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SCIENTISTS' NIGHTSTAND: STEVEN WEINBERG

For a book group, physicist Steven Weinberg recently read Wuthering Heights. "I thought I had read it years ago, but I evidently hadn't, because I was surprised at how great it is," he says. "Heathcliff is not just a romantic hero, looking something like Laurence Olivier; he is also satanically evil." Review Weinberg's recent reading and recommendations.

MARCH-APRIL 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fellow Feeling
A review of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal. de Waal sets out to demonstrate that empathy is "a biologically grounded capacity that all people share"
Joan Silk

Ready or Not
A review of Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction, by Susan Hough. As recently as the 1970s, it seemed feasible that scientists would soon be able to say precisely when and where earthquakes would strike and what their impact would be, but most geologists now believe that that goal is almost certainly unattainable
Cosma Shalizi

Explicating Gould
A review of Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life, edited by Warren D. Allmon, Patricia H. Kelley and Robert M. Ross. Because Stephen Jay Gould was ambivalent about or perhaps even hostile toward cladistics, population genetics and ecology, he was only partially connected to the mainstream of developing evolutionary thought, says Sterelny
Kim Sterelny

The Science of Parenting
A review of Nurtureshock: New Thinking about Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Bronson and Merryman point to scientific findings that challenge some common assumptions about young people and parenting
Ethan Remmel

The Godly Scientist
A review of Boyle: Between God and Science, by Michael Hunter. Hunter places Boyle’s scientific accomplishments in a context of lifelong piety and serious moral concerns, says Golinski
Jan Golinski

Land Portraits
A review of Mapping the World: Stories of Geography, by Caroline and Martine Laffon
Brian Hayes

Heading South
A review of Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, by Frank Jacobs
Anna Lena Phillips

Cruising for a Bruising
A review of Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth, by Alanna Mitchell. Mitchell sets out on a personal voyage of discovery, accompanying top ocean scientists on expeditions that reveal the toll various assaults are taking on the global ocean
Rick MacPherson

The Conditions for Existence
A review of Not by Design: Retiring Darwin’s Watchmaker, by John O. Reiss. Reiss aims to reassert a thoroughgoing materialism and remove teleology from our vision of nature, says Dupré
John Dupré

Avian Appreciation
A review of Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, by Jeremy Mynott, and The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live, by Colin Tudge. Both of these books explore what birds mean to us and what we can learn from living with them
Aaron French

Short takes on two books
Reviews of Fordlandia and Crow Planet

OFF THE SHELF

A short story by E. O. Wilson about the life and death of an ant queen and her colony appeared recently in The New Yorker. New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman interviewed Wilson for the Book Bench blog.

BioScience has reviews of Joan Roughgarden’s The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness, Lewis Wolpert’s How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells and The Lives of Ants, by Laurent Keller and Élisabeth Gordon.

In the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen reviews The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, by Ben Mezrich, and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, by Julia Angwin.

In the New York Times, Sandeep Jauhar reviews Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. You can read the book’s first chapter here, and you can listen to Gawande discuss the book in a podcast here.

Also in the Times, Lisa Margonelli reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot; Claudia Goldin reviews Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected; and Katherine Bouton reviews two books about early-19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning.

In the Opinionator blog at the New York Times site, Steven Strogatz has begun a series of posts about mathematics with an essay about numbers. The second installment in the series deals with arithmetic and the visualization of numbers.

The Economist has a review of Philip Ball’s The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It.

In CERN Courier, you will find two pages of reviews covering Voyage to the Heart of Matter: The ATLAS Experiment at CERN, by Anton Radevsky and Emma Sanders; Paul Halpern’s Collider, Frank Close’s Nothing; and E=mc²: Why Should We Care?, by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.

FORTHCOMING TITLES OF INTEREST

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2010)

The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, by Anil Ananthaswamy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March)

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March)

Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, by Stephen S. Hall (Knopf Doubleday, March)

An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World, by Anders Halverson (Yale University Press, March)

In Praise of Science: Curiosity, Understanding, and Progress, by Sander Bais (The MIT Press, March)

The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Exploration into How Life Organizes and Supports Itself, by Mary Theberge and John Theberge (McClelland and Stewart, March)

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, by Alva Noë (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $15). Reviewed in the July–August 2009 issue.

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, by D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University Press, $21.95). Nanoviewed in the March–April 2009 issue.

Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know, by Jeremy Bernstein (Cambridge University Press, $19.99)

Einstein’s Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe, by Evalyn Gates (W. W. Norton, $16.95)

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, by Keith E. Stanovich (Yale University Press, $22)

Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, by Robert Poole (Yale University Press, $17)

The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppresive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back, by Alan Michael Collinge (Beacon Press, $14)

The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century, by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz (Beacon Press, $16)

The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up, by Kieran Egan (Yale University Press, $20)

Bear Wrangler: Memoirs of an Alaska Pioneer Biologist, by Will Troyer (University of Alaska Press, $19.95)

Jetpack Dreams: One Man’s Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was, by Mac Montandon (Da Capo Press, $15.95)

The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History, by Justin Marozzi (Da Capo Press, $16.95)

Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm, by Steven I. Apfelbaum (Beacon Press, $16)

Art, Community and Environment: Educational Perspectives, edited by Glen Coutts and Timo Jokela (Intellect Books, $35)

NEW EDITIONS, REISSUES, UPDATES

Galapagos: Islands Born of Fire, 10th anniversary edition, by Tui De Roy (Princeton University Press, $29.95 cloth)

Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, by Sigfried Giedion, with an introduction by Witold Rybczynski (New York Review Books, $27.95 paper). Originally published in 1948.

Monuments of the Incas, second edition, by John Hemming, photographs by Edward Ranney (Thames and Hudson, $45)

The Age of Reptiles: The Art and Science of Rudolph Zallinger’s Great Dinosaur Mural at Yale, second edition, compiled and edited by Rosemary Volpe (Yale University Press, $24.95 paper)

The Inventor’s Bible: How to Market and License Your Brilliant Ideas, third edition, by Ronald Louis Docie, Sr. (Ten Speed Press, $24.99 paper)

PROBLEMS? COMMENTS?

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