THE SCIENCE SHELF NEWSLETTER


News about the Science Shelf archive of book reviews, columns, and comments by Fred Bortz



Issue #30, Bookonomic Stimulus Edition, May-June 2009



NOTE: Many of the links that follow take you to the review of the book in question. Each review has a link to buy at Amazon.com if you are interested.

Dear Science Readers,

Your response to the previous Science Shelf newsletter was gratifying. Many of you decided that at least one of the titles listed there deserved a click-through to Amazon.com. So I will repeat those links at the end of this newsletter to give you another chance to check them out.

Meanwhile, I've been busy pitching reviews to newspapers in a decidedly bleak economic climate. I haven't sold as many reviews, which means I have less of my own material to add to the Science Shelf. But the reviews I have published are on topics as varied and interesting as ever. I'll get to those shortly, but first a political diversion.

Besides adding my own reviews, I have added one from a new internet friend Ronald Martin Wade. I persuaded Ron to write a review of a new book about global warming that I thought would suit his conservative Republican political views. In so doing, I discovered that the problem he has with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is not all that different from mine.

Gore's dramatic presentation sometimes relies on worst-case scenarios (or at least worse-case scenarios) and occasionally overstates them, and that raises doubts among many of the people I hope most to persuade that action is necessary. My desire to persuade them is not a result of my ideology (more-or-less liberal), but rather what my reading over the past ten years tells me about the science of climate change.

Since I admire Al Gore, I am willing to accept that the motivation behind his presentation is not partisan. In the movie, Gore never argues for a particular policy except to say that the even the mid-range scenarios indicate the need for policy action. Still, the fact that he is a partisan political animal leads many people to suspect an ulterior partisan motive.

And that brings me to Ron Wade's review of Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley by Stephan Faris. Faris takes as a starting point the scenario that the world can find policies that limit global warming to about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which appears to be something that humans and most other living things can adapt to without devastating economic consequences. I think you will find Ron's perspective interesting and his writing to be clever and pointed.

As for my own reviewing, readers of this newsletter may have noticed my taste for the work of Astrobiologist Peter Ward. His latest book challenges the "good mother" Gaia hypothesis with Monster-Mom: The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

I also just completed a review of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. This very readable book will change what you think about food and our origins as "the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."

On My Reading List

The next couple of months promise to be fun for me! I have several book reviews lined up, and as I add them to the Science Shelf, I will replace the Amazon.com links below with links to my reviews.
Whether or not you are old enough to remember the Apollo Moon landings (On July 20, 1969, I took a Polaroid picture of my black-and-white TV screen with the words "Live From The Moon"), you can relive those great events of four decades ago with Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.

Also on my reading table is How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas by David P Barash Ph.D. and Dr. Judith Eve Lipton. Just looking at the chapter openers makes me smile. The chapter titles appear to the right of the first few paragraphs while the text is constrained by an hourglass curve.

Science Shelf readers who appreciated Barbara Oakley's Evil Genes and its long subtitle ending with "My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend" will probably look forward to my paired review of The Anatomy of Evil by Michael H. Stone, M.D. and Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain by Kathleen Taylor.

I've also pitched a review of an important and provocative new book by Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming) with collaborator Sheril Kirshenbaum. The title is Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. I hope one of my review clients agrees that this subject merits a few column inches even on constrained book review pages.

From the Previous Newsletter

Follow the link above for the newsletter or the links below

Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream by Tanya Lee Stone

A pair of books that I would classify as potentially life-saving:

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D. (includes a brief review of the following book as well)

and

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D. (full-length review of this book alone)

The Max Parallax: Things You Should Know by Ronald Martin Wade

My Usual Thanks

Thank you to the growing number of people who are kind enough to buy some of the books that they discovered here through the Science Shelf links. They've even used the link on the Science Shelf homepage to enter and buy books and other Amazon.com products including, most recently, a new Kindle e-reader and several Kindle editions. (If the books above are available on Kindle, the Amazon.com links will list them as other editions.)

I'll never know who those buyers are unless they tell me, thanks to Amazon's very sensible privacy policies. I just find out what they have bought, how much they paid, and how much my commission amounts to.

At the current pace, monthly commisions cover the cost of the web address, webhosting, and enough to buy me a three-topping large pizza (no anchovies, please) and a 2-liter coke. (Note the improvement of one topping and one soft drink from last time.) I'll never expect commissions to cover the time I spend maintaining the archive of book reviews and sending out messages like this. That's a labor of book- and science-love, and your feedback (in terms of increasing numbers of clicks) tells me you appreciate it.

As always, happy science reading, and thanks in advance for your support!

Fred Bortz