New at the Library

Description: Our politicians make vital decisions and declarations every day that rely on official data. But should all statistics be trusted? House of Commons Library statistician Georgina Sturge draws back the curtain on how governments of the past and present have been led astray by figures littered with inconsistency, guesswork and uncertainty. Discover how a Hungarian businessman’s bright idea caused half a million people to go missing from UK migration statistics. Find out why it’s possible for two politicians to disagree over whether poverty has gone up or down, using the same official numbers, and for both to be right at the same time. And hear about how policies like ID cards, super-casinos and stopping ex-convicts from reoffending failed to live up to their promise because they were based on shaky data. With stories that range from the troubling to the empowering to the downright absurd, Sturge reveals secrets from the usually closed-off world of policy-making. It also suggests how–once we understand the human story behind the numbers–we can make more informed choices about who to trust, and when. (publ.)

Description: Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics–we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly-understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray–statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter. Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. He uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, this is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful. (publ.)

Calmar Campus

Calmar Campus

Description: We often think of mathematics and literature as polar opposites, as different as they come. But what if, instead, they were inextricably, even fundamentally, linked? In her clear, insightful, laugh-out-loud funny debut, Professor Sarah Hart shows us the myriad connections between math and literature, and how understanding those connections can enhance our enjoyment of both. Did you know, for instance, that Moby-Dick is full of sophisticated geometry? That James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novels are deliberately checkered with mathematical references? That George Eliot was obsessed with statistics? That Jurassic Park is undergirded by fractal patterns? That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote mathematician characters? From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Professor Hart shows how math and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe. As the first woman to hold England’s oldest mathematical chair, Professor Hart is the ideal tour guide, taking us on an unforgettable journey through the books we thought we knew, revealing new layers of beauty and wonder. As she promises, you're going to need a bigger bookcase. (publ.)

Description: A bird flits overhead. It’s an everyday occurrence, repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times daily by creatures across the world. It’s something so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that sometimes we forget how extraordinary it is. But take that in for a moment. This animal flies. It. Flies. The miracle of flight has evolved in hugely diverse ways, with countless variations to flapping and gliding, hovering and diving, murmurating and migrating. Conjuring lost worlds, ancient species and ever-shifting ecologies, this exhilarating new book is a mesmerising encounter with fourteen flying species: from the first fluttering insect of 300 million years ago to the crested pterosaurs of the Mesozoic Era, from hummingbirds that co-evolved with rainforest flowers to the wonders of dragonfly, albatross, pipistrelle and monarch butterfly with which we share the planet today. (publ.)

Description: The never-before-told story of one of Canada’s most influential scientists and the discovery of plate tectonics, a pivotal development that forever altered how we think of our planet. In 1961, a Canadian geologist named John “Jock” Tuzo Wilson (1908–1993) jettisoned decades of strongly held opposition to theories of moving continents and embraced the idea that they drift across the surface of the Earth. Tuzo tells the fascinating life story of Tuzo Wilson, from his early forays as a teenaged geological assistant working on the remote Canadian Shield in the 1920s to his experiences as a civilian-soldier in the Second World War to his ultimate role as the venerated father of plate tectonics. Illuminating how science is done, this book blends Tuzo’s life story with the development of the theory of plate tectonics, showing along the way how scientific theories are debated, rejected, and accepted. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 26 Mar. 2021 p. 26.
Description: Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth? We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away. Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have been in existence for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than fifty times its total volume of liquid water. Could there be organisms living in their depths? Alien Oceans reveals the science behind the thrilling quest to find out. Kevin Peter Hand is one of today’s leading NASA scientists, and his pioneering research has taken him on expeditions around the world. In this captivating account of scientific discovery, he brings together insights from planetary science, biology, and the adventures of scientists like himself to explain how we know that oceans exist within moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. He shows how the exploration of Earth’s oceans is informing our understanding of the potential habitability of these icy moons, and draws lessons from what we have learned about the origins of life on our own planet to consider how life could arise on these distant worlds. Alien Oceans describes what lies ahead in our search for life in our solar system and beyond, setting the stage for the transformative discoveries that may await us. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 24 May 2021 p. 74.
Description: We live at a time when billions have access to unbelievably powerful technology. The most extraordinary tool that has been invented in the last century, the smartphone, is forcing radical changes in the way we live and work–and unlike previous technologies it is in the hands of just about everyone. Coupled with the rise of social media, this has ushered in a new era of deeply personal technology, where individuals now have the ability to work, create and communicate on their own terms, rather than wait for permission from giant corporations or governments. At least that is the optimistic view. This book takes readers through this turbulent era, as related by an author with a ringside seat to the key moments of the technology revolution. We remember the excitement and wonder that came with the arrival of Apple’s iPhone with all the promise it offered. We see tech empires rise and fall as these devices send shockwaves through every industry and leave the corporate titans of the analogue era floundering in their wake. We see that early utopianism about the potential of the mobile social revolution to transform society for the better fade, as criminals, bullies and predators poison the well of social media. And we hear from those at the forefront of the tech revolution, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Tim Berners-Lee, Martha Lane-Fox and Jimmy Wales, to gain their unique insights and predictions for what may be to come. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 5 Mar. 2022 p. 70; NYT/BR 27 Mar. 2022 p. 14.
Description: The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction. Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves–monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents–The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 12 Apr. 2021 p. 69; Economist 17 July 2021 p. 72.
Description: A golden era of deep-sea discovery is underway. Revolutionary studies in the deep are rewriting the very notion of life on Earth and the rules of what is possible. In the process, the abyss is being revealed as perhaps the most amazing part of our planet, with a topography even more varied and extreme than its Earthbound counterpart. Teeming with unsuspected life, an extraordinary interconnected ecosystem deep below the waves has a huge effect on our daily lives, influencing climate and weather systems, with the potential for much more–good or bad depending on how it is exploited. Currently the fantastic creatures that live in the deep–many of them incandescent in a world without light–and its formations capture and trap vast quantities of carbon that would otherwise poison our atmosphere; and novel bacteria as yet undiscovered hold the promise of potent new medicines. Yet the deep also holds huge mineral riches lusted after by many nations and corporations; mining them could ultimately devastate the planet, compounded by the deepening impacts of ubiquitous pollutants and rampant overfishing. Eloquently and passionately, marine biologist Prof. Helen Scales brings to life the majesty and mystery of an alien realm that nonetheless sustains us, while urgently making clear the price we could pay if it is further disrupted. (publ.)

Reviewed: SA April 2021 p. 72; LR March 2021 p. 16.
Description: When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would. Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned ​a curiosity ​of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA, known as CRISPR. … Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm … Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids? After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020.

Reviewed: PW 24 Jan. 2022 p. 45.
Description: Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don’t know it yet. The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. An asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanished seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life on Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Aug. 2021 p. 37.
Description: Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts–whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead. … Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to re-create life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. … Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab? … Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Feb. 2021 p. 52.
Description: Everyone has heard of the term “pseudoscience,” typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella–astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements–both of which display allegations of “pseudoscience” on all sides–there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. … This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. … Michael D. Gordin guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Reviewed: Economist 9 Apr. 2022 p. 66 (referenced)
Description: On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson’s theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein’s theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. This tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period–such as wristwatches, radio, and film–helped to shape people’s conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival’s legacy–Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. (publ.)

Description: In 2020, an invisible germ–a virus–wholly upended our lives. We’re most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or Covid-19. But viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they were trees. Viruses have been a part of our lives for so long that we are actually part virus: the human genome contains more DNA from viruses than our own genes. Meanwhile, scientists are discovering viruses everywhere they look: in the soil, in the ocean, even in deep caves miles underground. Fully revised and updated, with new illustrations and a new chapter about coronaviruses and the spread of Covid-19, this third edition of Carl Zimmer’s A Planet of Viruses pulls back the veil on this hidden world. It presents the latest research on how viruses hold sway over our lives and our biosphere, how viruses helped give rise to the first life-forms, how viruses are producing new diseases, how we can harness viruses for our own ends, and how viruses will continue to control our fate as long as life endures. (publ.)
Holdings Note: 2nd ed. (2015) at Calmar; call no. 616.9 Zim.

Description: Designing a captivating creature simply for it to exist against a white background and going no further is a purely academic exercise. Designing a creature that can survive in a world, interact with its own and other species, and go on to make an impact, is designing with intent. This is the end goal of creature design and what you will witness in this latest book from industry expert Terryl Whitlatch. With decades of experience in the entertainment industry, developing creatures for Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace and Beowulf, among other films, Whitlatch offers an abundance of valuable advice throughout the Principles of Creature Design. For Whitlatch, there’s no limit to what can be imagined with an open mind, though the journey may not always be an easy one. It’s what she calls “Chasing the unicorn.” We will surely enjoy joining her on her journey, filled with creatures so vivid, whimsical, and elaborate that we will wish–or wonder–if they are real. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 21 Jan. 2021 p. 37.
Description: In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability reckoning, and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment–dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (good old-fashioned AI, or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology’s underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself–what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI’s reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Feb. 2021 p. 20.
Description: Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions? Rare metals are essential to electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines, and solar panels, and also to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. But consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or the environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs of this dependence. This book reveals the dark side of the world that awaits us. It is an undercover tale of a technological odyssey that has promised much, and a look behind the scenes. Behind it all lurks China, which has captured the lion’s share of the ownership and processing of rare metals we now can’t do without. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book shows that by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence–on rare metals that have become vital to our new ecological and digital society. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 7 Oct. 2021 p. 39.
Description: Science is how we understand the world. Yet critical flaws in peer review, statistical methods, and publication procedures have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless-or worse, badly misleading. Drawing on surprising new data from “meta-science” (the science of how science works), Science Fictions documents the errors that have distorted our knowledge on issues as varied as cancer biology, nutrition, genetics, immigration, education, and extraterrestrial life. Stuart Ritchie’s own work challenging an infamous psychology experiment helped spark what’s now widely known as the “replication crisis,” the realization that many supposed scientific truths cannot be relied upon. Now, he reveals the very human biases, mistakes, and deceptions that undermine the scientific endeavor: from contamination in science labs to the secret vaults of failed studies that nobody gets to see; from outright cheating with fake data to the more common but still ruinous temptation to exaggerate mediocre results for a shot at scientific fame. Yet this is far from a counsel of despair. Rather, it’s a defense of the scientific method against the pressures and perverse incentives that lead scientists to bend the rules. By illustrating the ways that science goes wrong, Ritchie gives us the knowledge we need to spot dubious research, and points the way to reforms that might save science from itself.

Reviewed: NYRB 2 July 2020 p. 48.
Description: The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. (publ.)

Scientific knowledge is the most solid and robust kind of knowledge that humans have because of the self-correcting character inherent in its own processes. Nevertheless, anti-evolutionists, climate denialists, and anti-vaxxers, among others, question some of the best-established scientific findings, making claims that are unsupported by empirical evidence. A common aspect of these claims is the reference to the uncertainties in these areas of research, which leads to the conclusion that science is uncertain about evolution, climate change, and vaccination, among others. The truth of the matter is that while the broad picture is clear, there exist--and will always exist--uncertainties about the details of the respective phenomena. In this book Kampourakis and McCain show that uncertainty is an inherent feature of science that does not devalue it. In contrast, uncertainty actually makes science advance because it motivates further research. The first book of its kind, Uncertainty draws on philosophy of science to explain what uncertainty in science is and how it makes science advance. It contrasts evolution, climate change, and vaccination, where the uncertainties are exaggerated, to genetic testing and forensic science where the uncertainties are usually overlooked. Kampourakis and McCain discuss the scientific, psychological, and philosophical aspects of uncertainty in order to explain what it is really about, what kind of problems it actually poses, and why it ultimately makes science advance.

