Friday Bookshelf
thusspakezuska | March 26, 2010March is women's history month, but don't let that circumscribe your fun. You can get together with a posse of your like-minded women friends and mock mansplainers anytime. Now, I know many of you have just recently learned that there even existed a name you could attach to this annoying behavior plaguing your existence. Believe me, I know how important naming experience is - that's why I have a whole category assigned to the topic. But your joy need not begin and end with just knowing that the craptastic manifestations you've been subjected to are (1) not your fault, (2) part of a larger…
thusspakezuska | January 13, 2010It's no secret bookstores have been in trouble for some time now. Small independent bookstores have been dropping like flies left and right. One of the oldest and best loved independent bookstores in Philadelphia, Robin's, recently closed, reinvented itself, and reopened in new space above its old location. It now sells mostly used books, along with some new books, and focuses on events as well. People are just dang glad to have some piece of the old store, opened in 1936 (in the middle of a depression!), in existence.
But hey, at least we have the big chain stores, right? Maybe not.…
thusspakezuska | July 25, 2008Earlier this year I reviewed Douglas Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, which inspired me to convert my garden to all or mostly native plants. I swore this year would be a much better gardening year than last. Visions of gardening glory danced in my head. Ah, early spring. Now we are baking in the heat of high summer and my garden sadly disappoints, even as passers-by comment on how much they enjoy looking at it. Yes, I think, if only you could see what it should look like! One-third of the natives I planted this spring, supposedly so well adapted to our climate and soil, have already…
thusspakezuska | May 2, 2008
You're a smart woman, and a fabulous scientist or engineer. You know you can be a great researcher or professional engineer. But have you given thought to doing more than your job - to becoming a leader? F. Mary Williams and Carolyn J. Emerson hope you will, and to encourage you, they've put together Becoming Leaders: A Practical Handbook for Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology. The book is a joint project of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers.
As the authors note in the introduction,…
thusspakezuska | March 28, 2008In the spring a suburban homeowner's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of lawn.
Originally uploaded by garethjmsaunders.
Fertilize! Break out the emergent herbicide! Fire up the sprinklers! Here comes the lawn mower and weed whacker! The relentless battle to maintain a time-, energy-, and resource-consuming monoculture that provides a perfect habitat for Japanese beetle grubs has begun!
Or maybe...just maybe...you could try something different this year. Douglas Tallamy, University of Delaware professor of entomology and wildlife ecology, hopes you will, and tells you why you…
thusspakezuska | October 19, 2007This week's Friday Bookshelf is actually a repeat of a blog post from the old blog site. It begins with a question:
Who was Annie Montague Alexander?
She lived from 1867 to 1950. Naturalist and philanthropist, she was the founder of two natural history museums at the University of California, Berkeley. Over her lifetime, she ranged widely throughout western North America and beyond, collecting specimens of plants and animals as well as fossils, many of which formed the basis of the museum collections. Early on she realized that increasing population growth in California was threatening…
thusspakezuska | October 5, 2007What does it take to be included in The Best Science Writing 2007?
Well, it helps if you write for the New Yorker or the New York Times. Eleven of 20 contributions selected for this volume originally appeared in the New Yorker or the New York Times or New York Times Magazine. It also helps if you are writing about something to do with human beings (twelve articles), and especially if you can contrive to write about the human brain (seven of those twelve articles). We humans do like to read about our brains.
You will have just a slight edge if you are a man (thirteen contributions…
thusspakezuska | September 7, 2007Loathe as I am to admit it, a copy of James Watson's historical novel The Double Helix does reside on one of my bookshelves. (Though I did purchase it in a used bookstore, so he garnered no profit from me.) As you may recall, The Double Helix, based loosely on Watson's experiences in England at the time the structure of DNA was discovered, showcased his imaginative powers, and introduced the world to a character known as "Rosy". Rosy was a disagreeable, plodding scientist - really barely more than a good technician - incapable of understanding the meaning of her data. Her fashion sense…
thusspakezuska | August 10, 2007Three for the price of one in this week's Friday Bookshelf! Which maybe makes up a little for the complete lack of a Friday Bookshelf last week.
