Critical Compendium

Natural Selections, by David P. Barash

“Truth be told, (David P.) Barash’s line of inquiry, like Richard Dawkins’ or Steven Pinker’s, does result in bracing and unsettling ideas. Through the lens of evolutionary psychology, we are forced to face our ancient self, that bestial creature that knows nothing of atomic bombs or jihad, marriage or MySpace, but still haunts our body, fuels our emotions and rules our lives — our genetic identity.” Read the review at LA Weekly.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 02.28.08 | Comments: None

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History Of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin

“For the first time, Americans have the chance to meet an ancient ancestor. Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old, human-like fossil from Ethiopia, is here on tour. For the next six years, you can visit her at museums across the country and stare into the mirror of your own past. But in Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin describes a fossil named Tiktaalik that makes Lucy’s time on Earth seem like just yesterday. At 375 million years old, Tiktaalik (which means “large freshwater fish” in Inuit) sports a curious mix of features that mark it as an evolutionary milestone, a “beautiful intermediate between fish and land-living animals.” In its fossilized bones, we see a flat head and body, a functional neck and other features that presage what’s to come, all mixed in with fish features like fins and scales. Most surprising of all, Tiktaalik has a wrist joint. “Bend your wrist back and forth,” Shubin instructs his readers. “Open and close your hand. When you do this, you are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik.” Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 02.20.08 | Comments: None

Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic, by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel

“A few years ago a psychologist and a philosopher got into an argument over whether we can accurately describe our thoughts. “Yes,” said the psychologist; with training and the help of my special technique, we can accurately describe our thoughts. The philosopher doubted it. To resolve their argument, they recruited a young woman who agreed tell them her thoughts, so that they could argue over whether she was credible. This is not an episode from a Preston Sturgis comedy, but the actual procedure through which Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel produced their remarkable book, “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic.” The premise is so ludicrous that it might seem impossible for anything to come of it, but this underestimates the skill of the authors, particularly Schwitzgebel, the philosopher, whose talent for straight-faced mischief has been displayed in his some of his other writing.” Read the review at Salon.com.

Filed under: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science | Posted 02.04.08 | Comments: None

The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr

“In his magisterial but flawed new book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” (Nicholas) Carr predicts that “software as a service” is about to revolutionize the technology industry. Forget Microsoft (and, for that matter, the Mac); the personal-computing era is over. And the transformation of computing into a utility is not merely the next wrinkle in the continuing metamorphic story of digital technology, Carr says, but rather its teleological culmination, its final destiny.” Read the review at Salon.com.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 02.04.08 | Comments: None

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret, by Seth Shulman

“Does the right person always get credit for a great invention? Was Thomas Edison or the Englishman Joseph Swan responsible for the light bulb? Did Al Gore or some other geek invent the Internet? Did Alexander Graham Bell steal from Elisha Gray a key idea behind the telephone? Such questions can fuel debates between historians of technology and champions of neglected genius. Science journalist Seth Shulman did not set out to tackle the Bell-Gray controversy, but a chance discovery made the challenge irresistible.” Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Science | Posted 02.04.08 | Comments: None

Freedom and Neurobiology, by John Searle

“As Searle disarmingly explains in his introduction to Freedom and Neurobiology, he produced this latest volume by accident. In 2001, he gave two lectures at the Sorbonne and agreed to their publication in French translation, thinking that they would in due course appear in some little-read journal. He was pleasantly surprised when some time later he received copies of an elegant little volume called Liberté et neurobiologie. Translations into German, Spanish, Italian and Chinese quickly followed, by which point it seemed silly not to have an English version. Inadvertent though it may be, this book offers a good introduction to Searle’s recent work.” Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

Filed under: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science | Posted 02.02.08 | Comments: 1 Comment

Science and Islam, by Muzaffar Iqbal

“Muzaffar Iqbal, who is a well-known scientist and Islamic scholar based in Canada, has written a book about science and Islam that is weighted towards the Middle Ages and has nothing to say about camel breeding or falconry. He has an agreeably caustic and aggressive approach to outdated and erroneous ideas about the history of science. The book is a polemical essay, rather than a history, and welcome as such. One of the targets is the notion that Islamic science was little more than a reheated version of ancient Greek science.” Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

Filed under: Essays, Nonfiction, Religion, Science | Posted 02.02.08 | Comments: None