Reviewed: NYRB 25 Feb. 2021 p. 33.
Description: “Can birds smell?” “Is this the same cardinal that was at my feeder last year?” “Do robins ‘hear’ worms?” David Sibley answers the most frequently asked questions about the birds we see most often. This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author. While its focus is on familiar backyard birds–blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees–it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley’s exacting artwork and wide-ranging expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life. (For most species, the primary illustration is reproduced life-sized.) (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 24 May 2021 p. 71.
Description: Almost all of us have sat in a math class, wondering when we'd ever need to know how to find the roots of a polynomial or graph imaginary numbers. And in one sense, we were right: if we needed to, we’d use a computer. But as Emeritus Mathematics Prof. Ian Stewart argues, math isn’t just about boring computations. Rather, it offers us new and profound insights into our world, allowing us to accomplish feats as significant as space exploration and organ donation. From the trigonometry that keeps a satellite in orbit to the prime numbers used by the world’s most advanced security systems to the imaginary numbers that enable augmented reality, math isn’t just relevant to our lives. It is the very fabric of our existence. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 6 June 2021 p. 30.
Description: When Sean Flynn’s neighbor in North Carolina texted “Any chance you guys want a peacock? No kidding!” he stared bewilderedly at his phone. He had never considered whether he wanted a peacock. But as an award-winning magazine writer, this kind of mystery intrigued him. So he, his wife, and their two young sons became the owners of not one but three charming yet fickle birds: Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle. Flynn chronicles his hilarious and heartwarming first year as a peacock owner, from struggling to build a pen to assisting the local bird doctor in surgery to triumphantly watching a peahen lay her first egg. He also examines the history of peacocks, from their appearance in the Garden of Eden to their befuddling Charles Darwin to their bewitching the likes of Flannery O’Connor and Martha Stewart. And fueled by a reporter’s curiosity, he travels across the globe to learn more about the birds firsthand, with stops including a Scottish castle where peacocks have resided for centuries, a southern California community tormented by a serial killer of peacocks, and a Kansas City airport hotel hosting an annual gathering of true peafowl aficionados. At turns comically absurd and deeply poignant, Why Peacocks? blends lively, insightful memoir and illuminating science journalism to answer the title’s question. More than that, it offers surprising lessons about love, grief, fatherhood, and family. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 5/27/2022 (Science Friday).
Description: Marine conservation biologist Dr. David Shiffman explains why it’s crucial that we overcome our misconceptions and rise above cinematic jump scares to embrace sharks as the imperiled and elegant ocean guardians they really are. … Exploring the core tenets of shark conservation science and policy, Shiffman synthesizes decades of scientific research and policymaking, weaving it into a narrative full of humor and adventure. Touching on everything from Shark Week to shark fin soup, overfishing to marine sanctuaries, Shiffman reveals why sharks are in trouble, why we should care, and how we can save them. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 11 Jan. 2021 p. 52.
Description: From a noted Cambridge zoologist, a wildly fun and scientifically sound exploration of what alien life must be like, using universal laws that govern life on Earth and in space. Scientists are confident that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Yet rather than taking a realistic approach to what aliens might be like, we imagine that life on other planets is the stuff of science fiction. The time has come to abandon our fantasies of space invaders and movie monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing. But short of aliens landing in New York City, how do we know what they are like? Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution–which applies throughout the universe–Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialize, and communicate. For example, by observing fish whose electrical pulses indicate social status, we can see that other planets might allow for communication by electricity. As there was evolutionary pressure to wriggle along a sea floor, Earthling animals tend to have left/right symmetry; on planets where creatures evolved mid-air or in soupy tar they might be lacking any symmetry at all. Might there be an alien planet with supersonic animals? A moon where creatures have a language composed of smells? Will aliens scream with fear, act honestly, or have technology? The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy answers these questions using the latest science to tell the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space. (publ.)

The book comprises 15 short chapters, each presenting an important equation of Physics, from the simplest and oldest, to more complex and recent ones. What can a professional 'read' in an equation? Does one see a rainbow differently when one knows the law of refraction of light? Do some equations tell more than what they were invented for? Memories and personal quotes in the book underline the intimate relation between a scientist and his research, and the interplay with his personal life.

A leading bioethicist offers critical insights into the scientific, ethical, and political implications of human genome editing. Designer babies, once found only in science fiction, have become a reality. We are entering a new era of human evolution with the advent of a technology called CRISPR, which allows scientists to modify our genes. Although CRISPR shows great promise for therapeutic use, it raises thorny ethical, legal, political, and societal concerns because it can be used to make permanent changes to future generations. What if changes intended for the good turn out to have unforeseen negative effects? What if the divide between the haves and have-nots widens as a result? Who decides whether we genetically modify human beings and, if so, how? We must be engaged and informed, think critically, and raise our voices as we create our future together. Sharp, rousing, timely, and thought-provoking, Altered Inheritance is essential reading. The future of humanity is in our hands.

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA and the birth of the genetic age, a powerful vocabulary has emerged to express science's growing command over the matter of life. Armed with knowledge of the code that governs all living things, biology and biotechnology are poised to edit, even rewrite, the texts of life to correct nature's mistakes. This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that science's promises of perfectibility have gone too far. Science may have editorial control over the material elements of life, but it does not supersede the languages of sense-making that have helped define human values across millennia: the meanings of autonomy, integrity, and privacy; the bonds of kinship, family, and society; and the place of humans in nature.

Reviewed: PW 3 Aug. 2020 p. 46.
Description: Most of us think of counting as a skill so basic that we see numbers as objective, indisputable facts. Not so, says Stone. In this playful-yet-probing work, Stone reveals the inescapable link between quantifying and classifying, and explains how counting determines almost every facet of our lives–from how we are evaluated at work to how our political opinions are polled to whether we get into college or even out of prison. But numbers, Stone insists, need not rule our lives. Especially in this age of big data, Stone’s work is a pressing and spirited call to reclaim our authority over numbers, and to take responsibility for how we use them. (publ.)

A penetrating indictment of how today's largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds "Don't be evil" was enshrined as Google's original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company's cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul--and ate our lunch. She shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump's election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed."

Dragonflies and damselflies are often called birdwatchers' insects. Large, brightly colored, active in the daytime, and displaying complex and interesting behaviors, they have existed since the days of the dinosaurs, and they continue to flourish. The book highlights the impressive skills and abilities of dragonflies and damselflies--superb fliers that can glide, hover, cruise, and capture prey on the wing. It also describes their arsenal of tactics to avoid predators, and their amazing sex life, including dazzling courtship displays, aerial mating, sperm displacement, mate guarding, and male mimicry. A lavishly illustrated, comprehensive, and accessible natural history that reveals the beauty and diversity of one of the world's oldest and most popular insect groups

Reviewed: NYT/BR 6 Sept. 2020 p. 15.
Description: We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it. But what happens to the universe at the end of the story? And what does it mean for us now? Theoretical physicist and Asst. Prof. at North Carolina State University Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was a young student, when her astronomy professor informed her the universe could end at any moment, in an instant. This revelation set her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics. Now, with lively wit and humor, she takes us on a mind-bending tour through five of the cosmos’s possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay (the one that could happen at any moment!), and the Bounce. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 20 Sept. 2020 p. 15.
Description: When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. The author blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? How has whale culture been both understood and changed by human technology? What can observing whales teach us about the complexity, splendor, and fragility of life on earth? (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 22 June 2020 p. 138.
Description: Beginning with the star-nosed mole, neuroscience professor Catania reveals what the creature’s nasal star is actually for, and what this tells us about how brains work. He explores how the deceptive hunting strategy of tentacled snakes leads prey straight to their mouths, how eels use electricity to control other animals, and why emerald jewel wasps make zombies out of cockroaches. He also solves the enigma of worm grunting–a traditional technique in which earthworms are enticed out of the ground–by teaming up with professional worm grunters. Catania demonstrates the merits of approaching science with an open mind, considers the role played by citizen scientists, and illustrates that most animals have incredible, hidden abilities that defy our imagination. … He shows not only how studying these animals can provide deep insights into how life evolved, but also how scientific discovery can be filled with adventure and fun. (publ.)

Description: Concisely guides readers through the geological development of the Great Plains region. It describes the distinct features of fifty-seven geologic sites, including fascinating places such as Raton Pass in Colorado and New Mexico, the Missouri Breaks of Montana, and the Ashfall Fossil Beds in Nebraska. This guide addresses the tricky question of what constitutes the Great Plains, showing that the region is defined in part through its unique geologic features. (publ.)

The Handy Science Answer Book makes science and its impact on the world fun and easy to understand. Clear, concise, and straightforward, this informative primer covers hundreds of intriguing topics. This friendly resource answers more than 1,600 of the most frequently asked, most interesting, and most unusual science questions.

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2019 p. 119.
Description: It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring readers on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life–unlike anything we have experienced so far–that could exist on planets outside our own solar system. Life could be out there in many forms: on frozen worlds, living in liquid oceans beneath ice and communicating (and even battling) with bubbles; on super-dense planets, where they would have evolved body types capable of dealing with extreme gravity; on tidally locked planets with one side turned eternally toward a star; and even on “rogue worlds,” which have no star at all. Yet this is no fictional flight of fancy: the authors take what we know about exoplanets and life on our own world and use that data to hypothesize about how, where, and which sorts of life might develop. Imagined Life is a must-have for anyone wanting to learn how the realities of our universe may turn out to be far stranger than fiction. (publ.)

Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. Nature's Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. If you're concerned about doing something good for the environment, Nature's Best Hope is the blueprint you need. By acting now, you can help preserve our precious wildlife--and the planet--for future generations.

Reviewed: LR Feb. 2021 p. 20.
Description: Is the shift to renewable energy and digital devices going to free us from severe pollution, material shortages, and military tensions? Rare metals are essential to electric vehicles, fighter jets, wind turbines, and solar panels, and also to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. But consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or the environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs of this dependence. This book reveals the dark side of the world that awaits us. It is an undercover tale of a technological odyssey that has promised much, and a look behind the scenes. Behind it all lurks China, which has captured the lion’s share of the ownership and processing of rare metals we now can’t do without. Drawing on six years of research across a dozen countries, this book shows that by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence–on rare metals that have become vital to our new ecological and digital society. (publ.)

A lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth--a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment--prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multi-billion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention. Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity.

Human innovation in tech is changing the world around us in ways we often fail to perceive. But what of the changes that are happening inside of us? Howard Axelrod spent two years living in solitude after a basketball accident left him blinded in one eye. In his memoir, The Point of Vanishing, he recounts his search for a means of orienting himself in the world. Now, Axelrod spins his personal philosophy out into the wider world, where technology is changing the nature of human consciousness faster than we can see it happening. We can't navigate without a GPS, we can't pay attention unless our attention is DEMANDED. We tap our phones 2,617 times a day, inadvertently deciding to rely on these devices instead of our minds to provide our lives with content and meaning.

