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On the Bookshelf

Online Exclusive: Children's Books Galore

William Cannon, Fenella Saunders, Kristen Greenaway, Catherine Clabby, David Schoonmaker, Nancy Schoonmaker


Scientists' Nightstand: Emily Monosson

Anna Lena Phillips

Environmental toxicologist, author of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out


Scientists' Nightstand: Chris Sangwin

Anna Lena Phillips

Mathematician, coauthor of How Round Is Your Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet


Schrödinger's Goose

Theodore M. Porter

A review of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, by Steven Shapin. Have the advantages of entrepreneurial science been oversold? Are contemporary funding regimes subtly eroding the integrity of science? Quite possibly so, Porter concludes


Keeping the Net Stupid

Hal Abelson

A review of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain. The creative work inspired by the enormous flexibility of the Internet is threatened, says Zittrain, by a trend away from open platforms and toward what he calls "tethered appliances"


Never at Rest

David Lindley

A review of Kelvin: Life, Labours and Legacy, edited by Raymond Flood, Mark McCartney and Andrew Whitaker. Why, asks Lindley, has Lord Kelvin's remarkable catalog of achievements left so little impression?


John O'Mountains

Michael P. Branch

A review of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, by Donald Worster. Worster has expertly sifted and sorted the details of Muir's complex life story to produce an engaging biography that should be considered definitive, says Branch


Electoral Games People Play

Steven Hill

A review of Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), by William Poundstone. Poundstone explores the unintended consequences of plurality voting and the pros and cons of the various electoral systems that have been proposed as alternatives


The Enlightenment Comes to the Amazon

Daniela Bleichmar

A review of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America, by Neil Safier. Safier's account of the Geodesical Expedition to the Equator in 1735 thoughtfully examines how Enlightenment science fared in South America and how that continent was depicted in Europe as a consequence of this exploration


The "Mad" Farmer

Christine Casson

A review of Conversations with Wendell Berry, edited by Morris Allen Grubbs. These 17 interviews conducted over three decades show the prescience and consistency of Berry’s vision, says Casson, and they invite reflection on how little has been accomplished during that span of time


Setting the Record Straight on the Refugia Hypothesis

Paul Baker

A review of Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator, by Paul Colinvaux. Colinvaux recounts his travels in search of lakes containing mud dating from the last glacial maximum, telling the tale with humor, ego and enthusiasm, says Baker


Musical Maladies

Norman M. Weinberger

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. Sacks sprinkles brief accounts of recent neuroscientific findings throughout the detailed descriptions of cases that are at the heart of this book, but he doesn't discuss the scientific issues in enough depth, complains Weinberger


Touring Turing

Martin Davis

A review of The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, reviewed by Martin Davis. Petzold provides a line-by-line close reading of Turing's classic paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," explaining background material as needed


A True Renaissance Man

William Cannon


One Tree at a Time

Anna Lena Phillips


Scientists' Nightstand: Steve Jenkins

Anna Lena Phillips

Writer and illustrator of children's books including Living Color


Armageddon Tourism

Hugh Gusterson

A review of A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger. Hodge and Weinberger tour nuclear test sites, weapons design labs, production facilities, bunkers and missile silos in the United States, the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, Russia and Iran, giving readers a sense of the vast scale of the nuclear weapons enterprise that has been built since the early 1940s


Recovering the Past

Robert J. Richards

A review of On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail. Smail rethinks historical techniques, exploring the explanatory possibilities of sociobiology and theories of brain development


Applied Geometry

Stan Wagon

A review of How Round Is Your Circle?: Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. Computer modeling of various aspects of geometry is all well and good, Wagon observes, but "nothing beats the construction of a physical model"


Two Singular Men

Robert Crease

A review of Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius, by Silvan S. Schweber. Schweber aims to show that the actions of these two men expanded our notion of what a human being can be and do


The Organisms that Made It All Possible

Audra J. Wolfe

A review of A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, by Jim Endersby. Endersby proposes giving equal time to scientists, their objects of study and the structure of the scientific enterprise, Wolfe says, but there are limitations to his approach


CSI: Mendel

Stephen M. Stigler

A review of Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy, by Allan Franklin, A. W. F. Edwards, Daniel J. Fairbanks, Daniel L. Hartl and Teddy Seidenfeld. Did someone screen, or sophisticate, Gregor Mendel’s data? Ronald A. Fisher thought so. The articles in this volume explore in minute detail the issues involved


The Andean Way

Mark Aldenderfer

A review of A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru, by Hugh Thomson. This captivating book "reads like a good travelogue," says Aldenderfer, but in his view, Thomson's romantic rendering of the Andean past is implausible


Changing Assumptions

Londa Schiebinger

A review of Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence, edited by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, and Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out, edited by Emily Monosson. The divisions in power that pervade modern institutions and assumptions can be changed, says Schiebinger


Object Lessons

Peter Pesic

A review of Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited and with an introduction by Sherry Turkle. These essays—most of them by students of science, and a few by senior scientists—illuminate the importance of early relationships with objects


Inside Information

Wim van Dam

A review of Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction, by N. David Mermin. This is a good textbook for theoretically oriented self-learning, says van Dam


The Rise and Fall of the Space Shuttle

Roger A. Pielke, Jr.

A review of Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program, by Pat Duggins.  Will retiring the space shuttle program give NASA a new lease on life?