Comments on: Read These Books and Be Smarter

By: Christopher Winter

Christopher Winter — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 18:32:20 +0000

Jimena Canales has a new book that may fit right in with The X Club. It is Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science from Princeton University Press. It gets a good review from Jess Keiser.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-shadowy-spirits-that-helped-advance-science/2020/12/23/6995cec8-35b0-11eb-b59c-adb7153d10c2_story.html

For that matter, Keiser’s own book Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience. may also fit in.

By: Christopher Winter

Christopher Winter — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 03:38:25 +0000

If you don’t know Jane Smiley as an author (and academic) you should. One of my favorite novels of all time is by her: JANE SMILEY: MOO* (That is the Amazon link, but it is been around a long time, so look for a used copy. This version on Amazon is just under one thousand dollars. Must be some kind of mistake!)

It must have been corrected. Tonight, neither edition is priced at anywhere close to a kilobuck. The mass market paperback lists for $9.43. (But I’d look on eBay for it.)

By: Christopher Winter

Christopher Winter — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 03:28:32 +0000

Thank you for these suggestions, Greg. I will be ordering The Spirit of Inquiry at a minimum — not least to learn more about Adam Sedgewick. The good professor figures in Irving Stone’s The Origin, in which he takes young Charles Darwin on a three-week geology trip to Wales. When Darwin returns home, he finds a letter offering him a voyage with one Captain Fitzroy. The rest, as they say, is history.

http://www.chris-winter.com/Erudition/Reviews/Mainstem/Stone_I/Origin.html