Book reviews
bioephemera | August 16, 2009I read Scibling Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide some time ago, but Moveable Type ate my half-finished review, and it's taken me until now to get back to it. You may have seen quite a few reviews elsewhere by now - Adam Kepecs reviewed it for Nature back in April, and to make a long story short, I largely agree with him: Lehrer is a very good writer, but this is not a great book.
Lehrer starts his book with an airplane anecdote, so I'll do the same - although his opening anecdote is about crashing a plane (albeit a simulated plane), so I'm not sure I'd recommend the book for nervous flyers.…
bioephemera | August 7, 2009Reviewer Jerry Coyne appears to have some of the same reservations I do ("Mooney and Kirshenbaum also fail to support their contention that the knowledge gap between scientists and the public is increasing") - but he ends up voting thumbs down:
No matter how much atheists stifle themselves, no matter how many scientists reach out to the public via new media, we may not find the appetite for science infinitely elastic. This does not mean, of course, that we should refrain from feeding it. But figuring out where and how to intervene will take a lot more work than the shallow and unreflective…
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
sciencewoman | July 25, 2009This slim novel by author Bi Feiyu takes the reader inside the world of the Peking Opera, after the Cultural Revolution and at the dawn of capitalism in China. Xiao Yanqui rashly lost her place in the opera company just when her star was rising, but now, 20 years later, she's been given a chance at redemption - a chance to return to the lead role in The Moon Opera. The novel follows Xiao as she attempts to control her body and contort back into the role of a much younger woman, despite the fact that she now has a teenage daughter of her own. Meanwhile, Xiao's understudy and star pupil wants…
bioephemera | July 17, 2009Janet has a very interesting post over at Adventures in Ethics, springboarding off Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America. She discusses a key concept that seems obvious, but constantly ends up being ignored by both pro-science and anti-science factions: scientists are not a monolithic interest group. (For one thing, we disagree about how and when to approach the public, and how conciliatory to be).
Janet says,
I think it's fair to say that scientists and other members of Team Science are not in total agreement about which segments of the public can be…
palmd | July 17, 2009If you've dipped even one toe into the science blogosphere lately, you've seen discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future. I have very little interest in the arguments currently raging but not because I don't care. The book makes interesting arguments, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't. More important, however, is that the authors have a track record of being listened to (cf The Republican War on Science). In a crisis that involves communication (i.e. of scientific knowledge), it…
bioephemera | July 9, 2009Wow: it looks like PZ Myers and his fans are embroiled in a bit of a kerfuffle with Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum and their adherents over the new Mooney/Kirshenbaum book, Unscientific America.
First, PZ says the book is "useless." Chris says well, phooey, because plenty of other people like it. And then everybody calls one another "poopyheads" (or variants thereof) in the comments sections of both blogs, which are running into the hundreds.
I'm relieved to note that I am completing two big projects next week, so I won't have time to read my copy of Unscientific America for a couple…
bioephemera | June 30, 2009Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me.
As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…
sciencewoman | June 10, 2009BrianR at Clastic Detritus introduced me to the perfect meme to wrap a tedious summer afternoon of work...What books are on my summer reading list? First let me say that *love* summer and breaks because I've always associated those times with a chance to do some of the reading that I've never managed to keep up with during the semester. And I don't just mean the teetering pile of journal articles on my file cabinet, but also the teetering pile of books near my bed. I hate paying good money for a book and then letting it sit around for years unread. Plus, with my blogger schtick I feel like…
denialism | May 26, 2009Seth Kalichman is a better man than I. Kalichman is a clinical psychologist, editor of the journal Aids and Behavior and director of the Southeast HIV/AIDS Research and Evaluation (SHARE) product, and he has devoted his life to the treatment and prevention of HIV. Despite a clear passion for reducing the harm done by HIV/AIDS, to research this book he actually met, and interviewed, prominent HIV/AIDS denialists. I confess I simply lack the temperament to have done this. To this day, when I read about HIV/AIDS denialists, and the the 330,000 people who have died as a result of HIV/AIDS…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2009I have been pinching myself for the past three weeks for two reasons: first I have good news to share with you and second, I was afraid that my good news was a dream that I'd awaken from.
My good news is that I just sent off a book review to be published in Nature magazine. Nature? you say .. Do you mean .. ?
Why, yes, I do mean ... !
