postage to Germany is at least three times what it is to anywhere in the USA, and I get an impressive headache when I read electronic…
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
gregladen | October 31, 2009Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People is the book that the recently published article in Seed Magazine, which was in turn recently banned in an Illinois school is mainly about. Here is the Publishers Weekly overview of the book:
This brilliant and accessible work of biological criticism has the potential to revolutionize the way readers conceive of gender and sexuality in the natural world. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, argues that the diversity of gender and sexuality one…
laelaps | October 30, 2009
Whenever I sit down to write an entry for this blog I remind myself that I might not always speak the same language as the people I am trying to reach. A statement that might be technically accurate, such as "Mammuthus primigenius was a Late Pleistocene proboscidean with a Holarctic distribution", will likely cause nonspecialist readers to go cross-eyed and vow never to visit this blog again. Instead I have to remember what it was like when I began to teach myself about paleontology and evolution. What do those words mean? And how can I quickly and accurately define them without sacrificing…
sciencewoman | October 30, 2009This week Minnow and I are pleased to honor the first request from a DonorsChoose Challenge giver. (There's still time, donate enough to complete a project, email me the receipt and you too can request a story.) I'll admit to being pretty excited when this request came it, because it was perfectly seasonal...and we already had the book in our queue. Today's featured book is Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden, by George Levenson and exquisitely photographed by Shmuel Thaler.
But before we can get to the book, let's tell you about our trip to the pumpkin farm, where we learned some factoids…
skookumchick | October 26, 2009Folks, we are heading into the home stretch for Donors Choose, and you've helped 1084 kids get access to books they wouldn't have had without your help. That's great. But we can do better.
So.... 24 Sciencewomen blog readers have already donated $1517 to needy projects, and if you can help us make it a little farther, I will donate 10% of our final tally on top.
The criteria:
1) That we make it to $1750 before the challenge closes on Oct 31; OR (that's right, OR!)
2) That 10 more people make donations, no matter how small.
So either a generous person can give ~$230 on their own, or a…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
sciencewoman | October 23, 2009This week, Minnow and I present "Where do Insects Live?" in the Science Emergent Readers Series, from which we've previously featured a book on oceans.
(Yes, I am using bugs in the colloquial sense and not just to refer to some Hemiptera.There's plenty of time for Minnow to learn those details later. Who knows, she may go on to a career in entomology.)
It's autumn in Mystery State and bugs are getting harder to find, but Minnow and I did see various bugs under a flower pot, ants on our sidewalk, and a spider on her swing set. On a walk with SciGram, Minnow also found a moth warming up on a…
pharyngula | October 20, 2009In this case, it's unintentional, though. His mangled version of Darwin's Origin is currently the #1 result of searches for the Origin on Amazon. It's not there honestly, though: it's because Amazon's indexing system has a deep flaw. It doesn't seem to actually track which edition is the most popular…it just gladly gives Comfort's edition full credit with every other edition of the same book. This also means that the star rating for the Comfort edition is elevated; he's getting a leg up by appropriating all the reviews for all the other editions.
Here's a video to explain the situation.…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
sciencewoman | October 16, 2009This week on SciWo's Storytime, we're reading about Lakes and Ponds in a book by Cassie Mayer, from the same series as an earlier episode about oceans. While the text of this series of books is simple, I'm finding that they are a great way to engage Minnow in a conversation about the topic. Listen to how excited she gets about lakes and boats...
I wanted to take Minnow to a local lake for "No Child Left Inside Day" earlier this Earth Science Week, but instead we played with the neighborhood kids and dug in the dirt, which was pretty fun too. In any case, Minnow and I have a long tradition of…
laelaps | October 14, 2009
Things have been a little slow around here this week, but for good reason.
As you might expect I have been hard at work on my first book, Written in Stone. It is a challenge, but the process has its own little rewards, and I am putting the majority of my effort into making it the best book that I possibly can. This leaves time for little else.
In fact, my experience thus far as a freelance science writer differs substantially from the "Life of a Freelance Writer" as described by writer Caroline Hagood. Hagood's routine involves many cups of coffee, shuffling around the apartment in pajamas,…
ddobbs | October 14, 2009
via press.princeton.edu
I am extremely pleased to report that my friend Adrienne Mayor's riveting (if queasy-making) biography of Mitradates, "Poison King," is a finalist for the National Book Award. It's wonderful to see a skillfully executed and absorbing account of an obscure bit of history get this sort of well-deserved attention.
Congratulations, Adrienne. And to the rest of you, click above and read it now -- so when she wins, you can say you've already read it.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm not an intertubez triumphalist. But I read that the Harvard Book Store has bought itself a fancy gizmo to print any book in about four minutes:
Battered booksellers, especially independent ones, have so far withstood the punishing shock-and-awe offensive of Internet Age marauders like Amazon. Now, they have a secret weapon that they hope will continue to lure customers into their stores: would you believe it's a machine that can print up a fresh new paperback copy from a menu of 3.6 million books?
Harvard Book Store cleared out space behind its History,…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2009I'll be at the ImagiCon 2 speculative fiction convention in the burbs of Stockholm on Saturday the 17th. I'm chairing a panel discussion on time travel and paradoxes at 15:00, and I'm on a panel about interstellar law at 21:00. Any Aard readers there, please make yourselves known!
[More blog entries about imagicon2, sf, sciencefiction, Sweden; imagicon2, sf, sciencefiction, Skarpnäck.]
grrlscientist | October 11, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
sciencewoman | October 9, 2009A few nights ago, Minnow was in the mood to make videos of some of her favorite books - almost any books, except ones with an overt scientific bent. Right now, she wants books with a storyline, and I'm afraid that some of the sciencey books I'd lined up for this month are not story-driven enough for her tastes.
But among the books she picked out, was a Little Golden Book called "Little Cottontail" by Carl Membling and illustrated by Lilian Obligado. As we read the book, it occurred to me that while on the surface this was a heart-warming book about a little rabbit's coming of age, if we dug…