Books
ddobbs | December 27, 2007
The best things I read this year, in no particular order:
"Falling Man: A Novel" (Don DeLillo)
"Tree of Smoke: A Novel" (Denis Johnson) This is almost cheating, as I'm still in the midst of reading it. But it'd have to dive a long way in the last few pages to not stay on the list. I'll be brave and leave it in. [Update: I fond this disappointing in the end; the last quarter did not sustain the apparent brilliance of the first half.
"The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)" (T. H. White). Before he wrote the incomparable <em>The Once and Future King</em>, T.H. White…
sporte | December 26, 2007Genetics textbooks abound with stories of European royalty and the hazards of having children after you've married one of your cousins. It struck me as an interesting parallel that the lion is such a popular symbol in so many royal coats of arms. Like the royal families of Europe, certain lion populations have also suffered from a few too many copies of certain recessive genes.
I first read about the Florida panthers a few years ago while researching material for a class that I teach on using bioinformatics. It wasn't my first encounter with big cats and their DNA. Years before, while…
laelaps | December 21, 2007As was evidenced by the long list of books that I've read this year, I've taken in a lot of material, and picking the 10 best books is a bit of a challenge. What makes a good technical book doesn't make a good popular science book, but overall there were a few that stood out from the rest to become volumes that I'm sure I'll be revisiting over and over again in the future (unlike the works in the "Bottom 10" list from a few days ago). As hard as it might be to rank some of these, here are my favorite 10 books that I read in 2007;
10) The First Fossil Hunters - Adrienne Mayor
The traditional…
clock | December 20, 2007It is midnight, and the deadline for submission of blog posts for the 2nd Science Blogging Anthology is over. We have recieved 468 entries (after deleting spam - the total was 501) and a jury of 30+ judges has already started reading and grading the entries. We truly believe that we will have the book ready and printed by the time the 2nd Science Blogging Conference starts, on January 18th-19th, so both the participants and you at home will be able to order your copy at that time.
A little later, I will post the links to all of the 468 entries so everyone can see them (and I will not hide…
cmooney | December 19, 2007Move over, all you monkey trials from primordial American history (and from, like, 2005). Here comes a high stakes whale trial that has been lost to our memories, but that we really should learn about and remember.
I'm talking about the 1818 court case Maurice v. Judd, chronicled in Princeton historian (and former Chris Mooney professor) D. Graham Burnett's new book Trying Leviathan. Back in those days, Linneaus's taxonomic system already classified the whale as a mammal, but folk wisdom (rooted, of course, in the Bible) said otherwise. Or as Ishmael puts it in Melville's Moby Dick: "Be it…
clock | December 19, 2007I need to pick, buy and send a book on U.S. history to an old friend in Belgrade. It should be an objective, academic book, 600+ pages, not more than $50 used at Amazon. Is there such a thing and if so, what shall I get?
cmooney | December 18, 2007We've already heard from Publisher's Weekly and Science Friday...but now the blogs are weighing in.
I'm psyched that the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger, and MSNBC's Alan Boyle are all naming Storm World as a top science read from 2007--and recommending it as an Xmas gift.
Thanks, guys!
laelaps | December 18, 2007
Nearly everyone has a book out about environmental crises these days, from scientist E.O. Wilson (The Creation) to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (A Contract With the Earth), but in many cases the conciliatory volumes aren't very good. Everyone has something to say about pollution and global warming, but the amount of people who seem to actually know anything about ecology seem to be in the minority when considering recent popular treatments, but Michael Novacek's Terra is a refreshing break from books that try to cash in on current environmental concerns without having much…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: Open Lab 2007, blog books
You might remember that one of my essays from 2006 was included in the book, Open Lab 2006. I was lucky because the editor of the book submitted my essay for me, and the judges seemed to like it enough to include it in the final book. Yea, me. Well, this year, I am on my own, except for your suggestions and support, so I would appreciate it if you would submit an essay I've written to this year's edition of Open Lab. They have 450 submissions so far, and out of those, they will select only 50 -- one per blog -- to be in the final book. GAH! That means that my…
laelaps | December 17, 2007
When the topic of persecution of scientists by religious authorities comes up, Galileo is typically mentioned most often, Giordano Bruno every once in a while, and Hypatia of Alexandria not at all. A longer list of figures who entered "warfare... with theology in Christendom" could be conjured up as well, even Linnaeus raising the hackles of the Vatican for grouping Homo sapiens in with primates. A more modern, though no less tragic, story involves the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the main focus of Amir Aczel's new book The Jesuit and the Skull.