First up is Lynn M. Osen's classic, originally published in 1974 and simply titled Women in Mathematics. Osen's slim volume has been beloved - and in print - for over thirty years for the biographical sketches of eight prominent women mathematicians: Hypatia, Maria Agnesi, Emilie de Breteuil, Caroline Herschel, Sophie Germain, Mary Fairfax Somerville, Sonya Kovalevsky, and Emmy Noether. The last chapter, titled "The Feminine Mathtique", is…
thusspakezuska | July 27, 2007What is this thing called feminist science studies?
Have you ever been asked that question, or perhaps asked it of yourself? You wanted a nice, short, pithy answer to hand over to your interlocutor. And yet, it's like being asked, what is this thing called science? The subject area is huge, the topics are diverse, the perspectives vary, contrasting and complementing one another.
Well. I don't have that nice, short, pithy answer for you today, but I do have a very nifty book to recommend: Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, edited by Mary Wyer, Mary…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2007This Friday Bookshelf veers slightly off my gender and scienc/engineering bookshelf for a detour over to the general women's studies bookshelf. I hope you'll see why I think it's appropriate to this blog.
The book I'm looking at this week is Engaging Feminism: Students Speak Up and Speak Out edited by Jean O'Barr and Mary Wyer. It's a collection of writings by students in Duke University's women's studies program, from their works in various courses and some outside course work.
Readings are grouped into the following categories: Reasoning With Emotion, Exploring Relationships,…
thusspakezuska | July 6, 2007Some time back I saw an announcement in the Chronicle of Higher Education for a new book about Maria Sibylla Merian. The book is Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd. If you've checked out the most recent Scientiae Carnival (and if not, why not?!?), you'll know that Peggy at Women in Science has included it in a list of recommended reading. It looks like a great book and I'd like to add it to my ever-expanding TBR bookshelf.
Maria Merian has held a special place in my heart for many, many years. I first encountered her nearly twenty years ago (…
thusspakezuska | June 29, 2007Mr. Zuska came home this evening, tired after a long week of work. We looked at each other and said "Pizza". Which turned out to be a good thing, because when the pizza delivery guy showed up and I went to pay him, I found a package on my front porch from the good folks at Seed (specifically, Jennifer - thanks, Jennifer!) A FREE BOOK! Yay! What's not to love about free books?
And this one turned out to be written by Natalie Angier, whom I adore. Angier, you will recall, is the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, which was the subject of my first Friday Bookshelf. The new book is…
thusspakezuska | June 22, 2007I'm going to cheat a little on this week's Friday Bookshelf. Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges is a book I have reviewed in the past for NWSA Journal (vol. 12, no. 3, 2000). So I'm going to quote my own review. My review was originally combined with a review of a film about women scientists called Asking Different Questions: Women and Science. To understand the end of this review, you need to know something from that film. One of the scientists, Ursula Franklin, offers a metaphor of women as earthworms working to prepare the soil for a better way of doing science. She says…
thusspakezuska | June 15, 2007It's Friday and though I have no heart for blogging, I promised you last week a new feature called "Friday Bookshelf". I feel some obligation to deliver, especially since I can't seem to get the damn Joy of Science discussion posts finished and now I'm sure they'll take even longer with this new blog malaise on top of a weekend full of activities planned by Mr. Zuska. I've had migraine all day and I haven't eaten so this is bound to be a mess, but for what it's worth...
I made a daring move and took the SECOND book off my bookshelf. It's called The Second X: The Biology of Women by…
thusspakezuska | June 8, 2007Many of my Sciblings have a regular Friday feature of one sort or another. For example, Dr. Free-Ride's got her Friday sprog-blogging, and there's Orac's Friday Dose of Woo over at Respectful Insolence. Karmen has Friday Fractals at Chaotic Utopia, which are particularly fun.
So I'm thinking of trying out my own Friday feature, which I am boringly calling "Friday Bookshelf". I've spent years collecting a mini-library of books on gender and science & engineering. Some of my readers will be familiar with more or less all of them; some may know of relatively few of them. I thought I…