Elizabeth Kolbert, one of today's leading environmental journalists, edits this year's volume of the finest science and nature writing. Bringing together promising new voices and prize-winning favorites, this collection is "a delight for any fan of popular science" (Publishers Weekly).
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With 26 essays collected from 15 publications, New Yorker contributor Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe) has pulled together a magnificent display of writing. There's not a weak piece in the bunch. Kolbert's choices provide a sense of major themes in science today, with five pieces focused on evolution and seven on environmental topics. As Kolbert notes, Darwin's ideas seem ever more central to our culture, even as their implications continue to challenge us. As Benjamin Phelan shows, there's controversy even among biologists about some aspects of evolution, such as whether humans are still evolving today; Phelan presents the evidence that we are. John Broome discusses the ethics of climate change while Michael Specter is insightful on the difficulties of measuring one's carbon footprint; he concludes counterintuitively that, in many cases, it may make more environmental sense to purchase imported food than to buy locally. Other entries show what might have been prior to the Big Bang, the use of virtual reality games to quell post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraqi War veterans and much more. The collection is a joy to read and one to savor. (Oct. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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"[Elizabeth] Kolbert has pulled together a magnificent display of writing. There;s not a weak piece in the bunch...the collection is a joy to read and one to savor." - Publishers Weekly
"[Elizabeth] Kolbert has pulled together a magnificent display of writing. There;s not a weak piece in the bunch...the collection is a joy to read and one to savor."
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Reading in Science,
By The Spinozanator "Spinozanator" (Harlingen, Texas) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
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This review is from: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 (Paperback)
The very best way to find out the truth about anything is by applying the methods of science - despite human failings in its application. I look forward to reading this collection of articles every year. With this brush stroke, I get a journalist's kaleidoscopic display of what different groups of scientists are doing with our world. This year's 26 selections, chosen by guest editor Elizabeth Kolbert, came from 16 different magazines - the best represented being Harper's, National Geographic, Discover, and New Yorker, all with three articles each.*Wendell Berry - The exploding population and our use of earth's resources cannot last forever. Whichever way we turn, we run into the difficult politics of self-imposed limits. *John Broome - The ethics of climate change is just as hard as the science. Most of the cost of controlling climate change must be borne in the near future, yet the benefit will come perhaps a century later. One of my favorites: *Nicholas Carr - Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that reliance on the written word would detract from the knowledge base people used to have to carry in their heads....The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press (15th century) set off another round of teeth gnashing - the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness....When Nietzsche's vision problem forced him to use a typewriter, the new technology had an effect of his work. His prose became tighter; his arguments became aphorisms.....The clock's methodological ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific method. The conception of the world that now revolves around schedules solidified new pathways in our brains.....The internet is now subsuming most of our other basic technologies. Is Kubrick's prophecy in "2001" - that machines will become thecontrolling intelligencia - coming true? *Chris Carroll - Asia is the center of much of the world's high-tech manufacturing and it is here that the devices often return when they die. *Andrew Curry - The story of the Stasi, a sprawling East German bureaucracy almost 3 times the size of Hitler's Gestapo that was spying on a population ¼ the size of Nazi Germany. Not a lot of science, but interesting. Another favorite: *Keay Davidson - Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that makes the universe expand faster and faster over time. It now threatens to undermine fundamental beliefs about physics, cosmology, and the nature of scientific discovery - yet we don't have a clue what it is. Another favorite: *Douglas Fox - Strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down but others speed up. As an ice crystal forms, it remains pure - only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities are crowded out together. In several of Stanley Miller's hundreds of experiments, conducted over a period of decades, mixtures of cyanide, ammonia, and ice formed nucleobases and amino acids - building blocks of RNA and proteins. If life on earth arose from ice, our chances of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy - even in this solar system - may be better than we ever imagined. *Adam Frank - What happened before the Big Bang? Three prominent cosmologist answer this question with these answers: 1. String theory and branes 2. A series of expanding and contracting multiverses 3. There is no need to find time's beginning because time really doesn't exist. For the first answer, evidence is decades away, if ever. The second is based on a speculative interpretation of inflationary cosmology, itself only loosely verified. The third offers no way of testing its accuracy at all. Another favorite: *Atul Gawande - Only 20% of the images we perceive come from the retina. The remaining 80% come from other parts of the brain controlling things like memory. In other words, what we see is a virtual reality - as given to us by our brains. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are usually protective but sometimes go awry. Millions of people have chronic pain of all sorts, phantom limb syndrome, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, tinnitus, pathological itching, or fibromyalgia - in which treatments of surgery and medication are notoriously marginal. Mirror image therapy has helped phantom limb pain. Perhaps this whole group of patients can benefit from mirror image or other virtual reality therapies - to treat problems made worse by glitches in our neurocircuitry. *David Grimm - When a cell divides, C14 from the environment is incorporated into new chromosomes. C14 levels in the atmosphere doubled during WWII nuclear testing and have been on a linear descent back to normal ever since. Therefore, the amount of C14 in a given cell can date its birth. This has proven useful in forensics and in the solution of several controversies in medical science - such as - is the cerebral cortex capable of generating new neurons? *Stephen S. Hall - Neanderthal males averaged 5'5" and 185 pounds. They may have had red hair and a culture similar to ours ( with certain differences) and we co-existed with them until 28,000 years ago. Did we interbreed? Maybe. Did we eat them? Possibly. *Sue Halpern - The use of a customized video-game called "Virtual Iraq" is being successfully used in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder - PTSD. Patients work through their emotional combat trauma in a computer-simulated environment. *Walter Isaacson - As Einstein explained in a Japanese publication, "My participation in the production of the atomic bomb consisted in a single act: I signed a letter to President Roosevelt." This statement didn't reveal how deeply involved he was in writing the letter, revising it, and deciding how to get it to the president. As the project proceeded he was left out - considered to be too big a security risk to be included. *Frederick Kaufman - The story of the processing, decontamination, and profit from human waste, exemplified by the company that serves New York City. Captain Jonah glides his sludge boat past the Statue of Liberty daily for processing og its cargo in Long Island. *Virginia Morell - Cognitive skills previously thought to be exclusive to homo sapiens have now been found in mammals, birds - even worms. Animal studies suggest the roots of cognition are deep, wide, and highly malleable. *J. Madeline Nash - A big red band snakes through the rocks in Wyoming for 25 miles. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - paleontologists call it the PETM - happened 55 million years ago and the resulting climate change accelerated evolution: above it there are horses - below it there aren't. Scientists believe that then, as now, the earth warmed in response to a precipitous release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. Kick up your feet and learn how geologists read the evidence left in rocks as though they were doing forensic science at a crime scene. The author closes with a quote from Mark Twain: "History does not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme. *Michelle Nijhuis - The longstanding conservationist credo is to restore - redesign is frowned upon, but climate change calls this all into question. Relocation of newly endangered species of plants and animals are being re-examined. Another favorite: *Benjamin Phelan - Up to 10% of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history. These changes are written in the genes with the signature of natural selection - legible even while the import of the message is unclear. Another favorite: *Virginia Postrell - For about two decades, economists have been running differing versions of the same experiment. A bunch of volunteers simulate real- time stock trading experiences under tightly controlled conditions. Again and again, the trading price runs way above fundamental value and near the 15th round, it crashes. But people do learn. By the third time the same group goes through a fifteen-round market, the bubble usually disappears. Another favorite: *David Quammen - Cancer is not an infectious disease - or is it? Cancers can apparently evolve much like species. A certain cancer of the Tasmanian devil has evolved a way to be spread through bites from one devil to another, and threatens this species' very existence. This beautifully written story pauses throughout with excerpts that revisit evolutionary concepts you may recall if you had a good college biology class - and introduces more recent developments in evolution you didn't learn about. Another favorite: *Joshua Roebke - Modern physicists cut from the doubting "spookey action at a distance" mold of Einstein figure out a way to test one of the basic tenets of quantum theory. QT passes yet another test. At the sub-atomic level, matter and energy really is spread out over all possibilities until measured. Only then does it coalesce to something measureable. My very favorite: *Oliver Sacks - Darwin's "Origin of the Species" was to become perhaps the most important (and notorious) book anyone had ever written. What does one do for an encore? In this beautiful essay with a dynamite finish, Sacks shows how Darwin, switching from observation to experimentation, spent much of the rest of his long life demonstrating how natural selection drove botanical evolution. Another favorite: *Mark A. Smith - Starts with the wonders of the little animalcules in pond water as seen under a microscope, meanders around speculations on consciousness, and displays the ubiquitousness of life....a beautiful essay. *Michael Specter - A wild ride concerning the local, national, and world politics of... Read more ›
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Direct Hit on the Pleasure Center of the Brain,
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This review is from: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 (Paperback)
