And by that I don’t mean “get nature” but rather, “get Nature, the magazine.” I do get Nature, which is very expensive, so maybe you don’t have to. A recent newsletter from the Mother Mag includes a list of great new science books, and I was pretty impressed with the books, so I’m giving you the list*. Take the money you saved on not subscribing to Nature and get one!

Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism by Mariana Mazzucato.

Capitalism is in crisis. The rich have gotten richer—the 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 44 percent of the world’s wealth—while climate change is transforming—and in some cases wiping out—life on the planet. We are plagued by crises threatening our lives, and this situation is unsustainable. But how do we fix these problems decades in the making?

Mission Economy looks at the grand challenges facing us in a radically new way. Global warming, pollution, dementia, obesity, gun violence, mobility—these environmental, health, and social dilemmas are huge, complex, and have no simple solutions. Mariana Mazzucato argues we need to think bigger and mobilize our resources in a way that is as bold as inspirational as the moon landing—this time to the most ‘wicked’ social problems of our time.. We can only begin to find answers if we fundamentally restructure capitalism to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems from the digital divide, to health pandemics, to our polluted cities. That means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government coalesce to share a common goal.

We did it to go to the moon. We can do it again to fix our problems and improve the lives of every one of us. We simply can no longer afford not to.

Naomi Oreskes’ Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean.

What difference does it make who pays for science?

Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about the world, and they do so in an objective manner using well-established methods, then how could it matter who’s footing the bill? History, however, suggests otherwise. In science, as elsewhere, money is power. Tracing the recent history of oceanography, Naomi Oreskes discloses dramatic changes in American ocean science since the Cold War, uncovering how and why it changed. Much of it has to do with who pays.

After World War II, the US military turned to a new, uncharted theater of warfare: the deep sea. The earth sciences—particularly physical oceanography and marine geophysics—became essential to the US Navy, who poured unprecedented money and logistical support into their study. Science on a Mission brings to light how this influx of military funding was both enabling and constricting: it resulted in the creation of important domains of knowledge but also significant, lasting, and consequential domains of ignorance.

As Oreskes delves into the role of patronage in the history of science, what emerges is a vivid portrait of how naval oversight transformed what we know about the sea. It is a detailed, sweeping history that illuminates the ways funding shapes the subject, scope, and tenor of scientific work, and it raises profound questions about the purpose and character of American science. What difference does it make who pays? The short answer is: a lot.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths–that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes–in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways—how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies–and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them—embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey–of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir by Katherine Johnson.

In 2015, at the age of 97, Katherine Johnson became a global celebrity. President Barack Obama awarded her the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—for her pioneering work as a mathematician on NASA’s first flights into space. Her contributions to America’s space program were celebrated in a blockbuster and Academy-award nominated movie.

In this memoir, Katherine shares her personal journey from child prodigy in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia to NASA human computer. In her life after retirement, she served as a beacon of light for her family and community alike. Her story is centered around the basic tenets of her life—no one is better than you, education is paramount, and asking questions can break barriers. The memoir captures the many facets of this unique woman: the curious “daddy’s girl,” pioneering professional, and sage elder.

This multidimensional portrait is also the record of a century of racial history that reveals the influential role educators at segregated schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities played in nurturing the dreams of trailblazers like Katherine. The author pays homage to her mentor—the African American professor who inspired her to become a research mathematician despite having his own dream crushed by racism.

Infused with the uplifting wisdom of a woman who handled great fame with genuine humility and great tragedy with enduring hope, My Remarkable Journey ultimately brings into focus a determined woman who navigated tough racial terrain with soft-spoken grace—and the unrelenting grit required to make history and inspire future generations.

Strange Survivors: How Organisms Attack and Defend in the Game of Life by Oné R. Pagán is an excellent book with the evolutionary arms race, competition, and nature red in tooth and claw (and many other parts) as its theme. Well written and humorous, and scientifically accurate.

Mike Haubrich and I interviewed the author, and the Ikonokast Podcast of that interview IS HERE.

From the Publisher:

Life is beautiful, ruthless, and very, very strange.