Reviewed: PW 22 July 2019 p. 196.
Description: This tells the story one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. Gareth Williams, Emeritus Professor and former Dean of Medicine at the University of Bristol, covers the most colorful period in the history of DNA, from the discovery of “nuclein” in the late 1860s to the publication of James Watson’s The Double Helix in 1968. These hundred years included the establishment of the Nobel Prize, antibiotics, x-ray crystallography, the atom bomb and two devastating world wars–events which are strung along the thread of DNA like beads on a necklace. The story of DNA is a saga packed with awful mistakes as well as brilliant science, with a wonderful cast of heroes and villains. Surprisingly, much of it is unfamiliar. The elucidation of the double helix was one of the most brilliant gems of twentieth century science, but some of the scientists who paved the way have been airbrushed out of history. James Watson and Francis Crick solved a magnificent mystery, but Gareth Williams shows that their contribution was the last few pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle assembled over several decades. The book is comprehensive in scope, covering the first century of the history of DNA in its entirety, including the eight decades that have been neglected by other authors. It also explores the personalities of the main players, the impact of their entanglement with DNA, and what unique qualities make great scientists tick. (publ.)

"The ultimate dino tour." Dinosaurs have held sway over our imaginations since the discovery of their bones first shocked the world in the nineteenth century. From the monstrous beasts stalking Jurassic Park to the curiosities of the natural history museum, dinosaurs are creatures that unite young and old in awestruck wonder. Digging ever deeper into dinosaurs' ancient past, science continues to unearth new knowledge about them and the world they inhabited, a fantastic time when the footprints of these behemoths marked the Earth that we humans now walk. From the horns of the Protoceratops to the wings of the Archaeopteryx, readers are invited to explore profiles of dinosaurs along with hundreds of color photographs, sketches, maps, and other materials--all rooted in the latest scientific discoveries.

Reviewed: LR June 2019 p. 43.
Description: Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way statistical claims can be sensationalised, particularly in the media. In the age of big data, as data science becomes established as a discipline, a basic grasp of statistical literacy is more important than ever. In this book, David Spiegelhalter guides the reader through the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Drawing on real world problems to introduce conceptual issues, he shows us how statistics can help us determine the luckiest passenger on the Titanic, whether serial killer Harold Shipman could have been caught earlier, and if screening for ovarian cancer is beneficial. How many trees are there on the planet? Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? Why do old men have big ears? Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions–questions that can only be addressed using statistical science. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 103; 20 May 2019 p. 73; LJ June 2019 p. 144; NYT/BR 1 Sept. 2019 p. 15.
Description: Insects comprise roughly half of the animal kingdom. They live every-where–deep inside caves, 18,000 feet high in the Himalayas, inside computers, in Yellowstone’s hot springs, and in the ears and nostrils of much larger creatures. There are insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet. Most of us think life would be better without bugs. In fact, life would be impossible without them. Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not pollinate. No cocoa, no chocolate. The ink that was used to write the Declaration of In-dependence was derived from galls on oak trees, which are induced by a small wasp. The fruit fly was essential to medical and biological research experiments that resulted in six Nobel prizes. Blowfly larva can clean difficult wounds; flour beetle larva can digest plastic; several species of insects have been essential to the development of antibiotics. Insects turn dead plants and animals into soil. They pollinate flowers, including crops that we depend on. They provide food for other animals, such as birds and bats. They control organisms that are harmful to humans. Life as we know it depends on these small creatures. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 64.
Description: Air pollution has become the world’s greatest environmental health risk, and science is only beginning to reveal its wide-ranging effects. Globally, 19,000 people die each day from air pollution, killing more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and car accidents combined. What happened to the air we breathe? Sustainability journalist Tim Smedley has travelled the world to try and find the answer, visiting cities at the forefront of the fight against air pollution, including Delhi, Beijing, London and Paris. With in-sights from the scientists and politicians leading the battle against it, and people whose lives have been affected by it, he tells the full story of air pollution for the first time: what it is, which pollutants are harmful, where they come from and most importantly what we can do about them. Air pollution is a problem that can be solved. The stories uncovered on this journey show us how. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.
Description: Home DNA testing companies, such as 23 and Me and AncestryDNA, are at peak popularity, fulfilling our desires to know where we come from and what our future might look like. Questions have arisen about who owns test results and whether testing companies have the right to sell customers’ data to pharmaceutical companies and other outlets. Yet home DNA tests have been credited with catching criminals, such as the Golden State Killer. Containing viewpoints from diverse voices in the field, this volume helps readers to examine the controversies surrounding home DNA tests. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.
Description: The excitement surrounding space exploration seems to have waned in the decades since the mid-twentieth century’s thrilling “race to space.” Is there still purpose in exploring other planets? If so, who should be tasked with this endeavor and what complications might arise from it? The viewpoints in this resource address important issues surrounding this topic, such as the merits of privatizing space exploration, seeking extraterrestrial lifeforms, the economics and politics of space exploration, and the possibility of militarizing space. (publ.)

A New York Times Notable Book  Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley set out to ensure food safety. He selected food tasters to test various food additives and preservatives, letting them know that the substances could be harmful or deadly. The tasters were recognized for their courage, and became known as the poison squad.

Reviewed: LRB 15 Aug. 2019 p. 23.
Description: At the dawn of the space age, technological breakthroughs in Earth orbit flight were both breathtaking feats of ingenuity and disturbances to a delicate global balance of power. In this short book, aerospace historian Roger D. Launius concisely and engagingly explores the driving force of this era: the race to the Moon. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and closing with the end of the Apollo program in 1972, Launius examines how early space exploration blurred the lines between military and civilian activities, and how key actions led to space firsts as well as crushing failures. Launius places American and Soviet programs on equal footing–following American aerospace engineers Wernher von Braun and Robert Gilruth, their Soviet counterparts Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin and cosmonaut Alexei Leonovto highlight key actions that led to various successes, failures, and ultimately the American Moon landing. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 24 Oct. 2019 p. 39.
Description: In September 2016, famous entrepreneur Elon Musk announced plans for the gradual colonization of Mars. As humans continue to degrade and destroy our planet’s resources, leading to predictions of total ecological col-lapse, some now suggest that a human colony elsewhere may be our species’ best hope for survival. In this sharply argued book philosopher Adam Morton examines these extra-terrestrial colonization plans with a critical eye. He makes a strong case for colonization, just not by human beings. Humans live relatively short lives, require large amounts of food and water, very specific climactic conditions and an oxygen-rich atmosphere to survive. Robots, on the other hand, suffer from none of these shortcomings. Reflecting compassionately on the nature of existence, Morton argues that we should treat the end of the human race in the same way that we treat our own deaths: as something sad but ultimately inevitable. The Earth will perish one day, and in the end, we should be more concerned with securing the future of intelligent beings than the preservation of our species, which represents but a nanosecond in the history of our solar system. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 104; LR Aug. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the main-stream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. … At a time when racialized national-isms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, this work is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different. (publ.)

Reviewed: WLT Summer 2019 p. 74.
Description: This new edition of The Thinking Person’s Guide to Climate Change has been thoroughly updated to cover global record highs, new research across the spectrum, and the Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gases. It remains a well-known and much-used reference for providing the most comprehensive, yet accessible, overview of where climate science stands today, acknowledging controversies but standing strong in its stance that the climate is changing–and we must respond. (publ.)

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities. Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi's account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history's most horrific events.

Description: In 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photos of the far side of the moon. Even in their poor resolution, the images stunned scientists: the far side is an enormous mountainous expanse, not the vast lava-plains seen from Earth. Subsequent missions have confirmed this in much greater detail. How could this be, and what might it tell us about our own place in the universe? As it turns out, quite a lot. Fourteen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being, creating galaxies and stars. Planets formed out of the leftover dust and gas that coalesced into larger and larger bodies orbiting around each star. In a sort of heavenly survival of the fittest, planetary bodies smashed into each other until solar systems emerged. Curiously, instead of being relatively similar in terms of composition, the planets in our solar system, and the comets, asteroids, satellites and rings, are bewitchingly distinct. So, too, the halves of our moon. (publ.)

Description: Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don’t? In this book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength–and the greatest reason we can trust it. Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, she explains that, contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted. This process is not perfect–nothing ever is when humans are involved–but she draws vital lessons from cases where scientists got it wrong. Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy. (publ.)

Description: Game designer and instructor Michael Sellers situates game design practices in a strong theoretical framework of systems thinking, enabling designers to think more deeply and clearly about their work, so they can produce better, more engaging games for any device or platform. Sellers offers a deep unifying framework in which practical game design best practices and proven systems thinking theory reinforce each other, helping game designers understand what they are trying to accomplish and the best ways to achieve it. …This book explains: What games are, and how systems thinking can help you think about them more clearly; How to systematically promote engagement, interactivity, and fun; What you can learn from MDA and other game design frameworks; How to create game-play and core loops; How to design the entire player experience, and how to build game mechanics that work together to create that experience; How to capture your game’s “big idea” and Unique Selling Proposition; How to establish high-level and background design and translate it into detailed design; How to build, playtest, and iterate early prototypes; & How to build your game design career in a field that keeps changing at breakneck speed. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 122.
Description: In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy. They note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms–from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of “power-knowledge.” … Contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as “fake news” and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny. Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 25 Oct. 2018 p. 20.
Description: If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to mil-lions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. (publ.)

Note: Standing Order.

Description: Science writer Challoner investigates the quest to identify the smallest, most fundamental constituents of matter–and how that quest helps us to understand what everything is made of and how it all works. He covers a wide range of topics–including the development of scientific thinking about atoms and the basic structure of atoms; how atomic interactions account for the familiar properties of everyday materials; the power of the atomic nucleus; and what the mysterious quantum realm of subatomic particles can tell us about the very nature of reality. Illustrated in color throughout, this book offers clear answers to questions we have all pondered, as well as some we have never even dreamed of. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 30; LR Oct. 2018 p. 38.
Description: An automotive and tech world insider investigates the quest to develop and perfect the driverless car–an innovation that promises to be the most disruptive change to our way of life since the smartphone. … Beginning with the way 9/11 spurred the U.S. government to set a million-dollar prize for a series of off-road robot races in the Mojave Desert up to the early 2016 stampede to develop driverless technology, this book represents a chronicle of the past, diagnosis of the present, and prediction of the future. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 1 Dec. 2018 p. 72 (2018 Best Books of the Year in Science & Technology)
Description: An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, this is a book about what quantum physics really means–and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Outstanding academic title; Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries; LRB 21 Jan. 2021 p. 37.
Description: Everyone has heard the claim, “Correlation does not imply causation.” What might sound like a reasonable dictum metastasized in the twentieth century into one of science’s biggest obstacles, as a legion of researchers became unwilling to make the claim that one thing could cause another. Even two decades ago, asking a statistician a question like “Was it the aspirin that stopped my headache?” would have been like asking if he believed in voodoo, or at best a topic for conversation at a cocktail party rather than a legitimate target of scientific inquiry. Scientists were allowed to posit only that the probability that one thing was associated with another. Pearl and his colleagues now attempt to establish causality–the study of cause and effect–on a firm scientific basis. Causality doesn’t just enable us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. (publ.)

