Volume 98 | Number 4 | July-August 2010
Noel Castree
A review of A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, by Paul N. Edwards. Edwards’s monograph relates in detail the effort, ingenuity and informed guesswork required to make sense of weather and climate
Robert L. Dorit
A review of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins lays out the evidence for evolution and writes engagingly about the mechanisms that drive the evolutionary process. But the book’s great virtue, says Dorit, is that it reminds the reader of the power of a single idea: descent with modification
Frank N. von Hippel
A review of Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly, by Michael D. Gordin. Offering a new perspective on the early U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship, Gordin describes the key decisions made about nuclear weapons policy while the United States had the only bombs
Rick MacPherson
A review of Darwin in Galápagos: Footsteps to a New World, by K. Thalia Grant and Gregory B. Estes; Galápagos at the Crossroads: Pirates, Biologists, Tourists, and Creationists Battle for Darwin’s Cradle of Evolution, by Carol Ann Bassett; and Galápagos: Preserving Darwin’s Legacy, by Tui De Roy, editor and principal photographer. These three books offer a portrait of the beauty, diversity and fragility of the islands where Darwin did so much of his evolutionary thinking.
Jared Farmer
A review of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country, by Marsha Weisiger. U.S. government officials in the 1930s told the Navajos that they needed to drastically thin their flocks in order to save the Colorado Plateau from severe overgrazing. But this well-intentioned program had dire consequences
Brian Hayes
A review of Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts, by Philip Ball. This trilogy of books about the modern science of shape, pattern and form is a grand tour of self-organizing systems, says Hayes
Ralf Dahm
A review of Science: A Four Thousand Year History, by Patricia Fara. It’s hard to imagine compressing 4,000 years of scientific history into 400 pages, but Fara succeeds at it, says Dahm, and “compellingly shows how insightful a backward glance can be”
Craig McClain
A review of Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King, by Brad Matsen. Matsen portrays Cousteau as a complex man of contradictions, a legendary figure whose life was on a downward arc for the two decades leading up to his death in 1997
Total Records : 11