In the evolutionary arms race that has raged on since life began, organisms have developed an endless variety of survival strategies. From sharp claws to brute strength, camouflage to venom?all these tools and abilities share one purpose: to keep their bearer alive long enough to reproduce, helping the species avoid extinction. Every living thing on this planet has developed a time-tested arsenal of weapons and defenses. Some of these weapons and defenses, however, are decidedly more unusual than others.

In Strange Survivors, biologist Oné R. Pagán takes us on a tour of the improbable, the ingenious, and the just plain bizarre ways that creatures fight for life.

Inside this funny, fascinating field guide to nature’s most colorful characters, you’ll meet killer snails, social bacteria, and an animal with toxic elbows. But Strange Survivors is more than a collection of curiosities?it is a love letter to science and an argument for the continuing relevance of this evolutionary battle as we face the threat of resistant bacteria and the need for novel medical therapies. Whether discussing blood-thinning bats and electric fish or pondering the power of cooperation, Pagán reveals the surprising lessons found in some of life’s natural oddities and how the tactics they employ to live might aid our own survival.

Life on Earth: Dinosaurs: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps! by Heather Alexander and Andres Lozano, is very wordy. For example, it might say “how did a dinosaur become a fossil? on the flap, and underneath it give the three stages of diagenesis. Oddly, the book is listed on Amazon as being for preschool to first graders, but the material is way advanced beyond that. I’d put this book at 2nd-3rd grade. But it is a flip book.

As noted in the title, there are 100 different questions, all with answers, with 70 of them being written on flaps.

I learned something interesting. I had not known about Therizinosaurus with its very long claws, thought to be used for digging. But I was very disappointed to find out that the teeth on this critter were clearly not adapted to eating roots. Oh well. (The latter was not in the book, something I had to research elsewhere.)

The answer to the question, “Why did the dinosaurs die out” is found under three separate flaps, each with a different hypothesis. That is in fact the current “consensus” as I understand it. Some will object to the book not insisting that dinosaurs never went extinct because there are birds. But they did, of course, go extinct. Just like the synapsids went extinct. Or did they?

Anyway, Life on Earth: Dinosaurs: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps! is a fun book, good for kids in first, second, or third grade.

In the same series: Life on Earth: Human Body, Life on Earth: Farm: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps!, and Life on Earth: Jungle: With 100 Questions and 70 Lift-flaps!. I only briefly looked through the “Jungle” book (as it were) and, as do most kids books on jungles (aka “rain forests”) it conflates the forest, savanna, and all the animals on all the continents. Hard to get away from that.

How do you keep your kids out of trouble in this digital age, short of locking them under the stairs like Harry Potter? You probably can’t, but I cover a couple of resources you might consider, here.

George R. McGhee Jr.’s Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World is not light reading. It is an academic treatise delving into climate change and geology, and related evolution, of the Carboniferous period. The Carboniferous was about 60 million years long, followed the Devonian and preceded the Permian, and the name refers to the giant amounts of coal that apparently formed during this period. This was a warm period and a period with multiple ice ages. The time span covered in this book, which goes well more recent than just the Carboniferous, is plenty long enough for all the continents to travel great distances, and the basic configuration of the Earth to change. There were periods so warm that multi-cellular land life likely did not exist at all in the tropics. The arctic was covered with a continent and it was very warm and lush, even if dark for half the time.

This is probably the time for a book like this, since over the last decade or so a great deal of field research and laboratory analysis of isotopes and other invisible things has led us to the point where a comprehensive overview of great and deep time, globally, is possible without the use of truthy but overdone generalizations. You get the sense form McGhee’s book of significant variation across space and time that is understood at some level of detail. Paleontology turns time machine at a finer scale than usual. You also get a sense of the bigness of change that can happen in the ecological systems we have here on Earth. It is very big. Outright scary, in fact.

Not a science book per se, but I do want to recommend that you get Steve Novella’s excellent new edition of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. My detailed review is here.

Beauty and the Beak: How Science, Technology, and a 3D-Printed Beak Rescued a Bald Eagle is an award winning science book that delves very deeply, much more deeply than most kid-level books, into at least four separate topics.

First, this is a story about a specific, real (not made up) eagle (to eventually be named “Beauty”). In this story, the egg comes first. We track Beauty the eagle through all the eagle life history stages, and few details are left out. A kid who absorbs this material will know ten times more than the average person about bird life history.

Eagles are not the most typical of birds (song birds are the most common and thus often considered more typical), but large raptors in general are fully bird-like but extreme, and of special interest in relation to humans; the main difference between an eagle and a song bird is timing. Eagles go through the same life history stages but they take years rather than one single annual cycle as almost other birds do. Humans have the same life history pattern as typical primates, but extended as well.

(Also, not mentioned in the book, a major division among birds is how sexual selection differentiates by sex. You have males elaborated (robins, cardinals, mallards), neither sex elaborated (crows), both sexes similarly elaborated (bald eagles), or each sex independently elaborated (love birds, parrots, macaws). Most of this probably has to do with nesting dynamics, ultimately. Eagles are the both-sexes-elaborated style bird, so males and females end up being virtually identical to we humans. But I digress.)

The life history story, exceedingly well done and highly engaging, and scientifically accurate, is the first large part of the book.

But then there is a catastrophe. A horrible thing happens to Beauty, and she almost dies. I guess a warning is needed here. It is not too gory, but it is a little gory, and some kids may be a little upset. But it is handled well by the authors.

After this point, it becomes a story of rescue and recovery, but also, a story about technology. In order to save the bird, it is necessary to build a prosthetic replacement beak. A biotechnology expert is brought in by the raptor rescue expert, and with a great deal of difficulty and trial and error, using 3D printer technology and excellent glue, the bird is made nearly whole again. There are details about what happens to the bird next that I won’t tell you, but they are very interesting. If you read this book you will learn things about bird beaks that you never thought about before.

The other themes are about the Bald Eagle as a symbol, conservation of raptors, and raptor rescue.

And, of course, there are numerous namechecks and callouts to other resources to learn more about eagles and eagle conservation, or get involved.

This is probably the best science book for kids to come out over the last two years. This is probably why it is the winner of the American Association for Advancement of Science/Subaru prize for excellence, and the California Reading Association Eureka Award for nonfiction (2017). It is also a Junior Library Guild selection.

There is an educational guide PDF available to go with the book as well, HERE.

I am going to keep my review copy of this book, of course, but I’m also going to buy a second copy and donate it to my local school library, or perhaps his classroom. Maybe one for each.

Beauty and the Beak should be a model for other science books for kids.

The Authors:

Deborah Lee Rose is an internationally published, award-winning author of children’s books (including Jimmy the Joey: The True Story of an Amazing Koala Rescue and The Twelve Days of Winter: A School Counting Book). She was also Director of Communications for Lindsay Wildlife Experience, which includes the first wildlife hospital in the U.S.

Janie Veltkamp is a raptor biologist and rehabilitator, wildlife educator, trained nurse, and master falconer. She has lifetime care of Beauty and led the engineering team who made Beauty’s prosthetic beak. Jane is founding director of Birds of Prey Northwest, in Idaho. She is the eagle expert for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Native American Aviaries.

When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11: Or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal is a new book by the amazing Philip Moriarty. You may know Moriarty from the Sixty Symbols Youtube Channel.

You can listen to an interview Mike Haubrich and I conducted with Philip Moriarty here, on Ikonokast. Our conversation wanders widely through the bright halls of education, the dark recesses of of philosophy of science and math(s), the nanotiny, and we even talk about the book a bit.

Moriarty, an experienced and beloved teacher at the University of Nottingham, uses heavy metal to explain some of the most difficult to understand concepts of nano science. Much of this has to do with waves, and when it comes to particle physics, wave are exactly half the story. This idea came to him in part because of what he calls the great overlap in the Venn Diagram of aspiring physicists and intense metal fans. Feedback, rhythm, guitar strings twanging (or not), are both explained by the same theories that help us understand the quantum world, and are touchstones to explaining that world.

