The Secret Syllabus, A Guide to the Unwritten Rules of College Success* by Jay Phelan and Terry Burnham is an unconventional yet science-based analysis of what a student entering college should do, to make that endeavor worthwhile. It is entirely counter-intuitive, and even shocking. Phelan and Burnham toss the usual advice into the garbage heap, and replace it with an entirely new mythology of how one should think about, and try to achieve, success in college.
And I’m sure this is excellent advice.
I’ve been advisor to college students, directed an admissions program, and I tutor college bound high school kids, so I know something of what I speak. I found the approach taken in this recently published book to be refreshing and very much on the money. I also know Phelan and Burnham pretty well. Jay Phelan and I taught together at Harvard for years, and I was one of Terry Burnham’s PhD thesis readers. I’ve been waiting for years for them to write this book, and now that they’ve done it, I’m very happy to recommend it.
The perspective Phelan and Burnham take is in part anthropological, in part rational-economic theory based, but mostly just plain creative and innovative. How to study. How to study a language. How to be job-marketable. How to have an effective plan for your college major and coursework, instead of the usual bone-headed plan everyone else has (and so often fails at). How to get a mentor and develop a productive relationship with them. This series of dependent clauses may not make great sentences but they accurately describe what you will get out of this book.
As with their earlier work (this is not their first book), Phelan and Burnham have their magic fingers on the pulse of current culture, and fold this into an engaging and humorous writing style. I know that these two authors have been through a lot, and they’ve turned their long and diverse experience into valuable advice.
If you have a kid heading for college, or even one who has been there for a year or so, just give them this book. If you are an advisor, counselor, or just the sort of prof or high school teacher that students look to for guidance, read this book, it will make you look wise. If you are a first or second year college student and want your instructors to be more helpful to you, and want to feel better about the choices you are making, put this book on your must-have list and actually read it when you cop a copy of it.
Here’s a video of the authors talking about The Secret Syllabus. Man have they grown up!
.” The review is published in American Scientist. American Scientist, by the way, is a great magazine that I highly recommend. A notch or two above all the others. Three notches in some cases.
by Jane Solomon, illustrated by Louise Lockhart* is a grandiloquent lionization of lexicon, with a plethora of terms allowing you to emulate an egghead as you enunciate extemporaneously. No flapdoodle in this tome, a true juggernaut of of pithy cirumlocutious verbiage.
by Jules Howard, illustrated by Jarom Vogel*, covers 300 species. Unlike my old volume, which only had large mammals and a snake or two, this volume gives a much more uniform treatment of “animal” with roughly equal treatment for six Classes. The book uses bleed-tags to quickly find the inverts, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals.
of these books (as far as I know in paperback) but that won’t include the quiz book. I found a very good used copy of each of the books in hardcover. If you know a family with kids between 8 and 14 (roughly) who don’t have these books, this is an excellent Covid-era bunch of reading for a holiday gift. Start it in mid January, finish them all, then go get your Covid vaccination!
is almost as extreme, or shall we say, hopeful, in its marketing-cover claims as the animals discussed are outlandish. If the cure for cancer was going to be found in a shark, we would have already found it. But despite what the book promises on its cover, Matthew D. LaPlante’s book is a detailed, engaging, and informative look at ongoing and recent scientific research from the perspective of an experienced journalist.
There are three categories of science book authors: Scientists, who write the best ones most of the time, science-steeped (often trained-as-scientists) science writers, who can write some pretty good books, and journalists who delve into the science and sometimes write amazing books, other times write books that are good books but not necessarily good science books. 
is sort of the opposite.
This is a series of essays by biologist Chrisiane Nusslein-Volhard, engagingly and skillfully illustrated by Suse Grutzmacher (and translated by Jonathan Howard) about the aesthetic sense talked about by Darwin, its evolution, distribution, function, meaning, across animals. The essays take a Tinbergian approach to explore most aspects of how thinks look or are looked at, how paterns, colors, and other features play ar ole in sexual selection, and how the underlying genetic connect to these important surface features, allowing us to understand the phylogeny of this physical-behavioral nexus. This is the scientist talking about the science. The book itself is also a bit unusual, as it is designed to fit comfortably in a pocket or purse. Take it to the dentist office or hair stylist! (When the Pandemic is over.)
I have a new theory of the origin of the universe. 
by Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis.
by re-written by McAllister and illustrated by Jannicke Hansen distills, or in literary terms, digessts, Dicken’s classics, including Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities.
, written by Katy Flint and illustrated by Cornelia Li is a top notch earth and science book across a very wide age range, but classed as a 4-8 year old book. This book sits across that divide of read to vs. read by, and I think it is a great read-by (the kid) book for up to 10 or 11 years old.*
has a whole chapter on this.
Cook is likely known to you for the Consensus project. There were two main projects, a few years back, in which scientist attempted to measure the degree of consensus over the idea that anthropocentric climate change is real. (It is real, and the consensus is near 100% in both peer reviewed literature and the conclusions of actual scientists.) John and his colleagues did one of those, and beyond that, widely promoted the results so that everyone knows about it.
“
” is a crowdsourced book (and an 
I don’t have a cranky uncle anymore (he died). But I do have a lot of neighbors who like to write in ALL CAPS. They show up when I give a talk on climate change, and they bring their conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, cherry picked “facts”, absurd expectations, and references to fake research done by fake experts. It is a lot to deal with. But now, I can use the Lewis Black technique for dealing with evolution deniers, but instead of pulling out a trilobite, holding it up and saying “Fossil!” I can pull out a copy of 
Take any major modern news theme. Deutsche Bank. Trump-Nato-Putin. Election tampering. Go to the standard news sources and you’ll find Chuck Todd following the path of “both sides have a point.” Fox News will be mixing conspiracy theory and right wing talking points. The most respected mainstream news anchors, Lester Holt, Christiane Amanpour, or Brian Williams perhaps, will be giving a fair airing of the facts but moving quickly from story to story. Dig deeper, and find Chris Hayes with sharp analysis, Joy Reid contextualizing stories with social justice, and Lawrence O’Donnell applying his well earned in the trenches biker wisdom.
by Louis du Toit and CL Raven is set, instead, in the memory of that fraught and beautiful country, written by a South African author. I live in a place where racial tension, especially anti-Muslim or anti-Middle Eastern feelings rest at a low level below the surface, and this is also a place where I accompany my son to the bus stop where he is the only child who is NOT an immigrant, a Muslim, a Hindu, or, egads, a French Canadian Catholic. I consider us both lucky to be among such diverse friends. 