There are many excellent reasons to buy and read The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2009, ranging from the pragmatic (keeping up with what's new) to the esthetic (science writing of rock-you-back-on-your-heels quality), but the best reason is twenty-six consecutive essays in which the book suddenly sags into your lap, your head tilts back a bit, your eyes focus on the far distance, and you can FEEL your cerebral tectonic plates shift and buckle. Are these essays really that good? Yes. Emphatically yes.It is not uncommon for a scientific anthology to include topics that range from the largest scope (the multiverse) to the smallest (quantum physics), from studies of consciousness to new perspectives on psychology, from life in the deepest ocean to conjectures of life on other planets, and Best American Science and Nature is no exception to this model. What makes the book outstanding is that editor Elizabeth Kolbert's selections deeply and seductively integrate hard science with our daily human existence. Read Frederick Kaufman's Wasteland, and you'll never be able to think the same way about depressing the lever on your toilet. Ever thrown away a TV, a computer, a cell phone? Chris Carroll's wonderfully sketched portrayal of humans in developing nations sacrificing their health to extract light and heavy metals from the refuse, tossing the plastic carcasses of our castaway computers into a river, where they bob their way into the ocean, will leave a mark, if not a scar, on you. Feeling down and need to be boosted by having your socks charmed right off you? Read Mark Smith's Animalcules and Other Little Subjects. From the origin of life (in ice) to the determination of the rich and gifted to find immortality, this literary roller coaster ride is one thrill after another. By including essays on economics (you, too, can get better at avoiding being caught up in the next bubble), ethics, and health, Kolbert skillfully and forcefully brings emerging scientific insights into the space in which you dwell, redecorating your mental landscape whether or not you were satisfied with your current lay of the land. A few of the essays (including, for me, the first two of the book) require a bit of mental heavy lifting. As with any workout, the post-exertion feeling that one experiences is well worth the effort expended. My bias is that the pursuit of knowledge is a noble one, what fun that a book like The Best Science and Nature Writing can make such a pursuit utterly pleasurable!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not a dud in the bunch!,
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This review is from: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 (Paperback)
What makes this stellar collection so special isn't just the crisp writing and well-organized stories; it's also the angle of approach. From the year's best pieces, chosen by series editor Folger, New Yorker writer Kolbert has selected those which reflect current interests, but from slightly off the well-beaten path.For Darwin's 200th birthday, for instance, Oliver Sacks' eloquent essay, explores the naturalist's lesser-known discoveries in botany and the thrill he got from this later work and his extensive collection of orchids. The environment comes in for serious scrutiny, of course, and several pieces look at big-picture human impact on the planet. Frederick Kaufman's "Wasteland" follows sewage through New York City's state-of-the-art North River treatment plant - where counterfeit money and vials of cocaine are a lot more common than alligators - to its end product as "organic" fertilizer adulterated with heavy metals, pharmaceuticals and more. Kaufman explores the politics as well as the realities we'll sometime have to face. And Chris Carroll follows our defunct computers and cell phones in "High Tech Trash," a horrifying story of capitalism at its worst. J. Madeleine Nash's "Back to the Future" tags along with scientists examining fossils in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, which 55 million years ago - after a massive carbon dioxide release - had a climate like today's Florida. In "Big Foot," Michael Spector explores food choices from a carbon footprint standpoint - with some surprising results (locavores despair!). A couple of pieces look at cutting-edge brain research. Atul Gawande's excruciating "The Itch" profiles a woman who developed an unremitting itch after a bout of shingles, an itch so awful she woke one day to find she had scratched through to her brain. One neurologist (overruled) hypothesized that the itch, like phantom limb pain, originated in the brain, not the nerves, and Gawande's detour through this research provides temporary relief. Virginia Postrel's "Pop Psychology" takes a droll look at the inevitability of economic bubbles and Nicholas Carr explores technology's effect on our thinking processes from the Gutenberg Press to the Internet in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The nature of the universe before the Big Bang has spawned myriad theories and Adam Frank tells us about them and their proponents in "The Day Before Genesis." The weirdness of quantum mechanics seems almost comprehensible in Joshua Roebke's "Reality Tests." Stephen S. Hall's "Last of the Neanderthals" explores the latest findings in the ongoing study of what killed off our sturdier cousins and Benjamin Phelan looks at new gene research which suggests that not only are we still evolving - we are evolving faster than ever. Every piece in the book engages the general reader with portraits of the people behind the science -what they do and how they feel about it. Some of the people are eccentric, like Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and author profiled in Gary Wolf's "Stayin' Alive," who intends to live forever. But most are just smart people who get really enthusiastic about their jobs. The writing is often witty and humorous. Kaufman's sewage story is downright hilarious as well as gross, the right mix to get people to read and remember the mind-boggling hugeness of the issue. This is a book for anyone with the slightest interest in the world we live in.
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