I’ve read all the books that do this, that attempt to explain this area of physics, and they are mostly pretty great. When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11 does it the best. Is this because it is the most recent? Does Philip Moriarty stand on the shoulders of giants? Or is it because the author has hit on a better way of explaining this material, and thus, owes his greatness to the smallness of his contemporaries? We may never know, but I promise you that When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11 is a great way to shoulder your way into the smallness of the smallest worlds.

Also, not so much a science book but, in this case, a science history book (yet not a “history of science” book … “History of Science” is a discipline of which author Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a practitioner.) Anyway, the famous and widely loved Neil deGrasse Tyson has a book coming out (for preorder) that reminded me of that story. It is called Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. The co-author is Avis Lang.

I’ve written a detailed review and something of a critique of the book here My critique is not book killing, but rather, a brief admonishment to the authors to not yammer on about what people did in the Paleolithic, or what happened in human evolutionary time frames, or what cultures do anywhere, without having much of a clue. Common problem. Otherwise, though, great book.

I am strongly recommending Amazing Arachnids by Jillian Cowles.

This book is in line to win the Greg Laden’s Blog Science Book of the Year.

Geographically, the book focuses on the arid American Southwest. This allows the author to be quasi-comprehensive in coverage of species (about 300 from among 11 orders). It also allows the author to tell the story of these critters as a story, with interconnected features of evolution and ecology. This is literary hard core science, with great illustrations (about 750 color photos, and other illustrations).

Because of the US SW focus, it might be a better purchase for people living in just that area. But as is the case with a handful of other nature-oriented books, like the The New Neotropical Companion, the science content and overall interest of the book transcends geography. You’re not really going to want to get that close to these arachnids anyway….

This is a very good book. You will learn things, even if you already know a lot about arachnids.

The author is a clinical microbiologists and photographer.

Coding with Scratch
First, in case you don’t know, “Scratch” is a programming language and environment.

Its mascot is a cat, of course, but the name “scratch” supposedly comes from the use of scratching by disk jockeys. Scratch was first developed at MIT back in the early 2000s, and has advanced considerably since then. You now see the basic format of this language either duplicated or mimicked in many different environments.

Scratch can be an online langauge or you can run a stand alone version, but the former is easier and better. To get started, go here and follow instructions.

If you want (your kid or you) to learn scratch fast, you may want to consider getting the cards produced by No Starch Press. You can get ScratchJr Coding Cards for ages 5 and up, or the much more advanced Scratch Coding Cards for kids 8 and above.

The idea is simple. You put the stack of cards on your desk next to the computer, which is tuned to the MIT Scratch site. Then you try out the stuff in the cards. By the time you are done you (or your kid if you step aside and allow access to the computer) will be pretty good at scratch programming.

I used the 3 year and above cards with my son, and we are about to start on the 8 and above cards, although he is very advanced and we are likely to skip past the first several.

By the way, Scratch runs on the web so you can access it from any sort of desktop or laptop computer including Chromebooks,a nd there are iOS and Android versions. It runs on the Kindle Fire as well.

LEGO related books (Links to my reviews):

The LEGO Christmas Ornaments Book, Volume 2: 16 Designs to Spread Holiday Cheer

LEGO Micro Cities: Build Your Own Mini Metropolis!

LEGO Boost Creative Toolbox

The LEGO Architecture Idea Book: 1001 Ideas for Brickwork, Siding, Windows, Columns, Roofing, and Much, Much More

Not yet reviewed, but recommended:

365 Things to Do with LEGO Bricks: Lego Fun Every Day of the Year

The LEGO Zoo: 50 Easy-to-Build Animals

The LEGO Neighborhood Book: Build Your Own LEGO Town!

The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City!

The Lego Ideas Book: Unlock Your Imagination

In the winter of 1938, a fishing boat by chance dragged from the Indian Ocean a fish thought extinct for 70 million years. It was a coelacanth, which thrived concurrently with dinosaurs and pterodactyls—an animal of major importance to those who study the history of vertebrate life.

Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelacanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is an exciting and very human story, filled with ambitious and brilliant people, that reveals much about the practice of modern science.

Some day over a beer I can tell you my coelocanth-Stephen Jay Gould story. Good beer story, not a good writing story.

Anyway, at that link, the book is $1.99 in Kindle format.