Review: TLS 22 Mar. 2019 p. 3.
Description: The ageing of the world’s population is one of the most important issues facing humanity in the 21st century. Sometime before 2020, the number of people over 65 worldwide will, for the first time, be greater than the number of 0-4 year olds, and this will keep on rising. The strain this is causing on society are already evident as health and social services everywhere struggle to cope with the care needs of the elderly. But why do we age, and how? Scientists have been asking these questions for centuries. There are myriad competing theories, from the idea that our bodies simply wear out, like well-worn shoes or a rusting car, to the belief that ageing and death are genetically programmed and controlled. Sue Armstrong tells the story of science’s quest to understand ageing, and to find ways of intervening to prevent or delay the crippling conditions so often associated with old age. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Sensational images and stories about variations in Earth’s climate and their impacts on society are pervasive in the media. The scientific basis for these stories is often not understood by the general public, nor even by those with a scientific background in fields other than climate science. This book is a comprehensive resource that will enable the reader to understand and appreciate the significance of the flood of climate information. It is an excellent non-mathematical resource for learning the fundamentals of climate analysis, as well as a reference for non-climate experts that need to use climate information and data. The focus is on the basics of the climate system, how climate is observed and how the observations are transformed into datasets useful for monitoring the climate. (publ.)

Description: As the global response to climate change continues to evolve, this book offers unbiased answers to the most difficult questions in an area dogged by misunderstanding and politicization. It provides an essential primer on what will be the defining issue of our time, providing an overview of the science, conflicts, and implications of our warming planet. (publ.)

Description: Why just play video games when you can build your own game? Follow the steps in this book to learn a little about code, build a few graphics, and piece together a real game you can share with your friends. Who knows? What you learn here could help you become the next rock-star video- game designer. So set your controller aside and get ready to create! Author Patrick McCabe shows how to build some basic knowledge of how computer code drives video games; create simple graphics and learn how to put them in motion; & put your knowledge together to put your modern twist on a classic game. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Dec. 2018/Jan. 2019 p. 50.
Description: At once reptilian and avian, dinosaurs enable us to imagine a world far beyond the usual boundaries of time, culture and physiology. We have envisioned them in diverse and contradictory ways, reflecting, in part, our changing conceptions of ourselves. Their discovery, around the start of the nineteenth century, was intimately tied to our awareness of geological time; their vast size and power called to mind railroads, battleships and factories, making dinosaurs, paradoxically, emblems of modernity. At the same time, their world was nature at its most pristine, and they simultaneously symbolized childhood innocence and wonder. Dinosaurs provided a sort of code that has enabled people to speak indirectly about the possibility of our own extinction. Not unlike humans today, dinosaurs seem both powerful–almost godly–and helpless in the face of cosmic forces even mightier than themselves. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries; NYRB 24 Oct. 2019 p. 39.
Description: The story of Pluto and its largest moon, from discovery through the New Horizons flyby. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Dogs do it. Millipedes do it. Dinosaurs did it. You do it. I do it. Octopuses don’t (and nor do octopi). Spiders might do it: more research is needed. Birds don’t do it, but they could if they wanted to. Herrings do it to communicate with each other. In 2017 zoologist Dani Rabaiotti’s teenage brother asked her a most teenaged question: Do snakes fart? Stumped, Rabaiotti turned to Twitter. The internet did not disappoint. Her innocent question spawned the hashtag #doesitfart and it spread like a noxious gas. Dozens of noted experts began weighing in on which animals do and don’t fart, and if they do, how much, how often, what it's made of, what it smells like, and why. Clearly, the public demands more information on animal farts. This book fills that void. So to speak. (publ.)
Note: Originally published: London: Quercus, 2015.

Reviewed: LJ 1 Oct. 2018 p. 73.
Description: A compelling story of a stalwart animal prized from prehistory through to today–an animal threatened by human greed, pragmatism, and rationalization. It stars turtles and shady and heroic human characters both, in set-tings ranging from luxury redoubts to degraded habitats, during a time when the confluence of easy global trade, limited supply, and inexhaustible demand has accelerated the stress on species. The growth of the middle class in high-population regions like China, where the turtle is particularly valued, feeds this perfect storm into which the turtle finds itself lashed. This is a tale not just of endangered turtles but also one of overall human failings, frailties, and vulnerabilities–all punctuated by optimistic hope for change fueled by dedicated turtle champions. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 106.
Description: If you want to understand how our world works, the periodic table holds the answers. When the seventh row of the periodic table of elements was completed in June 2016 with the addition of four final elements–nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson–we at last could identify all the ingredients necessary to construct our world. In this book, chemist and science educator Tim James provides an informative, entertaining, and quirky illustrated guide to the table that shows clearly how this abstract and seemingly jumbled graphic is relevant to our day-to-day lives. James tells the story of the periodic table from its ancient Greek roots, when you could count the number of elements humans were aware of on one hand, to the modern alchemists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have used nuclear chemistry and physics to generate new elements and complete the periodic table. In addition to this, he answers questions such as: What is the chemical symbol for a human? What would happen if all of the elements were mixed together? Which liquid can teleport through walls? Why is the medieval dream of transmuting lead into gold now a reality? Whether you're studying the periodic table for the first time or are simply interested in the fundamental building blocks of the universe–from the core of the sun to the networks in your brain–Elemental is the perfect guide. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 19 Aug. 2018 p. 15.
Description: Any reader of science fiction or viewer of Star Trek will be awake to the dream that there may be life elsewhere in our universe that isn't like life here on Earth. Maybe, like E.T., it has new letters in its genetic alphabet! Maybe it's made of silicon! Maybe it gets around on wheels! Or maybe it doesn’t. In this book, biologist Charles Cockell makes the surprising argument that the Universe constrains life, making its evolutionary outcomes quite predictable–in short, if we were to find, on some distant planet, something very much like a ladybug eating something very much like an aphid that had itself just been feeding on the sap of something very much like a flower, we shouldn’t at all be surprised. Considering the vast pantheon of creatures that have existed on Earth, from pterodactyls to sloths, it is tempting to think that the possibilities for life are limitless, and that a ladybug is a marvelous oddity. But as Cockell reveals, the forms and shapes of life are guided by a limited sets of rules. There is just a narrow set of mathematical solutions to the challenges of existence. Any natural environment usually has multiple challenges to survival in it, each associated to a physical equation. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Using a variety of innovative techniques, astronomers have recently discovered thousands of planets that orbit stars throughout our Milky Way galaxy. Donald Goldsmith presents the science of exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life in a way that Earthlings with little background in astronomy or astrophysics can understand and enjoy. Much of what has captured the imagination of planetary scientists and the public at large is the unexpected strangeness of these distant worlds, which bear little resemblance to the planets in our solar system. The sizes, masses, and orbits of exoplanets detected so far raise new, unanswered questions about how planets form and evolve. Still more tantalizing are the efforts to determine which exoplanets might support life. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In the last 25 years, planetary science experienced a revolution, as vast oceans of liquid water have been discovered within the heart of the icy moons of our Solar System. These subsurface oceans lie hidden under thick layers of ice. We call them ocean worlds. Some of these icy moons, such as Ganymede, may hold two to three times more liquid water than all the water present on Earth, while others, such as Enceladus and Europa, are thought by astrobiologists to be our best hope of finding extra-terrestrial life. This book explores and compares a variety of Solar System ocean worlds, meeting in the process 22 of the most intriguing objects, from the giant asteroid Ceres to the enigmatic, distant Sedna. In doing so, the reader will also encounter the multiple spacecraft that brought back most of what we know of these worlds (Pioneers, Voyagers, Cassini-Huygens, etc.), as well as the latest scientific research on this new topic. The authors also entertain the possibility of life on each of these ocean worlds by assessing their habitability, as ultimately, these ocean worlds might hold the key to answering the fundamental questions in life: How did life appear? Where do we come from? Is there life out there? (publ.)

Description: C++ remains the key language at many leading game development studios. Since it’s used throughout their enormous code bases, studios use it to maintain and improve their games, and look for it constantly when hiring new developers. This book is a practical, hands-on approach to programming 3D video games in C++. Modeled on Sanjay Madhav’s game programming courses at USC, it’s fun, easy, practical, hands-on, and complete. Step by step, you’ll learn to use C++ in all facets of real-world game programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, physics, AI, audio, user interfaces, and much more. You’ll hone real-world skills through practical exercis-es, and deepen your expertise through start-to-finish projects that grow in complexity as you build your skills. Throughout, Madhav pays special attention to demystifying the math that all professional game developers need to know. (publ.)

Description: Learn one of today's most important skills–coding–while creating your own games! With this illustrated, interactive guide to coding, readers will dis-cover how to create, test, and play fun 2D computer games. No prior programming knowledge is required to become proficient: just follow the easy step-by-step examples to program and share games on an Apple or Windows PC, Android device, or Apple iOS tablet. With code instruction in JavaScript–a user-friendly programming language used in millions of web-sites–this book is the perfect springboard for mastering coding skill, from website creation to business processes, computer engineering, and profes-sional-level game development. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Top 75 Titles highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: What familiar force do the Big Bang, the expansion of the Universe, dark matter and dark energy, black holes, and gravitational waves all have in common? This dynamic book uncovers gravity as a key to understanding these fascinating phenomena that have so captivated public interest in recent years. Readers will explore the latest discoveries on how this ordinary force in our everyday lives powers the most colossal changes in the Universe. Written by the popular French public scientist and leading astrophysicist Pierre Binétruy, the book also explains the recent experimental confirmation of the existence of gravitational wave. (in-trod.)
Note: Originally published: A la Poursuite des Ondes Gravitationnelles (Paris: Dunod, 2015).

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Manta and devil rays are some of the most intriguing creatures in the ocean. Driven forward by powerful beats of wing-like pectoral fins, these filter feeders search the waters for prey, their horn-like head fins giving rise to ancient mariners’ tales of fearsome devilfish dragging boats into the ocean depths. (publ.)
Note: The National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium (Dubuque) has a long-standing and quite popular exhibit of “Cownose rays” (Rhinoptera bonasus), a species of manta rays. See “Fishbase” listing @ https://www.fishbase.se/summary/2584 (Sweden) for further information.

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 120.
Description: How much do you really know about how the human body works, and how it reacts to food, exercise, nutrition, and the environment? While most of us have read about at least one fad diet, we're left wondering about the greater biochemistry, psychology, sociology, and physiology of the obesity crisis in the United States. Chemist Simon Quellen Field shows us how our bodies react to food and the environment, and how our brain affects what and how much we eat, and in turn, is affected by what we eat. He shows why some diets work for some people but not for others, based on genetics, previous weight history, brain chemistry, environmental cues, and social pressures … and explores how dozens of hormones affect hunger and satiety and interact with the brain and the gut to regulate feeding behavior. Field further explains the addictive nature of foods that interact with the same dopamine and opioid receptors in the brain that cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, and nicotine do. (publ.)

Review: PW 26 Nov. 2018 p. 52.
Description: What does privacy mean in the digital era? As technology increasingly blurs the boundary between public and private, questions about who controls our data become harder and harder to answer. Our every web view, click, and online purchase can be sold to anyone to store and use as they wish. At the same time, our online reputation has become an important part of our identity-a form of cultural currency. This book examines the relationship between online visibility and privacy, and the politics of identity and self-presentation in the digital age. In doing so, Nora Draper looks at the revealing two-decade history of efforts by the consumer privacy industry to give individuals control over their digital image through the sale of privacy protection and reputation management as a service. Through in-depth interviews with industry experts, as well as analysis of media cover-age, promotional materials, and government policies, Draper examines how companies have turned the protection and promotion of digital information into a business. Along the way, she also provides insight into how these companies have responded to and shaped the ways we think about image and reputation in the digital age. Tracking the successes and failures of companies claiming to control our digital ephemera, Draper takes us inside an industry that has commodified strategies of information control. (publ.)

