Volume 99 | Number 4 | July-August 2011
Sheldon Krimsky
A review of Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, by Philip Mirowski. Mirowski explores the historical and ideological roots of the growing commercialization of academic science.
Peter Woit
A review of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, by David Kaiser. Kaiser maintains that members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group—New Age physicists who held brainstorming sessions at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the late 1970s—planted seeds that later blossomed into today’s field of quantum information science
Cosma Shalizi
A review of Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg. This wide-ranging and thought-provoking textbook explores social networks (especially those defined by transactions), computer networks, and places where these intersect
Brian Hayes
A review of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, by Oren Harman. George Price, “a real-life Forrest Gump,” was present at the making of the bomb and the development of the transistor but is best known for reformulating the idea of kin selection in evolution
Simon Baron-Cohen
A review of The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, by V. S. Ramachandran. By showing how neuroscientists set out to make sense of the brain’s mysteries, this book may inspire a new generation of students to enter the field
Daniel Simberloff
A review of Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, by Joe Roman. Using the Endangered Species Act of 1973 as a springboard, Roman explores a number of conservation issues, using disputes over various species to reveal problems and conflicts that are pervasive in conservation worldwide
Alix Cooper
A review of Histories of Scientific Observation, edited by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck. The essays in this collection explore the rich history of difficulties, problems and dilemmas that have beset the practice of scientific observation over the past 15 centuries
Jacqueline Olds
A review of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle. Turkle reflects on the ways we are being changed by technology that provides us with substitutes for face-to-face connections with real people