Not strictly science but skepticism, so I thought it might be of interest, is Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism by Barbara Weisberg.

A fascinating story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts in the second half of nineteenth century America viewed through the lives of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters whose purported communication with the dead gave rise to the Spiritualism movement – and whose recanting forty years later is still shrouded in mystery.

In March of 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox – sisters aged 11 and 14 – anxiously reported to a neighbor that they had been hearing strange, unidentified sounds in their house. From a sequence of knocks and rattles translated by the young girls as a “voice from beyond,” the Modern Spiritualism movement was born.

Talking to the Dead follows the fascinating story of the two girls who were catapulted into an odd limelight after communicating with spirits that March night. Within a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to seances. An international movement followed. Yet thirty years after those first knocks, the sisters shocked the country by denying they had ever contacted spirits. Shortly after, the sisters once again changed their story and reaffirmed their belief in the spirit world. Weisberg traces not only the lives of the Fox sisters and their family (including their mysterious Svengali–like sister Leah) but also the social, religious, economic and political climates that provided the breeding ground for the movement. While this is a thorough, compelling overview of a potent time in US history, it is also an incredible ghost story.

An entertaining read – a story of spirits and conjurors, skeptics and converts – Talking to the Dead is full of emotion and surprise. Yet it will also provoke questions that were being asked in the 19th century, and are still being asked today – how do we know what we know, and how secure are we in our knowledge?

I’m not sure if this is a good find or not, but have a look. You will be out $1.99 for the Kindle version.

Everyone has an inner nerd just waiting to be awakened by the right passion. In Everything All at Once, Bill Nye will help you find yours. With his call to arms, he wants you to examine every detail of the most difficult problems that look unsolvable–that is, until you find the solution. Bill shows you how to develop critical thinking skills and create change, using his “everything all at once” approach that leaves no stone unturned.

Whether addressing climate change, the future of our society as a whole, or personal success, or stripping away the mystery of fire walking, there are certain strategies that get results: looking at the world with relentless curiosity, being driven by a desire for a better future, and being willing to take the actions needed to make change happen. He shares how he came to create this approach–starting with his Boy Scout training (it turns out that a practical understanding of science and engineering is immensely helpful in a capsizing canoe) and moving through the lessons he learned as a full-time engineer at Boeing, a stand-up comedian, CEO of The Planetary Society, and, of course, as Bill Nye The Science Guy.

This is the story of how Bill Nye became Bill Nye and how he became a champion of change and an advocate of science. It’s how he became The Science Guy. Bill teaches us that we have the power to make real change. Join him in dare we say it changing the world.

I’m not endorsing the following book because I don’t know much about it, and I’m not that big on behavioral economics or listening to them. Too risky. But, I thought some of you might want to know because it is cheap. Thus, being misinformed is not as bad if you pay less for it!

But seriously, this might be a great book, I really don’t know. Have a look: The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves.

I’ve always been interested in canals, and I’m actually one of the few archaeologists in North America who has worked on them. They tend to contain either very little else but water, or a lot of trash (depending on if they are in use or not) and always contain very interesting fish.

Anyway, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation is about the builiding of the Erie Canal and the meaaning of that event. I’m looking forward to reading this, and it is only $1.99!

A radiation accident transforms two youngsters into superheros, and simultaneously creates an evil villain for them to fight. The graphic novel covers that story and is indurated with frequent cleverly placed molecule size chemistry lessons.

Teachers need to know that this book complies with Next Gen science standards and is very classroom friendly. Indeed, author Preece is a chemistry and physical science teacher (and a trained chemist).

It is a great read, an engaging story, and the lessons are informative and easy on the eyes. I recommend it for the youth in your life who is into science. Teachers should have a look at it!

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig

We know it simply as “the pill,” yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig’s masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.

Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era by Daniel J. Levitin

Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments on the other hand can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps we can take to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Ultimately, Levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, medical decision making, magic, modern physics, and conspiracy theories.

This urgently needed book enables us to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. As Levitin attests: Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Euphemisms like “fringe theories,” “extreme views,” “alt truth,” and even “fake news” can literally be dangerous. Let’s call lies what they are and catch those making them in the act.

Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Maria Popova.

Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates “the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life,” in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year’s set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.

This is a fun graphic novel mystery book by C.A. Preece and Josh Reynolds. Two cousins experience an incident that would make a physicist cry, but that works in a chemistry book because they now have the ability to observe and change matter. So this is a superhero book, designed to teach chemistry. The story is great, the science is great, and the pedagogy is well suited for kids and adults that like graphic novels.

Preece is the chem teacher (high school) and Reynolds is the artist.

This is written for grades 7 through 10 (ages 8-12) but some younger kids will do fine with it.

This book is pretty new, but I think it is available.

Here are some books that are currently available cheap on Kindle, for anywhere from free to two bucks, that are either science or otherwise, I suspect, of interest to readers of this blog:

Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World

In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World

Adams: An American Dynasty

How the mind might or might not work

This is a collection of writings by various experts on how the mind works. They are not all right, but they are all intertesting. Includes Pinker, Lakoff, etc. Personally, I think there is a bit of a bias in the listing of authors towards a certain school of thought that I don’t personally think nails the mind down very well, but most of these essays are worth reading even if it is just to yell at them: The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Personality, and Happiness

A book by Sean B. Carrroll

The never-before-told account of the intersection of some of the most insightful minds of the 20th century, and a fascinating look at how war, resistance, and friendship can catalyze genius.

In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis and ascended to prominent, dangerous roles. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate determination and rare talent they emerged as leading voices of modern literature and biology, each receiving the Nobel Prize in their respective fields.

Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished and unknown material gathered over several years of research, Brave Genius tells the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into extraordinarily creative and engaged individuals. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events–of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.

Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize

It might too late for this one

I don’t know anything about this book, so I’m not really recommending it, but it is only 2 bucks.

We live in complicated, dangerous times. Present and future presidents need to know if North Korea’s nascent nuclear capability is a genuine threat to the West, if biochemical weapons are likely to be developed by terrorists, if there are viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government, if private companies should be allowed to lead the way on space exploration, and what the actual facts are about the worsening threats from climate change. This is “must-have” information for all presidents—and citizens—of the twenty-first century.

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines

How to talk to Rick Perry about climate change

No, really.

How to Change Minds About Our Changing Climate dismantles all the most pernicious misunderstandings using the strongest explanations science has to offer. Armed with airtight arguments, you’ll never be at a loss for words again—no matter how convincing or unexpected the misconception you’re faced with. And with our planet’s future in our hands, the time to change minds is now: The sooner we can agree, once and for all, that climate change is a significant threat to our well-being, the sooner we can start to do something about it.

How to Change Minds About Our Changing Climate: Let Science Do the Talking the Next Time Someone Tries to Tell You…The Climate Isn’t Changing; Global Warming … Other Arguments It’s Time to End for Good

Now for something entirely different

I’ve not read these, though I’ve got them on my eShelf, but I know most of you have either read them or plan on doing so. These are the “golden compass” books. I don’t know much about them but I know they are popular among non-believers/atheists/scientists/nerds/geeks, and they happen to have gotten suddenly cheap.

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials

The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials

The Subtle Knife: His Dark Materials

The Outdoor Science Lab for Kids and the other books in the same series are excellent, highly recommended, and reviewed here.

Treecology is also a science activity book that people seem to love. Chance are you already have it. Obviously, it focuses on trees, but that does not stop it from being year round, and there are, of course, many non-tree things that relate to trees, and that stuff is covered as well. My review.

Electronics for Kids and The Arduino Project Handbook are great DIY books, the first explicitly for kids, and the second for older kids or adults, or younger kids working with older kids. Click the links to see my reviews.

For kids into math and related fields, check out the Manga guides. Here, I review the latest one on Regression Analysis, and in that post, I’ve got a list of the others.

For smaller kids, there is a new (early last year) David Macaulay book on machines. The book itself is, in fact, a machine.

The number of books on this list is not large, and I think this was not the most prolific year ever for top science books. But, the ones on the list are great! For brevity, I’m mostly using the publisher’s info below. Where I’ve reviewed the book, there is a link to that review. Click through to the reviews if you want to read my commentary, but in most cases, you can judge these books by their covers.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.

The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll

In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll’s presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky

A charmingly illustrated and educational book, New York Times best seller Women in Science highlights the contributions of fifty notable women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from the ancient to the modern world.

Full of striking, singular art, this fascinating collection also contains infographics about relevant topics such as lab equipment, rates of women currently working in STEM fields, and an illustrated scientific glossary.

The trailblazing women profiled include well-known figures like primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as lesser-known pioneers such as Katherine Johnson, the African-American physicist and mathematician who calculated the trajectory of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

Women in Science celebrates the achievements of the intrepid women who have paved the way for the next generation of female engineers, biologists, mathematicians, doctors, astronauts, physicists, and more!

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are.

The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people.

Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

After learning about the complex life of trees, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.

Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s remarkable stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.

Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man named Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the United States and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.

Lab Girl

The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (Princeton Field Guides) by Don Proghero

This book is an interesting idea. Never mind the field guide part for a moment. This isn’t really set up like a field guide, though it is produced by the excellent producers of excellent field guides at Princeton. But think about the core idea here. Take every group of mammal, typically at the level of Order (Mammal is class, there are more than two dozen living orders with about 5,000 species) and ask for each one, “what does the fossil record look like.” In some cases, a very few living species are related to a huge diversity of extinct ones. In some cases, a highly diverse living fauna is related to a much smaller number of extinct ones. And each of these different relationships between the present and the past is a different and interesting evolutionary story.

If you looked only at the living mammals, you would miss a lot because there has been so much change in the past.

The giant sloths may be extinct, but Don Prothero himself is a giant of our age among fossil experts. His primary area of expertise includes the fossil mammals (especially but not at all limited to rhinos). I believe it is true that he has personally handled more fossil mammalian material, in terms of taxonomic breath and time depth, across more institutional collections, than anyone.

See my full review here

The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (Princeton Field Guides)

Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry by Christie Wilcox

Christie Wilcox’s book is one of the better science books I’ve read in some time. This is an area I should know something about, as a biological scientist, and as a person who has lived for years in the venom-rich rain forest. But I still found myself learning something new with every page turn. Wilcox has studied venom for years — this is her area of specialty — and her text is enriched with well placed and well told stories of her own sometimes harrowing experiences.

The book is very well written and very well documented with copious notes.

A fascinating subtext has to do with human evolution and experience. There is a theory that primates generally are tuned to venomous creatures, especially snakes, and some of the key primate evolutionary adaptations are shaped by the experience of living in trees where large venomous snakes hunt. In the present day, there is what looks to me almost like a cult of self envenomation, found among people who keep venomous snakes (mainly), who inject themselves with venom regularly in order to stay, maybe, immune in case of an accidental bite. But they seem to be doing something more than this, almost using the venom as a sort of drug or, fascinatingly, as an elixir to extend life. On top of this, there is even an expanding practice of using snake bites, or ingesting the powdered form of snake venom, as a recreational drug. This set of not too unrelated human stories sits intriguingly amid myriad stories of venom use among a wide range of animals, including several mammals, fish, cone snails, snakes and lizards, etc.

Read my full review here

Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry

Some Other Books

There are a few other books that I want to mention, that are not strictly science books, or that are great but that would appeal to a narrower audience.

The first is a book you should buy instead of a science book, this year, if you are only going to buy one book. This is Shawn Otto’s “The War On Science.” I’ve written a review of it here. Please follow through to the review, look it over, then get yourself a copy of this important book.

Howard Wainer’s “Truth or Truthiness” appeals to people who consider themselves skeptics, but may not be as much interest to a wider audience. But if you call yourself a Skeptic and have not seen it yet, have a look it!

Earthquake Time Bombs is an important book to read if you live in an earthquake area and care that YOU ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!! No, but seriously, Robert Yeats is THE expert on earthquake risk and hazard, and I loved this book even though I don’t live in an earthquake prone area. But, I’m really into geology. Are you? If so, check it out.

Anyone interested in, or engaged in, the Evolution-Creation discussion should have a copy of THe Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth on their shelf. Check out my review to see why.