Description: Design and build the next indie game hit! This book will teach you how to create awesome video games. Games from scratch. Games that run cross-platform, in web browsers, and on phones. Games filled with dynamic sound and music. Games overflowing with impressive visual effects. Fun games. More importantly, this book will teach you how to think about making games. You’ll learn to analyze and dissect games–to understand what it is that make great games great. By the end of the journey you’ll have the knowledge and tools needed to produce engaging, polished products that people will love to play. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 29 June 2018 p. 32
Description: A Harvard museum curator draws on the latest breakthroughs in evolutionary biology to examine how tiny, random convergences, from mutations to butterfly sneezes, have triggered remarkable evolutionary changes. “Earth’s natural history is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. But evolutionary biologists also point out many examples of contingency, cases where the tiniest change–a random mutation or an ancient butterfly sneeze–caused evolution to take a completely different course. What role does each force really play in the constantly changing natural world? Are the plants and animals that exist to-day, and we humans ourselves, inevitabilities or evolutionary flukes? And what does that say about life on other planets? Jonathan Losos reveals what the latest breakthroughs in evolutionary biology can tell us about one of the greatest ongoing debates in science. (publ)

Reviewed: PW 14 Jan. 2019 p. 35; LR Sept. 2019 p. 43.
Description: This is the captivating story of mathematics’ greatest ever idea: calculus. Without it, there would be no computers, no microwave ovens, no GPS, and no space travel. But before it gave modern man almost infinite powers, calculus was behind centuries of controversy, competition, and even death. Steven Strogatz charts the development of this seminal achievement from the days of Aristotle to today’s million-dollar reward that awaits whoever cracks Reimann's hypothesis. Filled with idiosyncratic characters from Pythagoras to Euler, this book is a compelling human drama that reveals the legacy of calculus on nearly every aspect of modern civilisation, including science, politics, ethics, philosophy, and much besides. (publ.)

Description: Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, Matthew Hindman explains why the internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open internet. He also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today’s online economy. (publ.)

Description: Begin by building classic games like Hangman, Guess the Number, and Tic-Tac-Toe, and then work your way up to more advanced games, like a text-based treasure hunting game and an animated collision-dodging game with sound effects. Along the way, you’ll learn key programming and math concepts that will help you take your game programming to the next level. Instruction about how to combine loops, variables, and flow control statements into real working programs; choose the right data structures for the job, such as lists, dictionaries, and tuples; add graphics and animation to your games with the pygame module; handle keyboard and mouse input; program simple artificial intelligence so you can play against the computer; use cryptography to convert text messages into secret code; & debug your programs and find common errors. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7); Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Lidar–a technology evolved from radar, but using laser light rather than microwaves–has found an astounding range of applications, none more prominent than its crucial role in enabling self-driving cars. This accessible introduction to a fascinating and increasingly vital technology focuses on the engaging human stories of lidar’s innovators as they advance and adapt it to better understand air, water, ice and Earth–not to mention mapping Mars and Mercury, spotting incoming nuclear warheads, and avoiding pedestrians and cyclists on city streets. Todd Neff is an award-winning science, environment, and healthcare journalist. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (May 2019 vol. 56 no. 9); Highly Recommended; Top 75 titles for community college libraries.
Description: Most people are aware that most people are endowed with genes and that these entities determine much of what you are and how you function as a living organism. But unless you have had a course in biology or genetics it’s entirely possible that you know very little if anything about genes and the substance they are made of, called DNA … This book is intended to fill that gap in your general knowledge by informing you what genes are, where in your body they are located, how they function, the dire consequences for your health and sometimes for your offspring if they fail to function normally, how they can be damaged and sometimes repaired–and much more. (introd.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Does life exist on Mars? The question has captivated humans for centuries, but today it has taken on new urgency. NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars orbit by the 2030s. SpaceX wants to go by 2024, while Mars One wants to land a permanent settlement there in 2032. As we gear up for missions like these, we have a responsibility to think deeply about what kinds of life may already inhabit the planet–and whether we have the right to invite ourselves in. This book tells the complete story of the quest to answer one of the most tantalizing questions in astronomy. But it is more than a history. David Weintraub tells why, of all the celestial bodies in our solar system, Mars has beckoned to us the most. He traces how our ideas about life on Mars have been refined by landers and rovers, terrestrial and Mars-orbiting telescopes, spectroscopy, and even a Martian meteorite. He explores how finding DNA-based life on the Red Planet could offer clues about our distant evolutionary past, and grapples with the profound moral and ethical questions confronting us as we prepare to introduce an unpredictable new life form–ourselves–into the Martian biosphere. Life on Mars is also a book about how science is done—and undone—in the age of mass media. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Michel Anctil shows how the mythical perceptions of bioluminescence gradually gave way to a scientific understanding of its mechanisms, functions and evolution, and to the recognition of its usefulness for biomedical and other applied fields. Naturalists since antiquity worked hard at dispelling fanciful ideas about the meaning of living lights by giving as reliable accounts of what they saw as was in their power. But it took the circumnavigations and oceanographic expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the rise of the modern scientific method, for biologists to realize how widespread bioluminescence is on the planet and how diverse are its expressions in light organs and ecological imprints. By the end of the nineteenth century an understanding of the chemical nature and physiological control of the phenomenon was at hand. Technological developments led to the recent explosion of knowledge on the ecology, evolution and molecular biology of bioluminescence. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: If you think of mathematics as a series of pointless classroom exercises without much relevance to real life, this book will change your mind. As the authors show, math is deeply embedded in almost every aspect of daily life–from managing your personal finances, making consumer purchases, and sharpening your computational skills, to learning to apply mathematical concepts that will give you a better grasp of both ordinary and extraordinary events and help you better appreciate the world we live in. With some basic geometry under your belt, you’ll discover that there is an optimal point on a soccer field from which to shoot a goal. And you'll be more clever with the gears of a bike. If you like to play cards or go to the casino, knowing something about probability will give you an edge. You’ll also have an enhanced understanding of the “whispering effect” inside the Capitol rotunda, why a car’s headlights are so bright, and even why sewer covers are round. (publ.)
Holdings Note: Copy also at Calmar library; call no. 510 Pos.

Reviewed: LJ 15 Oct. 2018 p. 72; NYT/BR 6 Jan. 2019 p. 17; Choice (Apr. 2019 vol. 56 no. 8) Recommended for community college libraries; PW 20 Aug. 2019 p. 78; LR Aug. 2019 p. 32.
Description: Picture this: after a long week, you finally have the house to yourself. As you settle into the couch, something stirs–a mouse darts out from under a cupboard, a fly zips past the window–and you suddenly realize that you’re not alone after all. Indeed, our homes are buzzing with life, but aside from the pursuit of better pest control, we’ve had only the barest understanding of it. That is why Rob Dunn and his team decided to take a closer look. In this book, Dunn reveals that our domestic domain, far from peaceful, is wild beyond imagination. From the Indian meal moths in the cupboard to the camel crickets living in the basement to the antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus waiting on the kitchen counter, every house is a wilderness brimming with thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi, and plants that live literally under our noses. To regain control over our critter-filled quarters, we fight back by obsessively sterilizing our homes. However, in doing so, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution, enabling deadly bacteria to thrive instead of species that help our immune systems and add flavor to foods like beer, sourdough bread, and kimchi. The “healthier” we try to make our homes, the more likely we are to put our own health at risk. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2); Outstanding academic title; Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Physicist A. Zee combines profound depth with incisive accessibility to take us on an original and compelling tour of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Inspired by Einstein's audacious suggestion that spacetime could ripple, Zee begins with the stunning discovery of gravity waves. He goes on to explain how gravity can be understood in comparison to other classical field theories, presents the idea of curved spacetime and the action principle, and explores cutting-edge topics, including black holes and Hawking radiation. Zee travels as far as the theory reaches, leaving us with tantalizing hints of the utterly unknown, from the intransigence of quantum gravity to the mysteries of dark matter and energy. Concise and precise, and infused with Zee’s signature warmth and freshness of style, this book opens a unique pathway to comprehending relativity and gaining deep insight into gravity, spacetime, and the workings of the universeю (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Aug. 2018 p. 41.
Description: Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean’s greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s–the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World’s first Shamu. Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace’s anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon. This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised “killer” became the beloved “orca”–And what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 May 2018 p. 74.
Description: Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to “flow?” Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. He tears down our assumptions about time one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 30 Apr. 2018 p. 54; Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Algorithms are running our society, and we don’t really know what they are up to. Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits. But how reliable is this data? Without understanding what mathematics can and can’t do, it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives. In this book, David Sumpter takes an algorithm-strewn journey to the dark side of mathematics. He investigates the equations that analyze us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions such as: Who are Cambridge Analytica? And what are they doing with our data? How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality? Are Google algorithms racist and sexist? Why do election predictions fail so drastically? Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes? What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines? (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Sept. 2018 p. 74.
Description: Zombification isn’t just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It’s real, and it's happening all around us, from wasps and crickets to dogs and moose–and even humans. … Science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre science of real-life mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab littered with the corpses of zombie ants, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: This book explores, explains and debunks some common misconceptions about quantum physics, particle physics, space-time, and Multiverse cosmology. It seeks to separate science from pseudoscience. The material is presented in layperson-friendly language, followed by additional technical sections which explain basic equations and principles. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 3 June 2018 p. 51; LR May 2018 p. 45; LRB 3 Jan. 2019 p. 11.
Description: A sweeping narrative scientific history that tells the epic story of the dinosaurs, examining their origins, their habitats, their extinction, and their living legacy. (publ.) “There are dozens of dinosaur books out there clamoring for your attention, each one stuffed with anecdotes about what fun it is to dig up bones in remote and picturesque places. So why should you read this one rather than any other? Brusatte scores because he honed his craft as a writer before becoming a scientist. This means he has the knack of summarizing a story in a few deft strokes without ever getting bogged down in detail …” (LR).

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 106.
Description: Attacks on science have become commonplace . Claims that climate change isn’t settled science, that evolution is “only a theory,” and that scientists are conspiring to keep the truth about vaccines from the public are staples of some politicians’ rhetorical repertoire. Defenders of science often point to its discoveries (penicillin! relativity!) without explaining exactly why scientific claims are superior. In this book, Lee McIntyre argues that what distinguishes science from its rivals is what he calls “the scientific attitude”–caring about evidence and being willing to change theories on the basis of new evidence. The history of science is littered with theories that were scientific but turned out to be wrong; the scientific attitude reveals why even a failed theory can help us to understand what is special about science. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 Books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Many technologies begin life as someone’s vision of an ambitious, perhaps audacious, technology that is expected to have a revolutionary impact on consumers–whether families, companies, or societies. However, if that highly touted technology fails “prematurely” at some point in its life history, it becomes a spectacular flop. Employing a behavioral perspective, this book presents a sample of twelve spectacular flops encompassing the past three centuries, ranging from the world’s first automobile to the nuclear-powered bomber. Because technologies may fail from many different causes, spectacular flops pose a special challenge to the author’s long-term project of furnishing generalizations about technological change. Instead of constructing generalizations that apply to all spectacular flops, this book provides limited generalizations that pertain to particular groups of technologies bounded by parameters such as “long-term development projects” and “one-off projects.” (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: This book tells the story of all the achievements in solving the problem of the missing antiparticles. It is written by Prof. Guennadi Borissov, an international expert in this subject. Reading this book does not require any specialist knowledge of physics. All phenomena observed in the microworld of particles are explained in simple terms using well-known examples from ordinary life. Starting by describing and discussing the main properties of particles and antiparticles, the book details the important stages in the research that have brought scientists closer to solving one of the greatest enigmas of nature. (publ.)

