Sharing Some Thoughts about Some Books
Here are some thoughts about books that I have read recently and found particularly enjoyable. I will be adding more to this list soon. If you have any book recommendations I would welcome them - please send an e-mail to alex@dzre.com
See my review of Physics Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek's book The Lightness of Being in the March-April 2009 issue of American Scientist. You can download the PDF format here.
The author of Why Evolution is True is Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Chicago. I bought this book after hearing Coyne interviewed on NPR. Coyne lays out the impressive body of evidence for evolution in a clear-cut, non-polemic fashion. One story that caught my attention was that of John Wells, from Cornell, who studied coral fossils deemed to be 380 million years old from radioisotope dating. To confirm the dating he counted coral growth rings (daily and yearly) and determined that 380 million years ago there were 392 days in a year or the day was 22 hours long. This is consistent with slow down of the Earth's rotation due to Moon and tides (the length of the day increases by about 2 sec every 100,000 years). There is much material like this. I assembled the references to online resources in the book. Included are some nice video clips.
I collected the links to online sources cited in the book here
This book, Titanic's Last Secrets by Brad Matsen, is not particularly well-written but the story of how John Chatterton and Richie Kohler and others gathered gathered evidence leading them to speculate on details of how Titanic broke up and sank so quickly after hitting the iceberg is exciting - at least to divers. Chatterton and Kohler are expert wreck divers, whose discovery of a sunken U-boat off the coast of New Jersey was told in Shadow Divers (see below). Matsen's book goes over the last moments of the Titanic and the testimony of the investigation that immediately followed the sinking. Chatterton and Kohler had a nice series called Deep Sea Detectives on the History Channel.
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson is the book I just referred to and is the story of how Chatterton and Kohler found the wreck of a German sub, the U-869, off the coast of New Jersey. Part of this story is their interaction with the US Navy that initially doubted their claim that they found a U-boat. The story was also told in a NOVA presentation called Hitler's Lost Sub. The book also talks about the challenges and hazards associated with wreck diving and diving deep.
Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller is based on a popular course Muller teaches at UC Berkeley. It covers the basic physics underlying issues a president has to deal with including terrorism, energy, nukes, space and global warming. Muller won the MacArthur Prize. Muller's website includes two cartoons - one of Obama reading the book in bed and another showing Muller lecturing to Obama, McCain, Clinton and Romney.
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan will forever change how you look at food. He is a professor of journalism at UC Brekeley and contributor to the New York Times magazine. What struck me is how far removed we are from the food we eat. Reading about CAFO's (concentrated animal feeding operations) - how cows and chickens, for example, are raised is depressing. How much of you daily intake consists of corn in one form or another is also disussed in this book.
In Defense of Food, also by Michael Pollan is a great follow-on to Omnivore's Dilemma. I like the first line of the introduction of the book: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He then goes to wonder how he will keep the reader engaged for the next 200 or so pages given that he jas given away the punchline. But he does keep you engaged.
Thomas Friedman is a regular op-ed contributor to the New York Times and his latest book is Hot, Flat and Crowded, the "Hot" referring to global warming, the "Flat" to the growing middle class world-wide (his previous book is The World is Flat) and the leveling of the playing field due to globalization and "Crowded" - well that one is obvious. Of course this book was written before the recent and spectacular downturn of the economy so it would be interesting to see if Friedman updates this book as he did his previous book. I particularly enjoyed Part III of HFC where he lays out a path forward concentrating on making the world greener - especially the suggestions for a smarter power grid.
Longitude by Dava Sobel is a great book - the story of the competition to come up with a solution to how to determine longitude at sea. John Harrison, the clockmaker, solved the problem. If you already have the book, you might want to look at the illustrated (front cover to the right) version of the book. This one has superb illustrations and photos of Harrison's clocks. Dava Sobel is also the author of Galileo's Daughter.
I think we own every book written by Calvin Trillin who writes for the New Yorker and also contributes a weekly verse to The Nation. The book shown to the left is a collection of verses about the recent presidential election. Trillin's wit is priceless. Here are some quotes. A number of his books are about eating in which he talks about his wife Alice, as in Travels with Alice and Alice, Let's Eat. A few years after she died, Trillin wrote a beautifully moving book, About Alice, talking about her and their marriage. One of my favorite New Yorker pieces by Trillin is his history of the Buffalo chicken wing that centers around the Anchor Bar in my home town of Buffalo, NY.
At the risk of sounding snooty, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby resonated with me. She decries "defining dumbness downward" (one of the chapter titles), "junk thought', disdain for logic and evidence and addiction to infotainment. I was moved by her recounting of an event I remember clearly - when Robert Kennedy, on April 4, 1965, gave an extemporaneous address to an agitated crowd in Indianapolis who just learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. His aides urged him to cancel his speech. It was a moving speech in which he quoted verbatim from Aeschylus's Agamemnon. It is hard to imagine something like that coming from most politicians we are familiar with. Of course, Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months later.
Many of us have sat through painfully bad PowerPoint presentations. Edward Tufte wrote a wonderful essay: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within in which he discusses how slideware, like PowerPoint with its templates, "usually weakens verbal and spatial reasoning." His Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a masterpiece. Anyone who has to give presentations on a regular basis should read his PowerPoint essay and this book. One of my favorite examples of a stunning visual display is the brilliant graphic showing the losses of the French army during Napoleon's march to Moscow.
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University in the UK. He has written a number of books on evolution: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale. In the God Delusion he takes on religion and argues that a collective irrational belief in "a God hypothesis" is pernicious. Not surprisingly, reaction to this book is very divided. As a scientist I am in complete with what Dawkins espouses here. This is a superb book.