Books
laelaps | June 24, 2009
Since the early 20th century, at least, young earth creationists have attempted to blame Charles Darwin for genocide, world wars, and whatever political movements seemed most threatening at one time or another (i.e. communism). What Darwin is faulted with changes with the times, but most recently young earth creationists have focused on hot topics from Darwin's own era: racism and slavery. From the Answers in Genesis tract Darwin's Plantation to the upcoming (and unethically produced) documentary The Voyage That Shook the World, creationists claim that Darwin's evolutionary vision undermined…
pharyngula | June 23, 2009What a deal. For only 99¢, you can get an abridged version of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; you can tell it's been abridged because the title has been reduced to Origin of Species. It's also special because it contains a 50 page introduction by Ray Comfort, which tells you everything that the creationists are sure is wrong about the rest of the book. It's like a book with multiple personality disorder — two parts that absolutely hate each other, an intro that is the inane product of one…
grrlscientist | June 21, 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…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2009tags: books, fiction, novels, public libraries
I am back at home, ill, but I managed to mooch a neighbor's uncharacteristically open wireless connection so I have been talking with one of my readers about one of our favorite topics: books. I love reading fiction when I am sick, and currently, I am trying to resist my urge to begin reading the entire Harry Potter series again (for the 14th or 15th time now. Reading HP is a 4-6 week investment that tends to keep me from doing what I should be doing: writing book reviews). During this conversation, I lamented the fact that I've not read many…
laelaps | June 16, 2009
In case you missed the last announcement, author Tom Levenson has been running a multi-part series on the genesis of his latest book, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Available now. Pick up a copy!). One of the most recent entries is about, to borrow from Tom's title, "writing the damn thing", to which Chad Orzel has replied. Given that I still have a helluva lot of writing to do I am in a different place than both Tom and Chad, but I think my experiences might be of interest to other neophytes who are thinking of making the blog-to-book transition.
One of the greatest obstacles I had to…
pharyngula | June 15, 2009When I was growing up, I had no introduction to evolutionary theory. Sure, I assumed it was true, and I went through the usual long phase of dinosaur fandom, but I was never taught anything at all about evolution throughout my grade school education, and what little I did know was largely stamp-collecting. That all changed, though, when I went off to college.
I can't credit the schools I went to, unfortunately: most of my undergraduate education (with a few wonderful exceptions) was the usual mega-survey course, where the instructor stuck a funnel in our heads and poured in facts for a term…
grrlscientist | June 15, 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.
Froth!: The Science of Beer by Mark Denny (Johns Hopkins University Press; 2009). Review Copy.
Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh (NYC: Collins; 2008). Review Copy.
Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Henry Huxley (Princeton University Press; 2009). Review Copy.…
grrlscientist | June 14, 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…
laelaps | June 14, 2009
The skull of the Taung child (Australopithecus africanus); the fragmentary remains of Orrorin; the scattered bones of Homo erectus from Dragon Bone Hill; a skullcap of a young Paranthropus from Swartkrans, South Africa. What do all these hominin fossils have in common? They all bear the tell-tale marks of predators, from birds of prey to gigantic hyenas, and run distinctly against the notion that humans have always dominated the landscape. There have always been toothy shadows that stalked the night during our history, and the significance of this fact is the focus of Donna Hart and Robert…
gregladen | June 12, 2009With the recent news about this book being made into a movie, I'm reposting my review of it.
The Time Traveler's Wife This is an easy decision, and not only because I read about five pieces of fiction this year and most of them were pulp. Well, OK, that is a factor. But this book is good enough for me to blog about it and you know I only blog about important things that you need to know about.
The book is The Time Traveler's Wife and it is by Audrey Niffenegger. Have you heard of it?
Apparently they are making this into a movie, which I suppose is a good thing. But it is the detail…
laelaps | June 12, 2009
There is no time like the summer to make a dent in my reading list. I am by no means a speed reader, but during this time of the year I can usually get through the average trade book in about 2-3 days. This year is a little different, though. I am digging deep in my research for my book about transitional fossils (now tentatively called Written in Stone), so this is not the time to get too distracted by titles unrelated to my work.
Still, it is good to take a step back and read works that I enjoy every now and then, no matter how unrelated to my work they might be. I'm working up a list of…
laelaps | June 11, 2009The Telegraph has just released the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation of the book Annie's Box, which focuses on Charles Darwin's personal struggle with science and religion. It is called Creation;
What do you think?
[Hat-tip to Michael Barton for sending this along.]
sciencewoman | June 10, 2009BrianR at Clastic Detritus introduced me to the perfect meme to wrap a tedious summer afternoon of work...What books are on my summer reading list? First let me say that *love* summer and breaks because I've always associated those times with a chance to do some of the reading that I've never managed to keep up with during the semester. And I don't just mean the teetering pile of journal articles on my file cabinet, but also the teetering pile of books near my bed. I hate paying good money for a book and then letting it sit around for years unread. Plus, with my blogger schtick I feel like…
laelaps | June 8, 2009
In the middle of August 2008 Matt Whitton, Rick Dyer, and "professional Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi claimed to have found what so many had sought after: the body of a real Bigfoot. FOX News picked up the story, DNA tests were performed, and a grand unveiling was planned, but, as ever, it all was a hoax. There was still no definitive proof that Sasquatch, Bigfoot, the Skunk Ape, Skookum, or a long lost "missing link" by any other name ever existed.
Last summer's brief frenzy over Bigfoot was hardly unique. As author Joshua Blu Buhs illustrates in his new book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of…
grrlscientist | June 7, 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…
pharyngula | June 1, 2009I admit, I was initially put off by the mere title of Nick Lane's new book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I'm one of those many biologists who is adamant about the absence of direction in evolutionary history, and ascending just sounds too much like life climbing the rungs of the ladder of life, so I picked it up in a somewhat prejudicial mood.
Have no fear, though, I was won over. Right at the beginning, he admits that it is a subjective list; his criteria for including the ten chosen evolutionary innovations are that it had to revolutionize…
grrlscientist | May 31, 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…
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2009Magnus Ljunggren has a lovely little piece about two Russian writers in today's Svenska Dagbladet.
1. In fiction, a man who doesn't exist. Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894-1943), a Latvian Jew, wrote the satirical novella Lieutenant Kijé (1927) about a non-existent military officer who gets entered into the rolls through a misunderstanding and rises through the ranks to general.
2. In reality, a body of fiction ascribed to a man who writes nothing. Anatolii Surov (d. 1987) published several successful plays and received the Stalin award twice, all on the strength of work that he stole from…
laelaps | May 25, 2009
During the first Congressional hearing on the IPCC report on human-induced climate change in 2007 Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher floated a rather unusual idea. Citing warmer global climates of the distant past, like that which dominated the Eocene about 56 to 34 million years ago, Rohrbacher implied that the current warming trend was just the symptom of a natural phenomenon. If past warming events were triggered by unknown causes, Rohrabacher suggested "dinosaur farts" as the cause of the Eocene hothouse, then perhaps present rises in temperatures had nothing at all to do with…
grrlscientist | May 24, 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…