Reviewed: 11 Jan. 2019 p. 28.
Description: Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Aug. 2019 vol. 56 no. 12) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A romantic description of the second law of thermodynamics is that the universe becomes increasingly disordered. But what does that actually mean? Starting with an overview of the three laws of thermodynamics, R. Stephen Berry explains in this short book the fundamentals of a fundamental science. Readers learn both the history of thermodynamics, which began with attempts to solve everyday engineering problems, and ongoing controversy and unsolved puzzles. (publ.)

Description: It is well established that all humans today, wherever they live, belong to one single species. Yet even many people who claim to abhor racism take for granted that human “races” have a biological reality. Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall provide a lucid and forceful critique of how scientific tools have been misused to uphold misguided racial categorizations. … They demonstrates conclusively that modern genetic tools, when applied correctly to the study of human variety, fail to find genuine differences. While the diversity that exists within our species is a real phenomenon, it nevertheless defeats any systematic attempt to recognize discrete units within it. The stark lines that humans insist on drawing between their own groups and others are nothing but a mixture of imagination and ideology. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 120, 179.
Description: Many of science’s greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive “double-slit” experiment that Thomas Young devised in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe. Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, to examine quantum mechanics from the perspective of this experiment and its variations. … This is the story of quantum mechanics told through the lens of the “double-slit” experiment, showing how light passing through two slits cut into a cardboard sheet first challenged our understanding of light and the nature of reality almost two hundred years ago–and continues to do so. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR May 2019 p. 19; NYT 31 May 2019 p. C20; PW 29 Apr. 2019 (author interview); NYT/BR 16 June 2019 p. 1; NYRB 18 July 2019 p. 28; TLS 2019 Book of the Year 29 Nov. 2019 p. 9; NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019"); TLS 22 Nov. 2019 p. 38; PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 32 (Best Books 2019).
Description: Traveling through “deep time”–the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present–award-winning nature author Macfarlane moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the under-land made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.” (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Essential for community college libraries; LRB 1 Aug. 2019 p. 35; TLS 21 June 2019 p. 8; NYRB 15 Aug. 2019 p. 4; TLS 2019 Book of the Year 29 Nov. 2019 p. 10.
Description: In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await–food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, trans-forming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, this book is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation. (publ.)

Description: Teaches how to write and deploy games with the Unity game development platform. …This practical guide exposes every aspect of the game development process, from the initial groundwork to creating custom AI scripts and building easy-to-read UIs. The 2nd ed. includes a new chapter on building 2D platformers with Unity's expanded 2D toolkit. …You need to know C# or a similar language. No game development knowledge is assumed. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2); Outstanding Academic Title; Top 25 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Harvard/Smithsonian astrophysicist Roy Gould offers a compelling narrative of how the universe–with no instruction other than its own laws–evolved into billions of galaxies and gave rise to life, including humans who have been trying for millennia to comprehend it. Far from being a random accident, the universe is hard at work, extracting order from chaos. Making use of the best current science, Gould turns what many assume to be true about the universe on its head. The cosmos expands inward, not outward. Gravity can drive things apart, not merely together. And the universe seems to defy entropy as it becomes more ordered, rather than the other way around. Strangest of all, the universe is exquisitely hospitable to life, despite its being constructed from undistinguished atoms and a few unexceptional rules of behavior. This book explores whether the emergence of life, rather than being a mere cosmic afterthought, may be written into the most basic laws of nature. (publ.)

Review: TLS 22 Mar. 2019 p. 14; Choice (Apr. 2019 vol. 56 no. 8) Top 75 Books essential for community college libraries.
Description: Technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and it has become clear–in part from David Reich’s own contributions to the field–that genomics is as important a means of understanding the human past as archaeology, linguistics, and the written word. Reich describes just how the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our species. He delineates how the Genomic Revolution and ancient DNA are transforming our understanding of our own lineage as modern humans; how genomics deconstructs the idea that there are no biologically meaningful differences among human populations (though without adherence to pernicious racist hierarchies); and how DNA studies reveal the deep history of human inequality--among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals within a population. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: The elusive Canada lynx bears kittens in Minnesota’s north-eastern woods. In the far southeastern part of the state, the succulent Leedy’s roseroot clings to cold cliffs. On the northwestern grasslands, the western prairie fringed orchid grows only on ancient glacial beach ridges. In the rivers of the Twin Cities metro area, the snuffbox mussel snaps on a fish’s nose to give its larvae a temporary home. These species and fifteen others living in Minnesota are on the federal Endangered Species List. Adam Regn Arvidson, a talented science reporter and genial guide, uncovers the stories of these plants and animals, providing compelling views of the state’s northern pine forest, deciduous forest, and prairie landscapes. Readers learn how beach driving in Texas affects Minnesota’s northern-most bird; how ranchers feel about prairie minnows; how urban runoff affects rivers and therefore mussels; how the wolf ended up in court. Scientists, orchid-hounds, lawyers, and nature lovers weigh in on the value and benefit of rare species–and their right to exist. This book is an entertaining and educational journey through Minnesota’s diverse landscapes, one wild and rare inhabitant at a time. (publ.)
Holdings Note: 2nd copy at Calmar library; call no. 591.68 Arv.

Description: Learn the basics of building a working application with a professional coding language, and how to test your app to make sure it works. Includes sections on getting started with JAVA, writing your first program, drawing with code, color, animation, creating AI, and making bird wings flap.

Reviewed: LJ 15 Feb. 2018 p. 82; Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Highly Recommended; Recommended for community college libraries); NYRB 7 June 2018 p. 45; CHE 23 Mar. 2018 (new books).
Description: Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem. Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, especially women of color. Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance–operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond–understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance. (publ.)

Note: Winner of 2017 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize.
Description: Noted Western and environmental historian Flores dazzles with his vivid, informed, and richly detailed essays on six iconic animals of the American Great Plains. Diving into their genetic past as far back as the Pleistocene epoch and on up to restoration efforts in recent times, Flores is especially evocative and illuminating about the lives of these animals (and their interactions with humans) in the several centuries running from the dawn of the Age of Exploration through the end of the Indian Wars. (publ.)

Description: Over the coming decades, Artificial Intelligence will profoundly impact the way we live, work, wage war, play, seek a mate, educate our young, and care for our elderly. It is likely to greatly increase our aggregate wealth, but it will also upend our labor markets, reshuffle our social order, and strain our private and public institutions. Eventually it may alter how we see our place in the universe, as machines pursue goals independent of their creators and outperform us in domains previously believed to be the sole dominion of humans. Whether we regard them as conscious or unwitting, revere them as a new form of life or dismiss them as mere clever appliances, is beside the point. They are likely to play an increasingly critical and intimate role in many aspects of our lives. (publ.)

Note: Donation.

Reviewed: Choice Jun 2018 vol. 55 no. 10 (Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: During the Cold War, the United States conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. The total explosive yield of these tests was 108 megatons, equivalent to the detonation of one Hiroshima bomb per day over nineteen years. These tests, particularly Castle Bravo, the largest one, had tragic consequences, including the irradiation of innocent people and the permanent displacement of many native Marshallese. Keith M. Parsons and Robert Zaballa tell the story of the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons and the effects of these tests on their victims and on the popular and intellectual culture. These events are also situated in their Cold War context and explained in terms of the prevailing hopes, fears, and beliefs of that age. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 Mar. 2018 p. 8.
Description: The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers. But the little-known fact is that female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation–they’ve just been erased from the story. Until now. Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they’ve often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize. … Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can’t imagine life without. Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention and the longest odds to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action is a revelation: women have embraced technology from the start. It shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 1/2 July 2017 p. C7; CHE 4 Aug. 2017 (new books); LR July 2017 p. 18; NYT/BR 13 Aug. 2017 p. 9; Economist 1 July 2017 p. 75; TLS 4 Aug. 2017 p. 32; Economist 9 Dec. 2017 p. 83 (2017 Books of the Year).
Description: As much a part of the New York skyline as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge is instantly and internationally recognizable. Yet as iconic as it is, its builder, Washington Roebling, is too often forgotten. The Brooklyn Bridge took 14 dramatic years to complete and here the personal story which lies behind that construction is told for the first time. Meticulously researched, and written with revealing archival material only recently uncovered, this is an engaging and illuminating portrait of a brilliant and driven man, and of the era in which he lived.

Reviewed: WSJ 2/3 Sept. 2017 p. C7; CHE 29 Sept. 2017 ( new books); LRB 8 Mar. 2018 p. 21.
Description: “The 140 characters allowed by services like Twitter or its Chinese counterpart, Weibo, are enough for merely a slogan when using Roman letters, while 140 Chinese characters can make a meaning-filled mini-essay.” (WSJ) Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. (publ.)

Description: As the global response to climate change continues to evolve, this book offers unbiased answers to the most difficult questions in an area dogged by misunderstanding and politicization. It provides an essential primer on what will be the defining issue of our time, providing an overview of the science, conflicts, and implications of our warming planet. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR July 2017 p. 21
Description: Two Berkeley scientists explore the potential of a revolutionary genetics technology capable of easily and affordably manipulating DNA in human embryos to prevent specific diseases, addressing key concerns about related ethical and societal repercussions. “…Doudna and Sternberg’s simple but compelling exploration of this hugely important subject offers an excellent overview of this startling and unprecedented discovery.” (LR)

Reviewed: NPR (23 July 2015; "What the College Kids are Reading")
Holdings: Copy at NICC/Calmar; call no. 384.534 RIC

Reviewed: NYT 25 Mar. 2018 p. SR 3 (article mention)
Description: An assessment of the ways in which the scientific community is mistrusted cites the consequences of such fear-based behaviors as the avoidance of vaccines, the banning of genetically modified crops, and the denouncement of the pharmaceutical industry. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 9 June 2017 p. 34; NYRB 13 July 2017 p. 31.
Description: Do you fear what might be lurking in your DNA? Well, now you can find out, and you most likely will. Scientists expect one billion people to have their genomes sequenced by 2025, and as the price drops it may even become a standard medical procedure. Yet cultural psychologist Steven J. Heine argues that the first thing we’ll do upon receiving our DNA test results is to misinterpret them completely. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 31; NYT/BR 10 June 2018 p. 14.
Description: A bold challenge to our obsession with efficiency–and a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity. Algorithms, multitasking, the sharing economy, life hacks: our culture can't get enough of efficiency. One of the great promises of the Internet and big data revolutions is the idea that we can improve the processes and routines of our work and personal lives to get more done in less time than ever before. There is no doubt that we're performing at higher levels and moving at unprecedented speed, but what if we're headed in the wrong direction? Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest head-lines and findings of computer science and social science,Tenner questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and above all an inability to break out of established patterns. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 8/9 July 2017 p. C6; Economist 5 Aug. 2017 p. 62; Choice Nov 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (Recommended for community college libraries); NYT/BR 31 Dec. 2017 p. 14.

Reviewed: Economist 27 May 2017 p. 74.
Description: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist, and New York Times writer, suggests that we can more accurately learn about people’s habits, opinions, and personal traits by observing actual searches done online, and mining data collected on this activity.

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: PW 26 June 2017 p. 30
Description: Directly addresses the most common questions and concerns associated with fracking, including: What is fracking? Does fracking pollute the water supply? Will fracking make the United States energy independent? Does fracking cause earthquakes? How is fracking regulated? Is fracking good for the economy? Having visited every major U.S. oil- and gas-producing region, the author highlights stories of the people and communities affected by the shale revolution, for better and for worse.

