Books
pharyngula | May 18, 2009I've been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It's a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market.
It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that's part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of…
laelaps | May 18, 2009Over at the Inverse Square blog author Tom Levenson has just started a multi-part blog series on the evolution of his forthcoming title Newton and the Counterfeiter. It is an extension of a session on writing a pop-sci book he lead with Dave Munger at ScienceOnline'09 last January, and the posts provide an excellent opportunity to see how a book goes from an idea to a volume sitting on the "New Arrivals" display at B&N. So far he has posted parts 0.0 and 1.0.
I can't match Tom's experience as an author, but I will be contributing my own perspective on writing a pop-sci book based upon…
sciencewoman | May 17, 2009One my friends lives outside of Anchorage, Alaska and recently had a black bear pay a visit to her backyard. Now her preschoolers are obsessed with bears.
Minnow too has a bit of a bear obsession at the moment, though she hasn't seen any bears in their natural habitat. At school, she's been reading "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" and at home one of her favorite books is the "Berenstain Bear's Big Honey Hunt." Saturday morning, Minnow announced that we were going on a bear hunt, or maybe that we were going to look for bees that would, presumably, lead us to bears. We made it all the way to the…
grrlscientist | May 17, 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 | May 15, 2009
I receive a fair number of books to review each week, 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.
Fresh: A Perishable History by Susanne Freidberg (Belknap Press; 2009). Review copy.
Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West by Rachel Dickinson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009). Review copy.
Birdsong by the Seasons: A Year of Listening to Birds by Donald Kroodsma (…
gregladen | May 15, 2009Jason Rosenhouse, of the Evolution Blog, has written a book and it is now seemingly available for pre-order. It is The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brain Teaser. The book was recently reviewed very favorably, and you can learn more about that here.
I've not gotten a review copy, so I can't personally tell you anything about this book, but I'm aware of Jason's command of this particular topic, so I'm sure it's fantastic. It has even been suggested that it could be used as a supplementary course text, so stats and probability instructors, take note!…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2009I just started investigating publishing options for my book manuscript and got my first rejection letter. That is, I apparently hadn't described the book very well, and the publisher rejected a manuscript I'm not in fact writing.
Said I, "The book's about elite settlements in late-1st Millennium Scandinavia and its working title is 'Mead-Halls of the Eastern Geats'".
Said they, "No thanks, we mainly publish prehistoric archaeology, not Medieval history, and not much about Scandinavia".
Replied I, "Err, actually, the 1st Millennium is Prehistory. In Scandinavia, that is. We don't have any…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2009From my Australian friend Ian I got a good book, Inga Clendinnen's 2003 Dancing with Strangers. It's an account of one of world history's most absurd situations.
Imagine a tropical continent inhabited exclusively by fisher-hunter-gatherers at a low population density for tens of thousands of years. They're isolated from the rest of humanity. There is not a single permanent building on the continent. Nobody ever wears clothes. Nobody has ever heard of agriculture or stock breeding. Now watch a fleet of colonisation ships from an early industrial society arrive at the continent's south-east…
laelaps | May 13, 2009A little while back I posted a little teaser on Twitter (or a "tweezer", as BrianR aptly called it) that I had some exciting news about my book. Now I can finally share it. I am proud to announce that I will be working with literary agent Peter Tallack of The Science Factory on my book project. I still have a lot of work to do, but this is a major step towards producing an absolutely smashing book about evolution and paleontology for you all to enjoy!
laelaps | May 12, 2009
At this moment there are more anti-creationism books available than I care to count. While they can be exciting for neophytes to dig into many repackage the same information and arguments over and over again, and they can quickly grow boring for those who have been following the creationism controversy closely. That is why I was excited to see that the new book For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design was going to allow geologists and paleontologists to respond to creationist claims.
The primary difficulty with the volume, however, is that intelligent design does not have much…
pharyngula | May 11, 2009Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit…
gregladen | May 11, 2009Galapagos Diary: A Complete Guide to the Archipelgo's Birdlife
... Continuing in our look at bird books to consider, I wanted to bring in the Galapagos Diary. I cannot tell you which is the best book for birding in the Galapagos, because, sadly, I've never done that myself. But my daughter, Julia, has, and she recommends this title. She brought a copy home from the Galapagos, and I am personally quite impressed by it. If you are planning a trip to the Galapagos, have a look at it.
grrlscientist | May 10, 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 | May 9, 2009Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's BoyfriendWhen I first received this book to review, I thought "Oh, great, another one of these pop evolutionary psychology books by some academic with a large mortgage payment" (or words to that effect). But then I read it and my attitude got better.
The theme of this book is as the title says, evil ... at several scales, and understanding evil from a neuro-psychological perspective. Here, the genes themselves are actually relatively unimportant except as part of the necessary steps to build a human…
gregladen | May 7, 2009As I write this, I am preparing for a trip up north. As we drive north we will follow the ecotone between the prairies and the deciduous woodlands, then track the ecotone between the prairies and the coniferous woodlands. Then we will make a turn and drive into the coniferous zone, cross the Mississippi, and then with a couple of small but palpable jumps in elevation and another hour and a half drive north, enter the lake region. Here, the primary vegetation cover certain times of the year is the nearly invisible diatom and algae layer on the top of the clear lakes, the bog plants, and the…
pharyngula | May 5, 2009The other day, I read this fawning review by Andrew O'Hehir of Terry Eagleton's new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, and was a little surprised. I've read a smattering of Eagleton before, and the words "brisk, funny and challenging" or "witty" never came to mind, and the review actually gave no evidence that these adjectives were applicable in this case. I felt like ripping into O'Hehir, but was held up by one awkward lack: I hadn't read Eagleton's book. Who knows? Maybe he had found some grain of sense and some literary imperative to write cleanly and…
pharyngula | May 5, 2009And it's gorgeous. Holbo has found a set of scans from a 1972 biology textbook (and an associated blog) that will blow your mind, baby. Here are some eukaryotic cells.
I think this is a very trippy metaphor for the synapse.
I like it. It's got style. I'm going to have to cruise some used bookstores to see if I can find a copy of Biology Today. If nothing else, I can imagine using some of those illustrations for talks…I'm also going to have to get a polyester suit with very wide lapels and a paisley print shirt, let my hair grow out, and shave the beard, but keep the mustache. Oh, I remember…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the local Walpurgis Night bonfire, met loads of neighbours old and new.
Played Abalone, Tigris & Euphrates and Qwirkle with Kai and other friends.
Went to a lovely dinner at the home of my friends Mattias & Lina.
Took a morning bike ride and walk in the woods to log a geocache that had appeared…
grrlscientist | May 3, 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 | April 30, 2009Head First Physics: A learner's companion to mechanics and practical physics I have been watching these Heads Up guides for some time now, mainly in the context of computer software and development. I have not tried any of these guides in IT because, so far, I've felt that while they may be excellent learning resources, they were not ideal reference books, and that is usually what I am looking for. I may be a bit unusual in this regard, but I'm pretty happy reading a reference book from beginning to end, then using later ... as a reference book. In fact, I'd say my ideal combination of…