science books
jdupuis | December 17, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This is a compilation of picks from various writers on their Culture Lab blog.
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics by Alex Bellos
Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox by Gareth Williams
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff
The Mind's Eye by Oliver Wolf Sacks
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can…
jdupuis | December 16, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot…
jdupuis | December 15, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Salon.com
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Concurring Opinions (Privacy books)
The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors by Hal Niedzviecki
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
New York Magazine
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
(The Skloot book probably deserves a special award for so often being the only science book on a list…
jdupuis | December 15, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
Packing For Mars by Mary Roach
The Legacy by David Suzuki
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James M. Tabor
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
Keeping…
jdupuis | December 14, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. I've cobbled this together from the critic-by-critic list I point to above.
You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger
The Plundered Planet by Paul Collier
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot ca or in the…
jdupuis | December 13, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik
Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean by Julia Whitty
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Gun by C.J. Chivers
The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New…
jdupuis | December 13, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This list is the Holiday Reading list from the Toronto Star Public Policy Forum, picked from individual lists in today's print newspaper. Bizarrely, I wasn't able to find the list online.
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It by Robert Glennon
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives) by Thomas Homer-Dixon
I'm…
jdupuis | December 12, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, is from December 11, 2006.
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I'm reading a lot of science auto/biography these days, and generally enjoying it a lot. While generally not…
jdupuis | December 11, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Screams of Reason: Mad Science in Modern Culture, is from January 18, 2007.
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A little pop-cultural analysis is never a bad thing, taken in small doses. In larger doses, however, it can be a bit problematic…
jdupuis | December 7, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
LaCrosse Tribune
Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside by Brad Steiger
Becoming a Doctor: From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share Their Experiences edited by Lee Gutkind
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom
How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey
STLtoday
The Gun by C.J. Chivers
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
The Immortal Life of…
jdupuis | December 7, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This one really annoys me because the list is solely embedded in the text of the article, with no separate listing of the titles or even bolding or italicizing the titles. But that's just me, I guess.
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane
The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalised Medicine by Francis Collins
Genetic Twists of Fate by Stanley Fields & Mark Johnston
The Immortal Life of…
jdupuis | December 6, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson
Chamber Four
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Quill & Quire
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by Johan Vaillant
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't…
jdupuis | December 6, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon
And a non-science book that, for obvious reasons, looks particularly…
jdupuis | December 5, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one covers three books and is from March 1, 2007:
The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 by Greene, Brian, editor…
jdupuis | December 5, 2010Every year the Globe publishes a gift book guide separate from their regular list of notable books. Great for coffee table style books for that special someone. The list has a few non-science items that look particularly cool to me so I'll list those too. (Note that the online version is missing most of the books mentioned in the print version.)
The Native Trees of Canada By Leanne Shapton
Self Sufficiency for the 21st Century by Dick and James Strawbridge
Atlas of the World by Oxford University Press
Explorers: Great Tales of Adventure and Endurance by the Royal Geographical Society
The…
jdupuis | December 4, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Republican War on Science, is from January 24, 2007.
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The is a fine and necessary book, one that uncovers a lot of history and a lot of current events that I certainly didn't know about. Being a Canadian…
jdupuis | December 3, 2010One of the more interesting lists every year is Strategy + Business because it gives a good selection of internet technology/innovation and social media books. I drew from various of their lists: Top Shelf, Leadership, China and Innovation.
Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance by Boris Groysberg
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future by Elizabeth C. Economy
Cognitive…
jdupuis | December 2, 2010Another nice list.
The Facebook Effect: The Insider Story of the Company that is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio
The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies
Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher
The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks
Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D Seeley
The Immortal Life of Henrietta…
jdupuis | November 30, 2010This list is from SFGate / San Francisco Chronicle and is drawn from their nonfiction, architecture and nature lists.
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
City Building: Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century by John Lund Kriken
Float!: Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion and Climate Change by Koen Olthuis and David Keuning
Bird…
jdupuis | November 28, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one includes three shorter reviews:
The Introspective Engineer by Samuel C. Florman (June 1, 2003)
Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti (…