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Home>mylibrarycurrent>Science Recent Picks
Science Recent Picks April 2003
The title-underlined links will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.
Darwin's blind spot : evolution beyond natural selection, by Frank Ryan. (2002)
"Darwin himself recognized that a crucial missing piece to his theory of evolution was a mechanism for heredity. Genetics seemed to solve the puzzle, evolution's so-called neo-Darwinian synthesis being championed most notably by the great biologist Ernst Mayr... Yet this orthodoxy has had its doubters, and their stories unfold in this work. The joining of two organisms to produce a new species, symbiogenesis, is the fuel for skeptics." (Booklist on Amazon)
| Shadow Mountain : a memoir of wolves, a woman, and the wild, by Renee Askins. (2002)
"Naturalist Askins narrates what is both an autobiography and the story of one of America's most controversial conservation projects the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Idyllic childhood summer evenings in northern Michigan; interning at a captive wolf project in Indiana; spending time on the west coast of Africa, Yale University and Montana accent the author's exploration of her life story as an enduring love of nature. Askins accomplishes her task with fascinating anecdotes and insightful introspection. The reader learns about the writer's life-altering experience as a college student raising a newborn wolf cub." (Amazon)
| The snow geese, by Willian Fiennes. (2002)
"Snow geese spend their summers in the Canadian Arctic, on the tundra. Each autumn they migrate south, to Delaware, California and the Gulf of Mexico. In the spring they fly north again. William Fiennes decided to go with them and to write about his travels. What he produced turned out to be about very much more than geese. A blend of autobiography and reportage, its subject was also homecoming: the birds on their long journey's home, the grace of homecomings, the strange gravity that home exerts. The arc of Fiennes' physical adventure formed the backbone for meditations on philosophy, natural science and personal memoir. The book contains ideas, with stories and anecdotes, with humankind as well as wild fowl, with funny and observant insights." (Amazon UK) |
The field : the quest for the secret force of the universe, by Lynne McTaggart. (2001)
"The energy found in the vacuum - or the zero point field - is enough to boil all the oceans of the world. These oscillating waves seem to be the key to all sorts of unexplained phenomena: ESP, homeopathy, energy medicine, spiritual healing, intercessory prayer, psychic phenomena, and the homing instincts of animals are examples. In this work, Lynne McTaggart follows the life and work of disparate physicists who seem to be on the verge of bringing about the same type of revolution that occurred exactly a century ago when quantum theory changed the face of physics forever. This book introduces characters not only from the scientific community but also from the CIA and NASA. Lynne's interviews with scientists working in Edinburgh, Russia and the USA build a picture of an interconnected universe and a new scientific theory which makes sense of supernatural phenomena." (Amazon UK)
A new kind of science, by Stephen Wolfram. (2002)
"Physics and computer science genius Stephen Wolfram, sets his sights on a daunting goal: understanding the universe. A New Kind of Science is a gorgeous, 1,280-page tome more than a decade in the making. With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare, Wolfram outlines a fundamental new way of modelling complex systems.
On the frontier of complexity science since he was a boy, Wolfram is a champion of cellular automata - 256 "programs" governed by simple non-mathematical rules...Wolfram wrote the book in a distinct style meant to make it easy to read, even for non-techies; a basic familiarity with logic is helpful but not essential. Readers will find themselves swept away by the elegant simplicity of Wolfram's ideas and the accidental artistry of the cellular automaton models. Whether or not Wolfram's revolution ultimately gives us the keys to the universe, his new science is absolutely awe-inspiring." (Amazon UK)
The rise and fall of the Southern Alps, by Glen Coates ; with illustrations by Geoffrey Cox. (2002)
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