Tech Q&A: Jo Marchant
Describe your latest project. Decoding the Heavens is a cross between a history book and an adventure story. It starts with the discovery in 1900 of an ancient shipwreck filled with treasure. Among the...
View ArticleDeep Doo-Doo
The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson Reviewed by Christopher Hamlin American Scientist Grannie used to say she was going out to the euphemism to euphemize....
View ArticleBook News for Monday, May 18, 2009
The Future of Books? The big story today is the rise of Scribd, a site that aims to be the iTunes of digital books. (Or the YouTube of digital books, depending on which newspaper you read.) The Scribd...
View ArticleThe Age of Wonder
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes Reviewed by Benjamin Moser Harper's Magazine Richard Holmes's monumental The Age of Wonder:...
View ArticleThe Age of Wonder
Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder is at once a history of Regency-era scientific discovery and a meditation on what the pursuit of science says about us as individuals and as a culture. Scrupulously...
View ArticleThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This is an absolutely fascinating account of a line of cells that would proliferate to such a degree that they became immortal. Shaved from a tumor in a poor black woman in the 1950s, cultured without...
View ArticleThe Disappearing Spoon
Sam Kean proves that chemistry makes for great storytelling with this entertaining look at the human stories behind the elements found in the periodic table. A delightful history of science, The...
View ArticleDecoding the Heavens
Decoding the Heavens recounts the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism, arguably the most remarkable archaeological find in human history. A mechanical computer dating from the second century BCE, it...
View ArticleThe Granola Section in Walmart
I'm sitting in the authors' tent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and it's time to put out the bunting. I've had an idea for my next book, a slim but vital volume entitled "Smart Questions...
View ArticleVenus of Longitude
On Tuesday, June 5, 2012, people across the world get to witness a rare, celestial shadow play. The planet Venus will, for about seven hours, cross the disk of the sun, a "transit" that happens less...
View ArticleThe Knowledge
What happens after the apocalypse? Dartnell provides concise explanations of agriculture, medicine, transportation, energy, and the scientific method. Not a how-to book but rather a framework for...
View ArticleThe Fragility of Grand Discoveries
When I was in graduate school at Berkeley I was offered a prestigious fellowship to study for a year in Germany, but I decided it would be a disruption, so I wrote a short note declining the offer. As,...
View ArticleYou Are… Who?
Writing a book is an unnatural act of communication.Writing a book is an unnatural act of communication. Speaking to a person, or even to an audience, is an interaction. Very different styles are...
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