I don't yet know when it will appear in print, but believe me, as soon as I know, you'll know! (aaand the author will know, and the book publisher, editors and publicity agents will know) Additionally, I am working on a longer version of this book review…
bioephemera | April 1, 2009
I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel?
The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular type of reader: those who are familiar with the original novel, yet…
bioephemera | March 7, 2009Brevity can be a creative coup. Consider Claire Evans' "Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds", which shoehorns our entire history into one minute: as the clock slowly ticks away, it makes me fear for a moment - implausible as it may seem - that it might run out before we evolve. Then there's the genius of Hamlet as Facebook updates (or Pride and Prejudice, though I don't find it nearly as good as Hamlet.) Maybe it's a symptom of our increasingly short attention spans, the acceleration of the news cycle, or simply the accumulation of too darn much data; for whatever reason, brevity is trendy. And…
developingintelligence | February 24, 2009Guest Post by Seth Herd.
I disagree with many of Gary Marcus's theories, but I think that his book Kluge is important, entertaining, and even accurate. The book's main thesis is that if God had designed the human mind, He would've done a better job. I'm not all that interested in arguments about intelligent design, but Kluge also has a lot to say about the human brain/mind and even the human condition.
I've frequently baffled and offended my students by saying "people are stupid!" Kluge is about how, exactly, we are stupid. In large part the book echoes introductory cognitive…
tqa | February 18, 2009
"Children are our hope for the future."
THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death.
"What does it contain, then?"
ME.
"Besides you, I mean!"
Death gave him a puzzled look. I'M SORRY?
Terry Pratchett
"Sourcery"
Bad Astronomy Blogger Phil Plait has written one of the most fantastically, outrageously, manically, humorously depressing books I've ever read, and I'm almost certain I mean that as a compliment. Death From The Skies provides a veritable smorgasbord of potentially deadly astronomical delights, each more exotic than the last. It's like having every Discovery Channel "The Sky Is…
sporte | November 14, 2008Masha Gessen was faced with a terrifying choice: cut off her breasts, and possibly save herself from cancer, or use them to feed her child.
It was late at night when I walked back to my empty dorm room at the conference. Shivering, I stood on the narrow bed, quickly shut the windows, tore the blankets off the other bed, and wrapped myself up, trying to get warm. Too cold to sleep, I picked up my copy of Masha Gessen's "Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene," expecting boredom to lull me into unconsiousness…
mspringer | October 13, 2008The Feynman Lectures are the bible of physics.
Because it's the definitive and authoritative sacred text? Nope. Because everyone has it but not many people have actually read it. This is too bad. The lectures are a fantastic way to learn about physics.
Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, one of the true titans of modern science. Unlike most great scientists, he was also tremendously charismatic, a ladies man, musician, adventurer, and a skilled popular writer. Sometimes science snobs look down on the cult of Feynman popularity, but this is just sour grapes. The man really was…
scientificactivist | September 5, 2008Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life
by Carl Zimmer
Pantheon: 2008, 256 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
I come face-to-face with Escherichia coli every day. In a sense, we all do--as billions of E. coli inhabit every individual's intestines. But for me, E. coli is a protein factory. I'm a structural biologist, and my work depends on being able to produce large amounts of specific proteins--generally proteins found in humans or mice. However, purifying large amounts of these proteins from humans or mice would be virtually impossible, and manipulating these proteins in the manner I…
neurophilosophy | August 16, 2008
Earlier this year, Sam Wang kindly sent me a copy of Welcome to Your Brain, the recently published book he has written with Sandra Aamodt. In a note slipped inside the book, he tells me that "We've done our best to make it both accessible and informative," and I think that he and Aamodt have succeeded in that aim.
Welcome to your Brain is indeed accessible and full of interesting facts about the brain. Wang is an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Stanford and Aamodt is editor in chief of the journal Nature Neuroscience. In their book, they draw on recent research…
scientificactivist | July 8, 2008The Animal Research War
by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker
Palgrave Macmillan: 2008, 224 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
In a dark room, buried in a nondescript building somewhere in London, an orderly array of new trainees sits silently, listening intently as a senior police official delivers a security briefing. Clicking through slide after slide of photos of activists, extremists, and terrorists, the official carefully explains who each person is, what organization(s) he or she is associated with, and what level of threat that person poses. All of this would probably look like business as…