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SCIENTISTS' NIGHTSTAND: SEAN CARROLL

Physicist Sean Carroll discovered George Gamow's One, Two, Three ... Infinity as a boy and "fell in love with it," he says. "Gamow was a theoretical physicist (one of the pioneers of nuclear fission), but he had wide-ranging interests and a madcap sense of humor. . . . It was certainly one of the books that got me interested in science."  Review Carroll's recent reading and recommendations.

OFF THE SHELF

Edge has an interview with German journalist/editor/publisher Frank Schirrmacher about human behavior in a modern information society; a roundtable discussion with Yale computer scientist David Gelernter about cloud computing, along with a manifesto authored by Gelernter; and the answers provided by 167 people to the question “How is the Internet changing the way you think?”

The New York Review of Books has a review by H. Allen Orr of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, a review by Garry Kasparov of Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, and an article by Jerome Groopman titled “Health Care: Who Knows ‘Best’?”

The London Review of Books has an essay by Steven Shapin titled “The Darwin Show,” in which he discusses, among other things, Richard Dawkins’s latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth. Also in the LRB, a review by David Kaiser of Frank Wilczek’s The Lightness of Being, and a review by Michael Wood of the movie Avatar.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Incest and Influence.

The New York Times has a review by Caroline Fraser of Wilding the World.

Audubon has a review of Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists, and an excerpt by Michael Engelhard from Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North about an encounter with musk oxen.

In Slate, Johann Hari reviews James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren; Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas, about higher education in America; and Michael Agger reviews Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.

Mark Sorkin reviews Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, by Peter Maass, in The Nation.

A recent Washington Post new-in-paperback roundup features a combined review of Snark and The Compassionate Instinct.

Peter D. Kramer reviews The Hidden Brain in the Washington Post; an interview with the author, Shankar Vedantam, appears in Salon.

Also in Salon, Gabriel Winant remembers historian Howard Zinn.

FORTHCOMING TITLES OF INTEREST

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

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems, by Henry Petroski (Knopf Doubleday, February)

To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India, by Bruce Rich, with a foreword by Amartya Sen and an afterword by the Dalai Lama (Beacon Press, March)

Among the Great Apes: Adventures on the Trail of Mankind’s Closest Relatives, by Paul Raffaele (HarperCollins, February)

Einstein's God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit, by Krista Tippett (Penguin Group USA, February)

March of the Microbes: Sighting the Unseen, by John L. Ingraham (Harvard University Press, February)

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Additive Combinatorics, by Terence Tao and Van H. Vu (Cambridge University Press, $48)

Cities of the World: A History in Maps, by Peter Whitfield (University of California Press, $35)

Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, by Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak (Oxford University Press, $16.95)

The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos, by Michael D. Lemonick (Atlas and Co./W. W. Norton, $14.95)

Sand: The Never-Ending Story, by Michael Welland (University of California Press, $17.95)

Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, by Noah Heringman (Cornell University Press, $29.95)

Crude Awakenings: Global Oil Security and American Foreign Policy, by Steve A. Yetiv (Cornell University Press, $24.95)

Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries, by Jennifer Clapp (Cornell University Press, $22.95)

Heal Thyself: A Doctor at the Peak of His Medical Career, Destroyed by Alcohol—and the Personal Miracle That Brought Him Back, by Olivier Ameisen (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $16)

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle (Yale University Press, $18)

The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease, by Alice Wexler (Yale University Press, $20)

Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist’s Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power, by Kelly Lambert (Basic Books, $15.95)

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, by David Berlinski (Basic Books, $15.95)

Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality, by Martha Nussbaum (Basic Books, $18.95)

NEW EDITIONS, REISSUES, UPDATES

The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters, revised edition, by Diane Coyle (Princeton University Press, $21.95). Reviewed in the September–October 2007 issue

Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe, by Mitchell Begelman and Martin Rees, second edition (Cambridge University Press, $36.99 paper)

Flatland, a new edition of the 1884 book by Edwin Abbott Abbott, with notes and commentary by William F. Lindgren and Thomas F. Banchoff (Cambridge University Press, $50 hardcover, $14.99 paper)

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, revised edition, by Barry Glassner (Basic Books, $16.95)

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, with new material, by Dennis Dutton (Bloomsbury Press, $15 paper)

Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, 15th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, by Dennis Covington (Da Capo Press, $14.95 paper)

COMING NEXT MONTH

Scientists' Bookshelf Monthly previews the March-April books section of American Scientist magazine, in which Joan B. Silk reviews The Age of Empathy, primatologist Frans de Waal's exploration of the biological basis for fellow-feeling in human societies; Cosma Shalizi assesses Predicting the Unpredictable, Susan Hough's assessment of the obstacles to earthquake prediction; and Kim Sterelny considers Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life, a collection of essays on the famed Harvard paleontologist edited by Warren D. Allmon, Patricia H. Kelley and Robert M. Ross.