Reviewed: NYT/Br 8 Oct. 2017 p. 31.
Description: A do-it-herself guide to auto maintenance, roadside emergencies, and the real scoop on how women can get honest car service at the garage, from engineer turned auto mechanic and award-winning entrepreneur Patrice Banks. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.

Reviewed: NYT 8 Oct. 2017 p. SR8 (author op/ed)
Description: Shows us that math isn’t confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do–the whole world is shot through with it. Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It’s a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted: How early should you get to the airport? What does “public opinion” really represent? Why do tall parents have shorter children? Who really won Florida in 2000? And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer? (publ.)

Note: Faculty Request.

Reviewed: WSJ 14/15 Apr. 2018 p. C4
Description: An illuminating, entertaining tour of the physical imperfections–from faulty knees to junk DNA–that make us human. We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution’s greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often–two hundred times more often than a dog? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there’s been some kind of mistake. (publ.)

Description: The author identifies the tension between the need for innovation and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order and stability as one of today’s biggest policy challenges. He looks at a number of historical examples, including coffee, electricity, margarine, farm. (publ.)

Description: Ashesh Mukherjee uses the latest research in consumer psychology to highlight five hidden costs of living online: too many temptations, too much information, too much customization, too many comparisons, and too little privacy. The book provides actionable solutions to minimize these costs. This book provides a new perspective on the dark side of the internet, and gives readers the tools to become a smart user of the internet. (publ.)

Description: For almost four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. The stewards of Earth, these organisms transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us. Falkowski takes readers deep into the microscopic world to explore how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible–and how human life today would cease to exist without them. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 1 May 2017 p. 50
Description: His noteworthy discoveries include a way to rationally design circuits using Boolean algebra, and information theory, which understands communications as bits and shows how to compress them and remove noise – methods that underlie DVDs, the Internet, and much else. (PW)

Reviewed: Choice Jun 2018 vol. 55 no. 10 (highly recommended; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: We hear that a glass of red wine prolongs life, that alcohol is a carcinogen, that pregnant women should drink not a drop of alcohol. Major medical journals first claimed that hormone replacement therapy reduces the risk of heart disease, then reversed themselves and said it increases the risk of heart disease. What are the effects caused by consuming alcohol or by receiving hormone replacement therapy? These are causal questions, questions about the effects caused by treatments, policies or preventable exposures. Some causal questions can be studied in randomized trials, in which a coin is flipped to decide the treatment for the next experimental subject. Because randomized trials are not always practical, nor always ethical, many causal questions are investigated in non-randomized observational studies. The reversal of opinion about hormone replacement therapy occurred when a randomized clinical trial contradict-ed a series of earlier observational studies. Using minimal mathematics–high school algebra and coin flips–and numerous examples, Observation and Experiment explains the key concepts and methods of causal inference. Examples of randomized experiments and observational studies are drawn from clinical medicine, economics, public health and epidemiology, clinical psychology and psychiatry. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.

Reviewed: Choice Jun 2018 vol. 55 no. 10 (Highly recommended; Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Planet Hunters tells a delightful tale of smart-alec nerds, the search for extraterrestrial life and the history of an academic discipline. Professional astronomer Lucas Ellerbroek takes readers on a fantastic voyage through space, time, history and the future. He describes the field of exoplanet research in its proper historical perspective, from the early ideas of sixteenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno and the rise of science fiction to the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995 and the invention of the Kepler space telescope. He travels the world to talk to leading scientists in the field, including first exoplanet discoverer Michel Mayor, NASA Kepler mission scientist Bill Borucki and MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Planetenjagers: Op Zoek naar Buitenaards Leven (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2014).

Reviewed: Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Highly Recommended; Recommended for community college libraries).
Description: In a post-truth, fake news world, we are particularly susceptible to the claims of pseudoscience. When emotions and opinions are more widely disseminated than scientific findings, and self-proclaimed experts get their expertise from Google, how can the average person distinguish real science from fake? This book examines pseudoscience from a variety of perspectives, through case studies, analysis, and personal accounts that show how to recognize pseudoscience, why it is so widely accepted, and how to advocate for real science. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 June 2017 p. 116
Description: The birth of geology was fostered initially by gentlemen whose wealth supported their interests, but in the nineteenth century, it was advanced by clergymen, academics, and women whose findings expanded the field. Reading the Rocks brings to life this eclectic cast of characters who brought passion, eccentricity, and towering intellect to the discovery of how Earth was formed.

Reviewed: TLS 5 Jan. 2017 p. 10
Description: Nicholas Thomas argues that what is special about museums are their collections, which are not just rich resources for reflection, but creative technologies that enable people to make new things in the present. Reflecting on art, science, history, and world cultures around the world, Thomas shows that in times marked by insecurity and increasing conflict, museums can help to sustain and enrich civil society. They stimulate a curiosity that is vital to understanding and negotiating the cosmopolitan but dangerous world we all now inhabit. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Jan. 2018 p. 56
Description: These adorable, furry marine mammals–often seen floating on their backs holding hands–reveal the health of the coastal ecosystem along the Pacific Ocean. Once hunted for their prized fur during the 1700s and 1800s, these animals nearly went extinct. Only now, nearly a century after hunting ceased, are populations showing stable growth in some places. Sea otters are a keystone species in coastal areas, feeding on sea urchins, clams, crab, and other crustaceans. When they are present, kelp beds are thick and healthy, providing homes for an array of sealife. When otters disappear, sea urchins take over, and the kelp disappears along with all of the creatures that live in the beds. Now, thanks to their protected status, sea otters are making a comeback in California, Washington, and Alaska. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 27 Aug. 2017 p. 35
Description: It has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century: the detection of gravitational waves. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime nearly a hundred years ago, but they were never perceived directly until now. Decades in the making, this momentous discovery has given scientists a new understanding of the cataclysmic events that shape the universe and a new confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein’s project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe’s structure and origin. (publ.)

Description: Steers you over glacial moraines and till plains to some of the state’s unparalleled geologic features, such as the Morton Gneiss, once thought to be the oldest rock on Earth; the St. Peter Sandstone, one of the purest sandstones in the world; the banded iron-formation, the source of iron for the Great Lakes steel industry; and the ancient shorelines of Glacial Lake Agassiz, one of the largest glacial lakes ever to have existed in North America. The book’s introduction presents an overview of Minnesota’s geologic history, and forty-two road guides discuss the landforms and rocks visible from a car window and at nearby waysides and parks. (publ.)

Description: The Show-Me State has plenty of geology to show, including the biggest entry room of any cave in North America, the largest lead deposit in the United States, and the only exposures in the Midwest of a large province of 1.48-billion-year-old granite and rhyolite. Geologic history is still being made here, too. In 1811 and 1812, an unprecedented series of magnitude 7 and 8 earthquakes rocked southeast Missouri, liquefying the floodplain sediments and temporarily blocking the flow of the Mississippi River. (publ.)

Description: Discover toadstools eroded out of jointed sandstone, rhinoceroses entombed in volcanic ash, and the largest dune field in the Western Hemisphere. (publ.)

Description: South Dakota fills the landscape with geologic diversity, from the glaciated rolling prairies in the east, across the Missouri River, and west to the rugged Badlands Wall and granitic domes of the Black Hills. Written for the layperson and amply illustrated with photographs, maps, and diagrams, this book describes and interprets the rocks and landforms visible along the state’s highways and the geology that lies hidden beneath prairie sod and in caves and mine shafts. Included are geologic tours of the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Badlands National Park, Wind Cave National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, and many other points of interest. (publ.)

Description: Discover the ice-sculpted landscape that intrigued and inspired John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Frank Lloyd Wright. From potholes carved into Precambrian basalt by torrential floods of glacial meltwater to the fossil tracks of ancient sluglike creatures that crawled across tidal flats 500 million years ago, the rocks and landforms of Wisconsin reveal a captivating geologic story that spans 2.8 billion years. Thirty-five road guides interpret the geology visible from the state’s highways and at more than 60 state, county, and city parks. …[Written] to help residents and visitors alike “envision mastodons roaming in front of glaciers 12,000 years ago, feel storm waves pounding sea cliffs 500 million years ago, and hear volcanoes exploding 1,900 million years ago.” With lively prose, detailed maps, black-and-white photographs, and shaded-relief images, the authors succeed in their goal: unraveling the 2,800 million years of geologic history recorded in Wisconsin’s rocks. (publ.)

Note: Donation.

Reviewed: TLS 3 Nov. 2017 p. 29.
Description: In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature–from a tiny rubber boat. Together, the two men tackle existential questions, survive the world’s most powerful maelstrom, and, yes, get drunk, as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their own, sometimes intoxicated, observations. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Havboka: eller, Kunsten å Fange en Kjempehai fra en Gummibåt på et Stort hav Gjennom Fire Årstider (Oslo: Oktober, 2015. 315 p.).

Reviewed: PW 14 Aug. 2017 p. 62; TLS 11 Jan. 2019 p. 32; NYT/BR 27 May 2019 p. 26.
Description: Jellyfish are an enigma. They have no centralized brain, but they see and feel and react to their environment in complex ways. They look simple, yet their propulsion systems are so advanced that engineers are just learning how to mimic them. They produce some of the deadliest toxins on the planet and still remain undeniably alluring. Long ignored by science, they may be a key to ecosystem stability. (Publ.)

From dissolving our fear of numbers and demystifying graphs, to elucidating the key concepts of probability and the use of precise language and logic, Helfand supplies an essential set of apps for the pre-frontal cortex while making science both accessible and entertaining. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 15 Dec. 2017 p. 3; TLS 15 Dec. 2017 p. 3
Description: Few people have done as much to change how we view the world as Charles Darwin. Yet On the Origin of Species is more cited than read, and parts of it are even considered outdated. In some ways, it has been consigned to the nineteenth century. In this book, the renowned cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman demonstrates that there is no better guide to the world’s living–and still evolving–things than Darwin and that the phenomena he observed are still being explored at the frontiers of science. (publ.)

Description: A complete guide to solar eclipses for the general public with detailed coverage of the 2017 and 2024 total eclipses over the U.S. Well timed for the August 2017 eclipse over North America, it shows how, when, and where to see the coming total solar eclipses, how to photograph and video record them, and how to do so safely.

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: TLS 23 Mar. 2018 p. 3
Description: Zoologist and documentary filmmaker Lucy Cooke is fascinated by the myths people create about animals to fill in the gaps in our understanding, and how much they reveal about the mechanics of discovery and the people doing the discovering. In this book she has gathered together the biggest misconceptions and mistakes made about the animal kingdom, and recounts the experiences that have opened her eyes to many surprising realities about animals and the progress of animal science.
Contents: Eel – Beaver – Sloth – Hyena – Vulture – Bat – Frog – Stork – Hippopotamus – Moose – Panda – Penguin – Chimpanzee.

Reviewed: Choice Oct. 2017 vol. 55 no. 2 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Where do turtles hail from? Why and how did they acquire shells? These questions have spurred heated debate and intense research for more than two hundred years. Weaving evidence from the latest paleontological discoveries with an accessible, incisive look at different theories of biological evolution and their proponents, Turtles as Hopeful Monsters tells the fascinating evolutionary story of the shelled reptiles. … Turtle issues fuel a debate between proponents of gradual evolutionary change and authors favoring change through bursts and leaps of macromutation. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 June 2017 p. 120; PW 7 Aug. 2017 p. 63.
Description: This book how venom is used for predation, defense, competition, and communication by an incredible diversity of species. It examines the unique methods that these species have evolved to create and deliver their deadly toxins. The book traces venom back to its origin in early jellyfish and sea anemones, and reveals how venoms have evolved dozens of times independently all across the animal kingdom since that time. And finally, it examines the relationships between these dangerous creatures and humans, who have not only learned to live with them, but also to benefit from them: scientists increasingly are harnessing the power of venom to create new drugs, treatments, and anti-venoms. (publ.)

