In a few years, I am going to leave this book lying out somewhere in my house and see if one of the kids picks it up and reads it.
"The Canon" by Natalie Angier
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-24295-5 Houghton Mifflin Books
The Canon is a pop overview of some key concepts in science, starting with scientific methodology and quantitative analysis, and then in six short chapters covering a couple of concepts in six of the major subfields of the natural sciences. No equations, all qualitative conceptual discussion.
The concept of the book is sounds, I couldn't really quibble with any of the choice of topics and most of the discussion is good.
In my fields, astronomy and physics, the actual science was decent, a couple of the explanations were flawed, but not critically, and I presume that in the other fields there were similar flaws in the explanation, but she got the point across and I actually learned some things.
The intended audience for this book seems to be the educated non-scientist wishing to dabble in the basics, analogous to someone doing a "western greats" collection of literature, but I suspect the real audience, if they can find the book, is the slightly precocious, well read early teenager.
If this book gets one kid to go read up some more on one of the subjects, and then explore further still, then it will have done a good job.
The style of the writing is very florid, with long sentences playing with alliteration, punning and thesauric obscurities in abundance.
Most of the time this makes for a fun read, occasionally it lead to my reading grinding to a halt when the writer tried to be a little bit too clever and left some malapropism dangling - some of those were intentional or slightly too clever indirect literary allusions, but occasionally they were just misplaced.
I went through a phase, early teens through early twenties, where I hoovered up all books like this and then I tapered off, too busy reading the technical literature to keep up with pop-sci. One of the pleasures of ScienceBlogs is that I have reason to go back and read the pop stuff again. I come at it now with a different perspective, but it is still fun.
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I'm about half-way through it. The florid style keeps my interest up, but sometimes it goes over the top. I thought "physicists talk the talk, and they chalk the chalk" was funny.
I found a boo-boo in the biology section; she credits Watson & Crick with establishing that DNA is the heriditary agent. This was already known from the work of Avery, MacLeod & McCarty, and confirmed by Hershey & Chase. Watson-Crick did provide a model for understanding replication and transcription, but this is a different thing.
Angier is currently serving as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell.
Post with 3 links waiting in the approval bin.
got it, sorry about that, the scienceblog comment filter gets hyper paranoid about anything with http code in it - I'm supposed to get notified of filtered comments but for some reason they don't always show up
Angier has mentioned that for her next project, she is considering writing a book on atheism for children.
Popular science books should always come with a web page for errata and updates. This is starting to really bother me, because anything in printed on dead tree is going to be outdated by the time it hits the bookstores.