Category Archives: Book reviews

Worth a read: Origin by Jennifer Raff

      2 Comments on Worth a read: Origin by Jennifer Raff
Origin by Jennifer Raff

Many of the most fascinating advances in DNA research have been in the extraction of readable genetic material from ever older biological sources. When those sources are ancient humans, the analysis of DNA fragments takes us back to our very origins as a species, analogous to the Hubble Telescope peering back through time to the beginnings of the universe. But… Read more »

Worth a Read: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

Anil Seth - Being You

“You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.” Anil Seth (Being You, p. 75) Science books exploring what it means for humans to be conscious have typically been a hard slog. I first read Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach, a notorious… Read more »

Worth a read: Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer

      1 Comment on Worth a read: Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer
The three Fates

An interesting tidbit from a recent DNA study documented by researchers in the Netherlands, translated for a general audience in Science News: Overall, as many as 12% of human pregnancies may start as multiple pregnancies, but under 2% carry to term, resulting in a vanishing twin. To think that a new science book can contribute positively to the hot-again issue… Read more »

Worth a read: A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins

I first taught computer modeling in the long-ago era before the Apple II, and I would start the class by bringing in an object from my then-young son’s toy box. I would hold it up and ask the class, “What is this?” I could always count on one student, invariably male, to volunteer, “That is a Ferrari!” Which would allow… Read more »

Worth a read: Shape by Jordan Ellenberg

Shape-Ellenberg

You have probably not thought much about geometry since your tenth-grade math class where you learned how to calculate the area of circle or a triangle. Have you retained anything else? Or even that? Well into the 19th century, you would not be considered to be an educated person unless you were familiar with Elements by Euclid, a Greek mathematician… Read more »

America – the missing years: 1619–1775

Slave Auction

Violence was commonplace in Nevis, as in all of the slave-ridden sugar islands. The eight thousand captive blacks easily dwarfed in number the one thousand whites, “a disproportion,” remarked one visitor, “which necessarily converts all such white men as are not exempted by age and decrepitude into a well-regulated militia.” (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 19) I am an avid… Read more »

Worth a read: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek

Fundamentals

I still remember the classic picture of the atom from my Michigan high school physics class, about the same time MIT professor Frank Wilczek was in a similar class in New York City in the late 1960s. Called the Rutherford model, that atom was pictured as a miniature solar system. with electron “planets” revolving around a sun-like nucleus, which was… Read more »

Worth a read: A Series of Fortunate Events by Sean B. Carroll

A Series of Fortunate Events

Good science is hard; good science communication may be even harder. During my publishing career I was the editor or managing editor on quite a few university-level texts, and I usually found the “Introduction to …” textbook authors to be better communicators and classroom teachers than the authors of “upper division” specialized texts. Ironically, the best-selling intro text authors may… Read more »

History and the math of “probably not”

      No Comments on History and the math of “probably not”

On a day when we can’t get an agreed-upon historical reckoning of the sequence of governmental Coronavirus response in the United States in early 2020 (despite extensive video evidence), I’d like to share my thoughts on “the probability of history” using some classic (and potentially dangerous) examples. In the mid-1990s, the late religious historian Marcus Borg authored a series of… Read more »

How bad are we really? Humankind by Rutger Bregman

Garden of Eden

An ages-old morality play has started a new season of “reality shows,” run on television every night since May 25, 2020. Was George Floyd a bad man or a good man? How about the four policemen who killed him on the street? Were the street protestors outside the White House on June 1 patriots expressing their constitutional First Amendment rights… Read more »