Book Review

Bridging the Millennia

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, with Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner and Thomas R. Trautmann. The articles in this volume stress the very remote past of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era, says Renfrew, and then leap to modernity without sufficiently considering the mediating effects of ancient civilizations.

A Drier and Hotter Future

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, by William deBuys. DeBuys reports on how and why the precipitation and ecology of the Southwest are changing in unpredictable and nonlinear ways

Exploring the Dark Universe

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek. Panek has a talent for elucidating difficult concepts and explains the history of dark energy beautifully, says Feng

The Battle Between Intuition and Deliberation

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman explores the capabilities, faults, biases and pervasive influence of intuitive thought

Two Journeys Through the Human Past

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life, by Martin Meredith, and The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution, by Dean Falk. Both of these books focus on controversies over how to distinguish what is apelike from what is humanlike in early hominin species

Two Mavericks

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbrück, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology, by Gino Segrè. Segrè insightfully narrates the personal and professional lives of Delbrück and Gamow and explains their scientific contributions

The Folly of “Sustainable Cities”?

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, by Andrew Ross. Ross shows how power, class, greed and prejudice shape the micropolitics of the pursuit of urban sustainability in Phoenix

Everyman’s Physics

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything, by Margaret Wertheim. Wertheim wants mainstream scientists to give the work of “outsider physicists” the same sort of attention that folk art has gotten from the elite art community

Trust in Neurons

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells us about Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland regards oxytocin as fundamental to morality, but what is that hormone’s role in a decision to send a $50 check to Oxfam, wonders Richards

Murkiness in Numerical Computing

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Handbook of Floating-point Arithmetic, by Jean-Michel Muller, Nicolas Brisebarre, Florent de Dinechin, Claude-Pierre Jeannerod, Vincent Lefèvre, Guillaume Melquiond, Nathalie Revol, Damien Stehlé and Serge Torres. In the borderland between mathematics and computer science, correct answers are not always to be had, says Hayes—particularly if we demand efficiency

Tackling Infinity

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, by Frank Close. The book’s core strength, says Riordan, is its discussion of how the electromagnetic and weak forces were combined into the electroweak force

Harms to Health from the Pursuit of Profits

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:00 EST

A review of Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, by Harriet A. Washington. Washington offers vivid narrative vignettes of various travesties that have resulted from the commercialization of science and health care

Four Experimental Lives

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of The Philosophical Breakfast Club, by Laura J. Snyder. “Snyder succeeds famously in evoking the excitement, variety and wide-open sense of possibility of the scientific life in 19th-century Britain,” says Daston

Exploring Matter and the Cosmos

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, by Lisa Randall. Randall brings her audience up to date on the status of her theory of warped geometry in extra dimensions as the Large Hadron Collider begins its work; she also reflects on the nature of science, emphasizing the importance of issues of scale. The book’s high point, says Pesic, is her description of the LHC, and in particular her lucid and compelling explanation of how it will detect the fleeting events it generates

The Geography of Illness

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground, by Tom Koch. Koch’s chronological review of the practice of medical mapping shows that its flourishing in the 19th century involved a reconceptualization of disease as essentially and not merely incidentally spatial. The book is beautifully produced, says Hamlin, with fascinating maps, but it is less substantive than it should be

Quantum Subversives

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of Coming of Age with Quantum Information: Notes on a Paulian Idea, by Christopher A. Fuchs. Fuchs’s e-mail correspondence with friends and colleagues from 1995 to 2000 about philosophical ideas in quantum physics shows that debates about the fundamental nature of our world are very much alive. The book is not easy reading and is not a coherent treatise, notes Cavalcanti, “but in it readers will find a delightfully poetic vision for our world”

Inverting the Turing Test

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means To Be Alive, by Brian Christian. Christian uses the hook of pursuing the “most human human” award in the Loebner Prize competition among chatbots to explore a wide range of topics related to issues of language use by humans and computers, including Markov chains, information theory, text compression, phonagnosia, speed dating, and the coherence of personality

Civil Liberties and the War on Smallpox

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of Pox: An American History, by Michael Willrich. Willrich describes a five-year wave of smallpox epidemics that swept the United States starting in 1898 and discusses the violence, social conflict and political contention those epidemics generated when authorities began using force to compel vaccination

Mr. Melville’s Whale

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean’s Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature, by Richard Ellis. Drawing on the historical observations of whalers and on recent research on living whales, Ellis discourses on fascinating aspects of sperm-whale biology and behavior; his chapters on the devastation wreaked by whaling are particularly absorbing

Information and Human Society

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EST

A review of The Information, by James Gleick. Gleick’s ambitious goal is to present information as an independent force that has been harnessed through the efforts of brilliant pioneers such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon