Volume 99 | Number 3 | May-June 2011
Noel M. Swerdlow
A review of Galileo, by J. L. Heilbron, and Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, by David Wootton. These two fascinating biographies of the famous scientist contain many incidents that will be new to nearly every reader; Heilbron’s excels in its detailed account of Galileo’s scientific work
William J. Rankin
A review of Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know, by Katy Börner. Börner presents 18 maps of science meant to serve as tools for understanding scientific literature. These graphic portrayals of scientific authorship show that clear disciplinary boundaries are the exception rather than the rule, says Rankin
Simon A. Cole
A review of The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence, by David H. Kaye, and Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties, by Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli. Both of these books are valuable, says Cole, but they’re quite different: Kaye provides a history of the disputes over the legal admissibility of DNA evidence during the early and mid-1990s, and Krimsky and Simoncelli address the privacy and civil-liberties concerns associated with law-enforcement DNA databases
Mary Jo Nye
A review of Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, by Lauren Redniss. Redniss’s extraordinary visual art illuminates a spare and poetic biography of the Curies, which is interspersed with vignettes on the uses and perils of the radioactive elements they studied
David H. DeVorkin
A review of Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet, by K. Maria D. Lane. The Mars canal craze that seized the public imagination around the turn of the 20th century has a surprising amount to teach us about ourselves, our institutions and what constitutes evidence and argument
Silvan S. Schweber
A review of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence M. Krauss. This biography has much to recommend it, says Schweber. He praises Krauss’s treatment of those parts of Feynman’s physics having to do with QED, weak interactions and quantum computing, but criticizes him for portraying Feynman as a mythic hero and minimizing the importance of the contributions of other remarkable individuals
Rasmus E. Benestad
A review of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, by James Rodger Fleming. In this history of weather modification, which covers everything from the rainmaking efforts of charlatans to proposed geoengineering solutions for anthropogenic global warming, Fleming emphasizes the folly of such attempts at control
Simone Vernez, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee
A review of The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine, by Francis S. Collins, The $1,000 Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine, by Kevin Davies, and Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, by Misha Angrist. Three recent books portray the challenges that lie ahead as we begin to try to incorporate individual genomic data into health care
Michael Szpir
A review of The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds, by Richard Crossley. Crossley has crammed more than 10,000 photographs of birds onto this book’s 640 plates, each of which presents a single species in a lifelike scene typical of its habitat