Description: Contrary to popular belief, not all viruses are bad for you. In fact, several are beneficial to their hosts, and many are crucial to the health of our planet. This book offers an unprecedented look at 101 incredible microbes that infect all branches of life on Earth–from humans and other animals to insects, plants, fungi, and bacteria. (publ.)
Holdings: Copy at Calmar campus; call no. 579.2 Roo

Description: We depend on–we believe in–algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It’s as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations–the marriage vow, the shaman’s curse–do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm–in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”–has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 9 Mar. 2017 p. 27
Description: This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parrots, among other bird groups, why Australian birds wield surprising ecological power, how Australia became a major evolutionary center, and why scientific biases have hindered recognition of these discoveries. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 31.
Description: Argues that society is now built upon a distrust of institutions and government, with people instead tending to trust complete strangers, or even an Internet bot, and explains the mechanics of trust to show how to benefit from this radical shift. … From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low . But this isn’t the age of distrust–far from it. In this book, Rachel Botsman suggests that we are at the tipping point of a social transformations–with fundamental consequences for everyone. A new trend is emerging: we might have lost faith in institutions and leaders, but millions of people rent their homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies, or find themselves trusting a bot. This is the age of “distributed trust,” a paradigm shift driven by innovative technologies that are rewriting the rules of an all-too-human relationship. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 11 Sept. 2017 (“All Tech Considered”); 13 Sept. 2017 (NPR Book Review); The Economist 16 Sept. 2017 p. 77; NYT/BR 8 Oct. 2017 p. 13.
Description: Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 5/6 Aug. 2017 p. C7
Description: Zapped tells the story of all the light we cannot see, tracing microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, and other forms of radiation from their historic, world-altering discoveries in the nineteenth century to their central role in modern life. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Highly Recommended)

Contents: Can a machine be built to think like a human? -- How could AI affect our society? -- Should machines be built like humans? -- Is AI a threat to the human race?

Reviewed: PW 17 Apr. 2017 p. 58

Reviewed: WSJ 19-20 Nov. 2016 p. C10; Choice May 2017 vol. 54 no. 9 (Highly Recommended; Community College Recommended)

Reviewed: NPR (22 Feb. 2017; "Cannibalism: It's 'Perfectly Natural,' A New Scientific History Argues")
Description: The author, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us on a tour of the field, exploring new avenues of research and investigating questions like why so many fish eat their off-spring and some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why sexual cannibalism is an evolutionary advantage for certain spiders; why, until the end of the eighteenth century, British royalty regularly ate human body parts; how cannibalism may be linked to the extinction of Neanderthals; and why microbes on sacramental bread may have led to Catholics’ to persecute European Jews in the Middle Ages.

Reviewed: Choice May 2016 vol. 53 no. 9 (Community College Outstanding Title).

Reviewed: NPR (23 July 2015; "What the College Kids are Reading")
Holdings: Copy at NICC/Calmar; call no. 384.534 RIC

Reviewed: Choice Apr 2016 vol. 53 no. 8 (Highly Recommended; Top 75 Titles for Community Colleges)

Reviewed: Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Essential; Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 Community College Selection)

Reviewed: Choice (Community College Core Collection in Allied Health Recommended for College Libraries)

Reviewed: Choice (Core Community College Automotive Technology Collection Recommended)

Reviewed: WSJ 8/9 April 2017 p. C12; NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 20.
Description: Discusses the distinct physical features of the owl and presents a look at fifty three species, describing for each, the regions of the world where they are found, their life cycle, communication abilities, nocturnal habits, and predatory behavior.

Description: For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State. The eruption was one of the largest in human history, deposited ash in eleven U.S. states and five Canadian provinces, and caused more than one billion dollars in damage. It killed fifty-seven people, some as far as thirteen miles away from the volcano's summit. Shedding new light on the cataclysm, author Steve Olson interweaves the history and science behind this event with page-turning accounts of what happened to those who lived and those who died.

Synopsis: Philosopher Michael Ruse presents a fictional dialogue among characters with sharply contrasting positions regarding the tensions between science and religious belief.
Note: 1st ed. (2008) not held at NICC.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life- which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum-reviving Darwin's own views-thinks not.

Description: Fibonacci, whose book Liber Abbaci, has quite literally affected the lives of everyone alive today. Although he is most famous for the Fibonacci numbers--which, it so happens, he didn't invent—Fibonacci’s greatest contribution was as an expositor of mathematical ideas at a level ordinary people could understand. In 1202, Liber Abbaci--the “Book of Calculation”--introduced modern arithmetic to the Western world.

Reviewed: WSJ 31 Dec. 2016 p. C6

Reviewed: CHE 20 Jan. 2017; Choice Jun 2017 vol. 54 no. 10 (Recommended)

Reviewed: LR Feb. 2017 p. 48; Choice Jun 2017 vol. 54 no. 10 (Highly Recommended; Community College Recommendation); NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 38; NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 22 (100 Notable Books 2017).

Reviewed: NPR 22 Aug. 2016; "Fresh Air" ("Aging And Unstable, The Nation's Electrical Grid Is 'The Weakest Link'")

Reviewed: Choice Jan 2017 vol. 54 no. 5 (Highly Recommended)

Reviewed: Choice Apr 2017 vol. 54 no. 8 (essential, Top 75 Selection for Community Colleges); TLS 10 Mar. 2017 p. 47; NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 38

Holdings: Updates earlier (5th; 1998) NICC/Peosta library ed.; call no. 808.0665 Day
Shelving Note: Writers Collection

Reviewed: TLS 31 Mar. 2017 p. 32; NYT/BR 28 Jan. 2018 p. 24
Description: This book lets us peer into the world of microbes--not as germs to be eradicated, but as invaluable parts of our lives--allowing us to see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are: they sculpt our organs, defend us from disease, break down our food, educate our immune systems, guide our behavior, bombard our genomes with their genes, and grant us incredible abilities. While much of the prevailing discussion around the microbiome has focused on its implications for human health, Yong broadens this focus to the entire animal kingdom, prompting us to look at ourselves and our fellow animals in a new light: less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we are.
Contents: Prologue: a trip to the zoo -- Living islands -- The people who thought to look -- Body builders -- Terms and conditions apply -- In sickness and in health -- The long waltz -- Mutually assured success -- Allegro in E major -- Microbes à la carte -- Tomorrow the world.

Reviewed: NPR (Fresh Air 13 Mar. 2017 "'Irresistible' By Design: It's No Accident You Can't Stop Looking At The Screen); LJ Dec. 2017 p. 32 (Best Books 2017)

Reviewed: LR Mar. 2017 p. 40; TLS 17 Nov. 2017 p. 37

Reviewed: Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Highly Recommended; Top 75 Titles for Community Colleges)

Reviewed: Choice Jun 2016 vol. 53 no. 10 (Highly Recommended; Top 75 Titles for Community Colleges)

Description: In bite-sized chapters that require only high school algebra, the author invites recreational mathematicians and neophytes alike to try their hands at solving mathematical puzzles and provides an engaging and friendly tour of numbers, shapes, and uncertainty. The result is an unforgettable introduction to the fundamentals and pleasures of thinking mathematically.

At the close of the 1970s, the two-domain classification scheme long used by most biologists--prokaryotes versus eukaryotes--was upended by the discovery of an entirely new group of organisms: archaea. Initially thought to be bacteria, these single-celled microbes--many of which were first found in seemingly unlivable habitats like the volcanic hot springs of Yellowstone National Park--were in fact so different at molecular and genetic levels as to constitute a separate, third domain beside bacteria and eukaryotes.

Reviewed: Choice May 2016 vol. 53 no. 9 (Highly Recommend-ed; Recommended for Community Colleges)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 1 Jan. 2017 p. 9; LR March 2017 p. 39; LRB 7 Sept. 2017 p. 23

Reviewed: WSJ 8-9 April 2017 p. C9; Choice Sep 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Recommended; Recommended for Community College Library Collections)

Reviewed: Choice Feb 2017 vol. 54 no. 6 (Highly Recommended; Top 75 Titles for Community Colleges)

Reviewed: WSJ 19-20 Nov. 2016 p. C10

Reviewed: CHE 31 Mar. 2017 (new books); TLS 18 May 2018 p. 7.

Description: Properly analyzed, the collective mythological and religious writings of humanity reveal that around 1500 BC, a comet swept perilously close to Earth, triggering widespread natural disasters and threatening the destruction of all life before settling into solar orbit as Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. Sound implausible? Well, from 1950 until the late 1970s, a huge number of people begged to differ, as they devoured Immanuel Velikovsky’s major best-seller, Worlds in Collision, insisting that perhaps this polymathic thinker held the key to a new science and a new history.

Reviewed: PW 17 Apr. 2017 p. 60; NYT 1 May 2017 p. C2
Description: As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these “shining girls” were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously ill. As the fatal poison of the radium took hold, they found themselves embroiled in one of America’s biggest scandals and a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights.

Reviewed: LR Dec./Jan. 2016/17 p. 60 (author interview); NYT/BR 5 March 2017 p. 15

Note: Faculty Request.

American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research, but over half of these studies can't be replicated due to poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn't just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence for terminal patients.

Note: Faculty Request.

Reviewed: WSJ 20/21 May 2017 p. C6; CHE 19 May 2017 (new books); Choice Sep. 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Highly Recommended; Recommended for community college libraries); NYT/BR24 Sept. 2017 p. 30.

Reviewed: Choice Mar 2017 vol. 54 no. 7 (Highly Recommend-ed)

Description: Argues that failures in structural engineering are not necessarily due to the physical design of the structures, but instead a misunderstanding of how cultural and socioeconomic constraints would affect the structures.
Contents: By way of concrete examples -- Things happen -- Designed to fail -- Mechanics of failure -- A repeating problem -- The old and the new -- Searching for a cause -- The obligation of an engineer -- Before, during, and after the fall -- Legal matters -- Back-seat designers -- Houston, you have a problem -- Without a leg to stand on -- History and failure.

This guide covers the story of trigonometry. It is a swift overview, but it is complete in the context of the content discussed in beginning and advanced high-school courses. The purpose of these notes is to supplement and put into perspective the material of any course on the subject you may have taken or are currently taking. (These notes will be tough going for those encountering trigonometry for the very first time!)

Reviewed: Choice Jan 2017 vol. 54 no. 5 (Highly Recommended; Community College Recommended)

Description: A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of our tech-besotted culture by the Pulitzer Prize finalist. The author offers an alter-native history of the digital age, chronicling its roller-coaster crazes and crashes (remember MySpace or Second Life?). Ground-breaking essays such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy” dissect the logic behind Silicon Valley’s “liberation mythology,” laying bare how technology has both enriched and imprisoned us--sometimes at the same time. A forward-looking new essay rounds out the collection. With searching assessments of topics from the future of work and play to free choice and the fate of reading, Carr once again challenges us to see our world anew. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 24-25 Dec. 2016 p. C8

Reviewed: CHE 9 Dec. 2016 p. B8