The Mind of the Market, by Michael Shermer

“Have you ever wondered how people develop trust and live together peacefully? Michael Shermer’s new book uses psychology and evolution to examine the root of these human achievements. He notes that the original environment in which people evolved, namely the small groups in hunter-gatherer societies, helped people develop altruism and cooperative behavior.” Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.25.08 | Comments: None

Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, by George Makari

“In his exhaustive and, to be quite frank, exhausting book, “Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis” (Harper, 614 pages, $29.95), George Makari gives us a blow-by-blow account of both Freud’s intellectual development and the institutional development of psychoanalysis.” Read the review at the New York Sun.

Filed under: Biography, Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.22.08 | Comments: None

Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt

“William Maxwell called memory “a form of storytelling … in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw”. John Stuart Mill thought it “the present consciousness of a past sensation”. The science contributors to this anthology locate the various functions of memory in different areas of the brain. Whatever it may be, and wherever it may reside, it is the single human function that has provoked speculation from Plato through St Augustine – both given due attention here – to Jane Austen, Tennyson, Virginia Woolf and the cognitive scientists and psychologists of today. That shower of names may give some flavour of the book’s scope. In fact, it is hard to do justice in a review to the range and depth of a collection which aligns brief sound-bites – Lewis Carroll, Anthony Powell – with entries that run over several pages.” Read the review at the Financial Times.

Filed under: Anthology, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science | Posted 01.18.08 | Comments: None

Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space, by Michael Belfiore

“(The) new manned spaceflight industry is now comprehensively chronicled for the first time by freelance journalist Michael Belfiore, a frequent contributor to Popular Science. Rocketeers gives a behind-the-scenes look at several of the new space companies, most of which formed in the 1990s and are only now hitting their stride, and a few of which are of the new millennium, including Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies and Bezos’s Blue Origin. Belfiore vividly depicts the spaceflights themselves, as described to him by participants like Brian Binnie, the pilot of Rutan’s SpaceShipOne during the winning X-Prize flight (and a former colleague of mine at the Rotary Rocket company).” Read the review at the New Atlantis.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.17.08 | Comments: None

Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, by John Allen Paulos

“John Allen Paulos is a mathematician who teaches at Temple University and also a talented popularizer. In previous books he has trained his mathematical eye on humor, the stock market and what he reads in the newspaper. Now he has taken on God. Paulos is not a credulous man. He sees things, he tells us, in the cold light of logic and probability. (His stock market book told how he was suckered into losing a bundle on WorldCom stock, but never mind.) In “Irreligion,” Paulos intends to expose the “inherent illogic” of arguments for the existence of God. He finds these supposed proofs to be, by and large, a load of tripe.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Religion, Science | Posted 01.16.08 | Comments: 1 Comment

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge

‘Brain plasticity is the topic of Norman Doidge’s new book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. About half of the chapters describe the basic science of plasticity, profiling major discoveries from the last 50 years and the scientists responsible for those discoveries. Doidge himself is a psychiatrist, so the other half of the chapters contain his reflections on how the idea of plasticity could be translated into psychiatric therapies.’ Read the review at the Literary Review of Canada.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.09.08 | Comments: None

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin

‘Do not be put off by the vaunting title. J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the first atomic bomb, was not a mythical hero but a damaged and limited human being, as Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin amply demonstrate. His main problem was his prodigious brain-power, as unmistakable as a withered limb, which made it hard for him to mix with other people, or even recognise them as the same species.’ Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

Filed under: Biography, Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.07.08 | Comments: None

Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, by Richard Fortey

‘When Herbert Wernham died, he left – surely against his better judgment – a curiously personal archive. Wernham was a botany curator in what was then, nearly 100 years ago, the natural history section of the British Museum. He was not good with money, colleagues recalled. He had greater success with women. We know this because he recorded all his “conquests” in alphabetical order in a card index. The lucky girls weren’t just named. On each card was a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. “Once a curator, always a curator,” muses Richard Fortey in Dry Store Room No 1, his affectionate portrayal of the institution in which he spent his working life. Having retired in 2006 as the Natural History Museum’s senior paleontologist, Fortey sets out to lead us through its physical and social labyrinth.’ Read the review at the Times Literary Supplement.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 01.07.08 | Comments: None

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens

‘The author of “God Is Not Great” seems to have won the battle for World’s Best Atheist (sorry, Richard Dawkins), and here has collected a far-reaching range of likeminded nonbelievers.’ Read the review at Time Out Chicago.