As my wife…
laelaps | December 17, 2007As suggested by Blake Stacey, here is a list of the 10 most horrible books I've read this past year. Some are widely recognized as being atrocious, but others were either disappointing or served up a side of "woo" without question, which definitely puts the book on shaky ground. So, without further introduction, here's the "bottom ten";
# 10) The Last Dinosaur Book - W.J.T. Mitchell
It was hard putting this one on the list, but I had to pick 10 and so it must be done. Mitchell's book isn't absolutely horrid (it's well-illustrated, which is a plus), but he never really quite "gets it" when it…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007Larry Moran has had a couple of articles up lately on Dr Sharon Moalem, a fellow who has a book out called Survival of the Sickest, and who also has a blog. Larry noticed a couple of things: he's writing utter tripe about junk DNA, he's editing and deleting comments about his science from his blog, and he's been misleading about his credentials — although, to be fair, Moalem does plainly and accurately list his background on the endflaps of the book (some of this has come from a student blog that has been dissecting his dubious claims).
And then I noticed…I actually have Moalem's book! I get…
gregladen | December 15, 2007
Fins into Limbs: Evolution, Development, and Transformation by Brian K. Hall, Ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. 459 pp.
Reptile and mammal limbs and bird wings are all modifications of the original tetrapod limb that, in turn, arose from the fins of earlier fish. That original transition was complex with some parts of the original fin being incorporated in the new limb, others not. Subsequent modification of the tetrapod limb has also, obviously, been diverse, including the functional reversal that involved the forelimbs of the forms ancestral to whales, seals, etc. turning…
laelaps | December 15, 2007I've read more books than I think I can remember during 2007; the new bookshelves I obtained this past fall are now buckling underneath the weight of the accumulated mass and the volumes that keep are seemingly without a home. Some books I've been meaning to get to for some time and haven't read, others I ripped through with great interest, and others were so utterly terrible that I'm tempted to remove them from my library altogether. In any case, here's a listing of what I can remember reading this year, from the very best to the absolute worst;
[Note: These aren't ranked in any way, it's…
gregladen | December 14, 2007REPOST from gregladen.com
"Everyone needs to understand the basic facts of evolution as well as the essentials of the scientific method... When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well."
-Ardea Skybreak, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"
Ardea Skybreak's new book, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing what's real and why it matters…
grrlscientist | December 14, 2007Everyone is talking about The Golden Compass -- a movie that I had no idea was being made or released or even premiered this past weekend -- a movie that is based on a series of books that I've never read and have only vaguely heard about. But my readers have fixed that literary oversight for me because you have sent the entire "His Dark Materials" trilogy to me, and I plan to start reading it as soon as I get a couple book reviews finished in the next few days. (Oh, I also plan to see the movie as soon as I've finished reading the first book). But a quick look around the internet has yielded…
grrlscientist | December 14, 2007tags: Harry Potter, Tales of Beedle the Bard, books, JK Rowling, auction, Sotheby's, Amazon.com
[larger view]
A Mystery Buyer purchased the only publically-available copy of JK Rowling's latest Harry Potter book, Tales of Beedle the Bard for £1,950,000 (US$3.98 million)! This is far more than the £50,000 ( $100,000) sale price that had been estimated by Sotheby's. The leather-bound and hand-written book was bought by a representative from London fine art dealers, Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. The proceeds generated by the sale of this book will benefit Rowling's new charity, The Children's…
kcontreary | December 12, 2007...but how you give matters quite a lot, it would seem. Just in time for the season of giving (and, of course, drinking oneself silly on eggnog), I'd like to share my holiday reading list, which is coincidentally heavy on that subject (giving, not eggnog). Fortunately for me, it's a loooong plane ride back and forth across the Atlantic.
1. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
Collier is an Oxford professor stepping into the Sachs-Easterly fray with this recent analysis of why it's been so hard to achieve anything close to…
laelaps | December 11, 2007The power of the evolution idea is that it directly affects every creature that has ever lived on this planet and ever will, for that matter. It does not apply only to mussels and marmosets, dinosaurs and date palms, or penguins and porgies; Homo sapiens is as much a product of evolution as the most basic of bacteria or most monstrous of whales. Not everyone readily accepts this basic fact, however, and even before Charles Darwin's landmark work On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection appeared in 1859 many people were threatened by the idea that life (and most of all human life) could…
laelaps | December 10, 2007I'm sure that many of you, like me, have added a number of books to your shelf in 2007 (or revisited ones that have already found a place there). My own selections have almost exclusively been in the area of natural history, both old and new, but before I write up a list of my favorite selections that I read this year, what are your favorites? The books could be new or old, but out of what you've read this year, what books rank among your favorites? (Replies can be left in the comments.)