Book Review
Colin Renfrew
A review of Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, with Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner and Thomas R. Trautmann. The articles in this volume stress the very remote past of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era, says Renfrew, and then leap to modernity without sufficiently considering the mediating effects of ancient civilizations.
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Donald Worster
A review of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, by William deBuys. DeBuys reports on how and why the precipitation and ecology of the Southwest are changing in unpredictable and nonlinear ways
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Jonathan L. Feng
A review of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek. Panek has a talent for elucidating difficult concepts and explains the history of dark energy beautifully, says Feng
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Steven Sloman
A review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explores the capabilities, faults, biases and pervasive influence of intuitive thought
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Greg Laden
A review of Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life, by Martin Meredith, and The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution, by Dean Falk. Both of these books focus on controversies over how to distinguish what is apelike from what is humanlike in early hominin species
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Silvan S. Schweber
A review of Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbrück, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology, by Gino Segrè. Segrè insightfully narrates the personal and professional lives of Delbrück and Gamow and explains their scientific contributions
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Kent E. Portney
A review of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, by Andrew Ross. Ross shows how power, class, greed and prejudice shape the micropolitics of the pursuit of urban sustainability in Phoenix
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Michael D. Gordin
A review of Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, by Margaret Wertheim. Wertheim wants mainstream scientists to give the work of “outsider physicists” the same sort of attention that folk art has gotten from the elite art community
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Robert J. Richards
A review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells us about Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland regards oxytocin as fundamental to morality, but what is that hormone’s role in a decision to send a $50 check to Oxfam, wonders Richards
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Brian Hayes
A review of Handbook of Floating-point Arithmetic, by Jean-Michel Muller, Nicolas Brisebarre, Florent de Dinechin, Claude-Pierre Jeannerod, Vincent Lefèvre, Guillaume Melquiond, Nathalie Revol, Damien Stehlé and Serge Torres. In the borderland between mathematics and computer science, correct answers are not always to be had, says Hayes—particularly if we demand efficiency
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Total Records : 1203