Filed under: Anthology, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion, Science | Posted 12.20.07 | Comments: None

Love and Sex with Robots, by David Levy

‘An artificial-intelligence expert who clearly isn’t afraid of artificial whoopie, (David) Levy predicts that by the year 2050, “robots will be hugely attractive to humans as companions,” and “the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s publishing sex manuals combined.” Yeah, he’s into it.’ Read the review at Time Out Chicago.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 12.20.07 | Comments: None

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, by Jeff Warren

‘In “The Head Trip,” (Jeff) Warren plunges into mundane and exotic states of mind with the verve of an intrepid travel writer. His approach is simple. Identifying about a dozen distinct modes of consciousness, from dream states to hypnosis to “the zone” that athletes wax poetic about, he endeavors to experience each one firsthand. Woven together with up-to-the-minute scientific research, it is a fascinating ride.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 12.20.07 | Comments: None

The Intelligence of Flowers, by Maurice Maeterlinck, translated by Philip Mosley

‘As a sequel to his enormously successful 1901 essay, “The Life of the Bee,” which sold an astonishing 250,000 copies, (Maurice) Maeterlinck’s 1907 essay “The Intelligence of Flowers” (nicely translated here from the French by Philip Mosley) melds religious intuition and scientific observation. He describes numerous examples of intelligence in flowers as they seek to reproduce, and by analogy insists that the “genius” observed in the behavior of flowers resembles the wisdom of people.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Essays, Nonfiction, Religion, Science | Posted 12.20.07 | Comments: None

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark

‘Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change? In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection.’ Read the review at the International Herald Tribune.

Filed under: History, Nonfiction, Science | Posted 12.14.07 | Comments: None

Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, by Gwyneth Cravens

‘Nuclear power is back. As temperatures rise, fission is starting to look green compared with fossil fuels . . . Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist and former anti-nuclear protester, is one of the technology’s new apostles. In “Power to Save the World,” she takes a journey through America’s nuclear heartland, from the New Mexico Mining Museum, with its display cases of uranium ore chunks, to the belly of Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, still waiting for loads of radioactive waste to bury.’ Read the review at Newsday

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 11.29.07 | Comments: None

The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA, by Edward Ball

‘Several years ago, Edward Ball took possession of an ancient family desk and discovered something in a locked compartment that to him must have seemed almost predestined. He found a collection of carefully labeled and dated locks of hair from nine of his 19th-century relatives, the oldest specimen dating from 1824 . . . . “The Genetic Strand” is the tale of Ball’s efforts to extract truth from these preserved hair specimens, and of what he learned about the power and pitfalls of DNA testing as a tool for exploring ancestry.’ Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 11.27.07 | Comments: None

Perfect Figures: The Lore of Numbers And How We Learned to Count, by Bunny Crumpacker

‘Some fishing boats trawl weighted nets across the seabed, hauling up everything they can possibly find, dumping the odd catch onto the deck for sorting. “Perfect Figures” does something like this with number lore. Were it not for Bunny Crumpacker’s poetic asides, one might mistake this text for the output of a Web-crawling search engine.’ Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 11.27.07 | Comments: None

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley

‘We’ve all run into people whose endearing charms camouflage a Machiavellian core. Even after we have been burned repeatedly, our good nature persuades us to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are, writes author Barbara Oakley, “successfully sinister.” How do some people get that way, and what allows them to survive and often rise to positions of leadership? Those are the central questions of Ms. Oakley’s fascinating new book, Evil Genes.’ Read the review at the Dallas Morning News. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 11.21.07 | Comments: None

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

‘Thanks to advances in neuroscience, a new model of the brain has emerged: dynamic, plastic, constantly regenerating and reorganizing itself, processing stimuli with such creative virtuosity that it’s hard to tell where reality ends and our mental translation of it begins. Optical illusions, in which the brain creates shapes, colors and movement absent in the images, are but one example. Jonah Lehrer, a science journalist with a neuroscience background, argues in “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” that this model is not as new as it seems.’ Read the review at the Baltimore Sun.

Filed under: Nonfiction, Science | Posted 11.10.07 | Comments: None