Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor. The best American science writing 2006. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. 362pp.

Greene, Brian, editor & Tim Folger, series editor. The best American science and nature writing 2006. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 290pp.

Zivkovic, Bora, editor. The open laboratory: The best writing on science blogs 2006. Chapel Hill, NC: Lulu.com/coturnix, 2007. 315pp.

First of all, these three books are all self-recommending. If you care about science, if you love good writing and especially if you can't get enough good writing about science then you have to buy and read these books. In the end, you won't be sorry with any or all of these books.

Two of them are from established series, Brian Greene's Best American Science & Nature Writing 2006 and Atul Gawande's Best American Science Writing 2006; as such, we really know what to expect from these books: high quality popular science journalism from the print media. And basically they both come through with representative volumes in their series. I'll talk about them in some detail, but not too much as, like I said, the series are known quantities. The third, Bora Zivkovic's Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 is a totally new beast. The first in what will hopefully be a series collecting the best in recent science writing on science-related weblogs. This is a wild card; going in we really don't have too much of an idea of what to expect in terms of quality of writing or variety of coverage or even basic interest level of most of the pieces. To make matters even more uncertain, it's self-published using the print-on-demand service Lulu.com rather than a traditional publisher, so potentially quality control for both the physical and intellectual components could be an issue. As a result, I'll discuss this book in quite a bit more detail.

I'll discuss them in the order I read them.

First of all, Brian Greene's Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 (BASNW). Really solid, most of the articles were professional and interesting. Having read every book in the series since 2000, I can say that this volume does not shame the series at all. I especially like the way Greene uses the introduction to encourage us to see good science writing as a way to bridge C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures, bringing together humanists and scientists around the warm glow of the scientific world view. A couple of the really notable stories this time around are John Hockenberry's "The Blogs of War" about soldiers blogging from Iraq and the free speech/military discipline issues around that. Another is Kevin Krajick's "The Mummy Doctor" about a man who's devoted his live to studying mummified human remains. Finally, I'd like to mention Charles C. Mann's "The Coming Death Shortage" about the oncoming population bulge in retired people and how it will effect western society, a fine article, one of the most thought provoking I've read in quite some time.

Now for the bad news. I always have a few quibbles with these books, and this one is no exception. One of the unfortunate things is that the quibbles always seem to be similar. First of all, 25 stories, only 2 women. Ok, Natalie Angier is pretty well the best science writer out there and she's one of the two. But you have to think that 2 out of 25 is pretty pathetic. Secondly, of 25 stories, 7 were from The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Either Greene or (more likely) the series editor really need to get out more. As well, 6 were from Scientific American, another huge problem. SciAm tends a bit towards a kind of homogenized earnest dullness in thier articles, which while perfect for what they're trying to accomplish, tends to wear on you after a while. Greene should have made an effort to include a bit more diversity in his selections. Another quibble was that there was basically no nature writing, maybe 1.5 articles out of the total.

Next comes Atul Gawande's The Best American Science Writing 2006 (BASW). This is a particularly terrific example of a science essay collection. I think Gawande has done an exemplary job putting this book together. I've read a few of his essays in previous volumes of the various series and they were all excellent; I will try to track down his recent book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.

He sets the tone for BASW right up front in the introduction:

So then what would the definition of the best science writing be? The clearest, most completely objective answer is: the best science writing is science writing that is cool. Even better, this particular year the best science writing is science writing that I think is cool...

I like science writing to be clear and to be interesting to scientists and nonscientists alike. I like it to be smart. I like it, every once in a while, to be funny. I like science writing to have a beginning, middle, and end -- to tell a story whenever possible.

Now that's a manifesto I can live with! And it seems that Gawande and I have very similar tastes in science writing, because I thought an awful lot of the stories he chose were really cool. In particular I'd like to mention Tom Mueller's "Your Move" about the developers of the super chess computer Hydra, Alan Weisman's "Earth without People" which describes how long it would take the planet to revert to its natural state if suddenly all humans were just to disappear. It a great article, very thought provoking and very moving, in a strange way. I also really enjoyed Neil Swidey's "What Makes People Gay" about the genetic and/or developmental origins of homosexuality. A good article is often one that leaves you with more questions, more uncertainty, than when you started. Finally, one of the truly finest stories I've read in any of the volumes of these stories is Richard Preston's "Climbing the Redwoods" about the great redwood forests in the north west -- climbing, exploring the treetops and canopy and hanging out with the dedicated researchers trying to save the redwoods.

A couple of small quibbles with Gawande's book are, of course, inevitable. Again, only two women out of 21 contributors is a little small. With fully six items from The New Yorker and four from The New York Times, and a bunch from the other slick magazines, Gawande suffers a bit from the lack of diversity of sources I noted with the Greene book altough not to the same extent and not as damaging to the quality of the book. For this particular kind of book, choose The New Yorker over Scientific American any day.

Finally, we come to Bora Zivkovic's The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 (OLBWSB). There's an interesting story behind this one: scientist Bora Zivkovic and some of his colleagues in North Carolina decided to organize a one-day science blogger conference for January 21, 2007, hoping to attract a bunch of bloggers to come and talk about what they do and get to know each other face to face. To commemorate that project, he came up with the idea to edit an anthology of the best recent science blog postings. Unfortunately, by that time it was December 2006 so there was very little time to solicit, compile, edit and publish the book. Well, using the power of the blogosphere and the print-on-demand powers of Lulu.com, he pulled it off (you can read more about the genesis of the book and conference here and here and order the book here).

Needless to say, this was a labour of love that certainly didn't take the full 9 months to be born. The important question is, how does it shape up to the other two? At first glance it seems that Zivkovic set himself an impossible task trying to pull something decent together, both in terms of the presentation and the quality of the content, in such a short period of time. We can probably only expect something shoddy and half-assed -- right? Well, I'm happy to say that all fears of disaster were certainly not justified -- anyone that pays attention to Zivkovic's blog knows that he's smart, capable, dedicated and without a doubt energetic and that he wouldn't let something unworthy out the door. Being a long-term fan of his blog (A Blog Around the Clock, part of the important ScienceBlogs stable), I was pretty sure I would be happy with the book and was looking forward to reading it as soon as he announced the project on his blog. And I wasn't disappointed. The book is very good indeed, better than even I expected. Zivkovic and the mighty forces of the science blogosphere that he drew upon have not let us down.

First, the good news. There's quite good variety in the posts, some longer and most quite short and to the point. That's something I appreciated about this book, the authors get right down to business with no wasted space, reflecting the more hit and run nature of blogs. Also, I appreciated the nice mix of tone, some serious, almost Scientific American-y, some very technical descriptions of some scientific principle, some very sophisticated literature review articles. On the other hand, there were also some pieces with more light-hearted intent, some personal essays and slice of life stories. Evolution vs. intelligent design, global warming deniers and other hot topics were also well covered. I would also like to note a much better percentage of women contributors than the others as well as several non-American voices excluded by definition from the other two. (10 11 women and at least 8 13 non-US out of 50 -- many authors are pseudonymous or don't give easily found location information so these numbers are approximate). The average quality of the writing might be a touch lower than the other two books, but only a little and, to my mind, understandable and almost inevitable in a collection that privileges non-professional writers; the flip-side is that we're getting so much of the information directly from the professional scientists so a few infelicities of style are more than compensated for. There are lots of great bloggers represented in this book, a few I'm certainly adding to my blogroll.

Now for a few individual highlights, although choosing three or four out of 50 is a tough task. The first article that really stood out for me was Zivkovic's own "Everything you ever Wanted to Know about Sleep (but Were Afraid to Ask)" where is gives a lot of information about sleep patterns and habits in a highly digestible and enjoyable fashion. Afarensis' "Lessons from Kennewick" was also very interesting and enjoyable. He talks about some of the important issues surrounding studying ancient human remains while still being respectful of what those remains represent to people today. Skeptico's "What the (Bleep) Were they Thinking" is a great demolition of the film What the (Bleep) Do We Know, which purported to be about how quantum theory supports various new age-y ideas but was really a load of crap. Finally, I'd also like to mention the post from John Hawks's Weblog "Selection, Nuclear Genetic Variation, and mtDNA" which was a bit too technical for me, but was a great example of the kind of review-type essay that's so valuable on the web. You can read the original posts for all the entries in the book here. And before I forget, Lulu.com does a great job on the physical book; it's comparable in quality to the best of trade paperbacks.

There always room for some constructive criticism; most of the quibbles I'm going to mention are obviously a result of the book being put together so quickly. Nevertheless, some issues need to be raised. First of all, there were a few cases where the short author bios at the beginning of each article needed to be expanded a bit. There were a couple of posts from group blogs where the actual author (which Munger from Cognitive Daily) wasn't mentioned or where an author's name is known but it wasn't mentioned in the bio (Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars). A few other hings of that nature, too.

I also found that the subject areas of the blogs were a little more restricted than I would like. The concentration of the life sciences posts, for example, was a bit high, but that reflects the focus of ScienceBlogs platform and of Zivkovic's blog where most of the post recruiting was done. I would have liked to see more on computing and engineering, for example. But again, the short time frame meant that people not plugged into the ScienceBlogs universe would unlikely have found out in time. The fact that Zivkovic also used a panel of volunteers to vote on submitted posts also may have lead to a bit less diversity of subjects -- first-past-the-post systems always reduce diversity at the margins. As an example, I was quite surprised not to see any posts on women in science. I hope Zivkovic uses a stronger editorial hand next time giving the book an even better balance and a stronger personality. But to reiterate, I loved this book so these criticisms are only meant in the most constructive way.

So, after a look at the individual trees, can we take a look at the forest as well? In other words, can I see any major differences in the kind of material in the various books? First of all, BASNW and BASW are composed of professionally written pieces, done for money by professional journalists. The stories are, on average, longer and more structured. They'll take an in-depth topic and explain from start to finish. Often it'll be obvious that no expense was spared in researching the article. The journalists get to travel around, interviewing scientists, visiting their labs or accompanying them on their field work. This leads to really interesting, human stories about the women and men doing the science. On the other hand, the blog postings are a little more all over map. Ranging from screeds against religious zealots and climate change deniers to short essays explicating a very particular scientific or philosophical concept to heartfelt personal essays, they reflect an amazing diversity of thought and opinion. I look forward to reviewing the next iteration of all three of these books this time next year. My final verdict? If I had to rank them, I'd put BASW in first a little; it's definitely the most purely entertaining of the three. A little behind BASW is OLBWSB, which is also a little ahead of BASNW. But, I'm really glad I have all three of these books and would unhesitatingly suggest them to anyone interested in science. I would recommend them to any academic or public library. High school and middle school kids would also really enjoy them. I know my 14 year old is next in line to read them around here!

Update 2007.03.02: Updated numbers of women and non-US contrbutors based on comment by Bora Zivkovic (coturnix) on the other blog.

Mooney, Chris. The Republican war on science. New York: Basic, 2006. 357pp. Revised and updated edition.

The is a fine and necessary book, one that uncovers a lot of history and a lot of current events that I certainly didn't know about. Being a Canadian, however, there was probably a bit more nitty gritty detail about various political maneuverings than I really felt I needed to know. It makes me wish in a way for a somewhat smaller book, say 150 pages of text rather than the 269 presented here (the rest is end notes, index, etc.), maybe titled The Republican War on Science for Canadians, complete with little glossaries sprinkled throughout reminding us that Red is conservative and Blue is liberal rather than the reverse here in Soviet Canuckistan.

Anyways, back to the task at hand. Like I said, I really appreciated the thoroughness of this book, the way it tackled Republican meddling in scientific circles in the last several decades. The way it didn't stint on critisizing the Democrats when the deserved it and praising moderate Republicans when they deserved it too. The book starts very positively with a detailed taxonomy of the different ways science can be abused, from undermining science itself to error and misrepresentation to magnifying uncertainties. This taxonomy not only appealed to the librarian in me, but gave an real map to the rest of the book, laying out the ways in which Mooney would approach and analyse his topic.

Mooney takes us on a quick tour of the Republican administrations from FDR to Nixon, followed by a bit more information on Reagan where the issues were creationism, Star Wars, Gingrich's campaign against the Office of Technology Assessment and for "sound science." Next up, he tackles the beginning of the battles against global warming and the EPA, also under Gingrich. Big Tobacco and the food industry's war on our waistlines are covered in the next couple of chapters. The Endangered Species Act is covered in chapter 10. The religiously motivated attachs on evolution, stem cell research and research into sexual and reproductive health issues are tackled in the next few chapters. The final chapter looks in some detail at the attitudes of the current administration, notably on climate change. The conclusion brings in all together; I found it particularly interesting how Mooney draws a parallel between postmodern critiques of the scientific worldview and the Republican penchant for ignoring the "reality-based" community of scientists.

So, in the final analysis I appreciated the opportunity to read this book, to plunge my mind into the depths that to which politics can sink. How relevant is the book still? Well, the current Republican administration is in its lame duck phase so the worst may be over. On the other hand, the Democrats also seem to want to curry favour with the religious element, which may mitigate some of the positives. As well, Canada has an ideologically conservative government right now as well, one that looks south for inspiration. The lessons learned by pro-science advocates in the US may prove to be all too relevant to us here in Canada.

A final note: Chris Mooney's blog is here, and the site for the book, here.

Skal, David J. Screams of reason: Mad science and modern culture. New York: Norton, 1998. 368pp.

A little pop-cultural analysis is never a bad thing, taken in small doses. In larger doses, however, it can be a bit problematic. The good news is that it can be breezy and light, fun and frivolous while still making some good points and containing a few nuggets of real wisdom. On the other had, it can be plagued with shallowness, of research and analysis, lacking in both depth and breadth. David J. Skal's Screams of reason is a good example of both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, although in the final analysis I would have to give it more plusses than minuses.

So, what's Skal trying to achieve here (p.18):

A prototype outsider, shunted to the sidelines of serious discourse, to the no-man's-land of B movies, pulp novels, and comic books, the mad scientist has served as a lightning rod for otherwise unbearable anxieties about the meaning of scientific thinking and the uses and consequences of modern technology. The mad scientist seems anarchic but often serves to support the status quo; instead of pressingus to confront the serious questions of ethics, power, and the social impact of technological advances, he too often allows us to laugh off notions that science might occasionally be the handmaiden of megalomania, greed and sadism. And while he is often written off as the product of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, upon closer examination, he reveals himself (mad scientists are almost always men) to be a far more complicated symbol of civilization and its split-level discontents.

And I would submit that he does a pretty good job of it, each chapter exploring a different aspect of the image of mad scientists (and science/scientists in general) in modern culture. In chapter 1, Skal presents the history of the prototypical mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. He does a good presentation of the history of the novel and the various films based on the novel, relating them to his thesis fairly well. He also touches upon some other creations from the same period, such as Dracula. Chapterd 2 and 3 touch on the Frankenstein story some more, this time focussing on artificial life such as robots, electicity and mostly B movies from the 30s and 40s. Chapter 4 doesn't quite see us moving on from Dr. Frankenstein, but we do continue discussing B movies, mostly related to nuclear weapons and fear thereof. Finally, chapter 5 moves on from our favourite mad scientist and discusses the phenomenon of aliens, UFO and abductions. And yes, a lot of B movies and a bit of TV. Chapter 6 is about mad medical doctors and the fears they conjure up. The Nazis get a few mentions, as does, you guessed it, Dr. F. Robin Cook, Hannibal Lecter and AIDS all get name-checked here. Chapter 7 is one of the most interesting, as Skal discusses the whole posthuman movement, with lots of fast and furious commentary on Rock Horror, David Cronenberg and others.

While this is good work, there are some serious weaknesses in Skal's approach. First of all, so much of the ambitious analysis he sets up for himself on page 18 really boils down into a lot of film history. That's understandable, because that's what he's known for with important books on Tod Browning (Dark Carnival), Dracula (Hollywood Gothic) and horror film (The Monster Show) but he really needed to broaden his approach for this project. He barely touches on the science fiction and horror pulps era of the 1930s onwards. Comics, almost nothing, when you consider the importance of several EC titles in horror and sf this is really too bad. Novels also get short shrift, unless a film was made out of it. Even tv didn't get too much coverage. Obvious shows like Star Trek and X Files are touched on only briefly while others like Night Stalker not at all. Even non-US film gets little attention, such as the various Hammer Films getting only brief coverage. Like I said, these are a serious weaknesses. It's like he had a lot of notes left from some of his film projects and thought he could cobble them together into another book.

Some other weaknesses? The tendency to recite film history and plot summary in the place of analysis is amusing and fun, but not really what he's trying to get at. As I alude to above, while Frankenstein may be the most important example I think he relies on the various film versions a bit too much.

Finally, at the end of the book, he gets all post-moderny on us, something that I found kind of surprising. Some quotes (p312-317):

[Carl] Sagan does not seem to appreciate that many people find scientific material threatening and dehumanizing, not because of ignorant apprehensions but because of what science explicitly states. Most people don't want to think of themselves as temporary mechanism destined for the scrap heap of oblivion...Sagan does a commendable job...in debunking pseudoscience...But in rationalizing the abdunction stories into absurdity, he completely misses their metaphorical dimensions and significance. They are the ultimate symbolic expressions of twentieth-century fears about being immobilized and dehumanized by "scientific" authority figures.

*snip*

In her book Science as Salvation the British moral philosopher Mary Midgley note theat "increasing technicality in the sciences...leaves unserved the general need for understanding, and whatever spiritual needs lie behind it." Ironically, "The promise of satisfying those spiritual needs has played a great part in establishing the special glory of the abstraction 'science' in our cultures." But as scientific complexity increases, general understanding wanes. As Midgley elaborates, "Many scienitists will now say flatly that most of us cannot expect to understand what is happening [in science] at all, and had better not even mess around with the popularizations. This gloomy estimate must extend, of course, far beyond the uneducated proles to the scientists themselves, when they deal with anything outside their own increasingly narrow provinces. There cannot, in this view, ever be such a thing as a scientifically-minded public.

And, well, a lot more like that in the last few pages of the book. After such a lively, but limited, journey through pop culture I find it interesting tha the last chapter reads like a bad undergrad paper in the philosophy of science by a 19-year-old that has just discovered postmoderism. In a sense, Skal is saying we're stuck with the image of science and scientists in pop culture becuause scientists are too smart, arrogant and condescending for their own good and that the "little people" are justified in their fear and suspicion because of their own ignorance and lack of intellectual curiousity. Sheesh. Read a book, pay attention in school, watch a documentary, for god's sake.

Anyways, in the final analysis, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it with some reservations. It's got lots of fun B movie history and a few interesting things to say about the place of science in modern culture, even if Skal seems to fall into some of the same traps at the end that he bemoans in the middle. Just skip the conclusion.

Roberts, Siobhan. King of infinite space: Donald Coxeter, the man who saved geometry. Toronto: Anansi, 2006. 399pp.

I'm reading a lot of science auto/biography these days, and generally enjoying it a lot. While generally not much of a fan of the "great man" theory of science history, I also tend to like a really good story. Siobhan Roberts's biography of mathematician Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter is a little more heavily weighted on the "great man" side of the equation a perhaps a little light on the "good story" but I enjoyed it tremendously nevertheless. Not least because I have a rather interesting personal connection to this book, but more on that later.

So, who was Donald Coxeter? In a sense, he was the Einstein of geometry in the 20th century, in the sense that Einstein demonstrated that science wasn't exhausted in the 19th century, Coxeter demonstrated that classical geometry wasn't exhausted either, that there was a lot of interesting avenues for important research and applications, both in science and the arts.

A nice quote from page 4, giving a sense of the man and his life's passion.

Coxeter was also known to be both instructive and entertaining in revealing the hidden symmetry of an apple. Around the dinner table with colleagues gathered for the American Math Society conference in 1981, he asked: " Did you know t hat apples do not have cores?" They thought he was pulling their legs, until the hostess, Marjorie Senechal, a mathematics professor at Smith College, procured an apple and placed it before him with a knife, as requested. He filleted the fruit into thin horizontal sections, demonstrating that there was no stem-to-stern core, but rather elongated pods of seeds within. The piece de resistence occurred when he reached the center of the apple and sliced through the equator. There lay it's secret symmetry -- not nature's sloppy attempt at spherical symmetry, as suggested by an apple's exterior, but rather perfect fivefold symmetry, hidden at the apple's heart: the apple seeds were arranged in a five-point star. Everyone around the table gasped when they saw it. "It just shows," said Senechal, "that he was looking everywhere, and looking deeply. Coxeter delighted in the geometry of everyday objects, and, because he was so curious and astute, he found symmetries and regularities in these objects that the rest of us never suspected."

And this is what Benoit Mandelbrot had to say about Coxeter style and place in history (p127):

"He was viewed as a throwback...He was a bit marginal...I remember feeling the strength of his style. The enjoyment Coxeter always had handling shapes, models, and letting models help him dream, is something I find very attractive and very important -- the spirit of loving shapes and the role of the eye and the hand, that what I dound so marvelous in Coxeter."

"Most people are not strong enough to have a well-defined personal style...The should bend according to fashion or circumstance and he clearly did not bend. He kept with his classical tradition of geometry, wich had been totally flattened -- pulverized would be even closer -- by Bourbaki. to learn mathematics without pictures is criminal, a ridiculous enterprise."

So, what is it about Roberts' book that makes it worth reading? First of all, it's quite a good outline of Coxeter's life, if a little shallow on his non-mathematical life. We hit the high points, like birth, death & marriage, but we see his children on stage only peripherally until the end when his daughter Susan starts taking care of him. To me this is a bit of a weakness of the book, the lack of color and emotion in the tale of Coxeter's life. Maybe there wasn't much, perhaps the life of a mathematician is like the life of a novelist, where all the good stuff happens between their ears rather than on a grander stage. And there are hints that Coxeter was a bit cold and distant. But still, remarkably little seemed to have happened in a life of over 90 years.

On the other hand, the story of Coxeter's intellectual life is absolutely griping, entwined as it was with the history of mathematics in the 20th century, especially the place of geometry in that history. In a way, you can almost see the story of Coxeter's life as the intellectual history of geometry in the last century, rising from the doldrums to take it's place in as a driving force in physics, ecommerce, databases and even bioinformatics. The overriding theme of the book is the interrelationship of geometry and life, the visual elements that we interact with in film, in art, in science, in architecture, in virtually every aspect of our lives. Coxeter's lifelong battle was to bring the visual sense back into math and math education, rejecting the more algebra-based ideas of the French Bourbaki collective, making math more understandable and accessible. And it was very clear that Coxeter was passionately concerned with the teaching of math and geometry and that cared a great deal about this students. There's a great story about how one of his students, Asia Ivic Weiss, now of York Unversity, was a bit leary of telling him about an error he'd made. When she did, he was actually delighted that she'd found the error and even gave her a wedding gift that commemorated the occasion (p129-130).

Yes, the more math, especially geometry, you know, the more you will enjoy this book. It doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to grasp subtle concepts, to make connections, to understand and enjoy geometry for it's own sake. But, we are rewarded by our efforts. We see how Coxeter's life intersects those of various notable personalities, both scientific and artistic and how Coxeter always takes something away to improve his own work. The artist M.C. Escher is a perfect example. He and Coxeter had a wonderfully odd, mutually beneficial relationship, a relationship well explored in the book as was Coxeter's relationship with Buckminster Fuller.

So, yes, this book is not perfect. I would have appreciated a bit more about Coxeter the man It's also a bit strange how much information was packed into 80+ pages of endnotes, almost like a parallel book actually more about Coxeter's life. I would have appreciated it if a lot of the material in the notes was expanded and pulled into the main narrative. Also, a couple of times a glossary would have been helpful.

But, overall this is a great book that tells a very important story. At the beginning I said I wasn't too fond of the "great man" theory of science history. That's certainly true, but at the same time I realize that so much of the intellectual history of an age can be seen through the works of individual scholars, that to ignore their stories is as great a error as to glorify them. And this book does strike a balance between the man, his work and the intellectual currents that surrounded him.

(A note to the math librarians out there reading this -- the bibliography is a wonderful source for collection development in the roots of classical geometry, in particular I guess we should all make sure our libraries are full of Coxeter!)

I guess I should elaborate on my personal connection to this fine book. In my capacity as Mathematics librarian at York University, I've obviously gotten to know many of the math profs at York and one of them is Asia Ivic Weiss, who happens to have been Coxeter's last grad student at the University of Toronto. Prof. Weiss was the graduate program director in the math department for a few years, including around when Coxeter passed away. As it happens, before he died Coxeter donated a significant amount of his mathematical papers to the Math Department at York, to be housed in their Coxeter Reading Room. Well, a few years ago, after Coxeter had passed away, Asia approached me for some advice on what to do with these papers. They were nice to have, and scholars certainly took advantage of them, but she was not sure if this was the best place. So, we met and discussed the situation. We quickly saw that the issue was larger in scope, that really we should come to terms with all of Coxeter's papers, most of whom were at his house in the Rosedale neighbourhood in Toronto. So, Asia, Coxeter's daughter Susan Thomas, Coxeter's mathematical executor Arthur Sherk and I all met at the Coxeter house where Susan was still living. I also consulted with one of York's archivists, Susanne Dubeau, to get her advice on the situation. After that meeting and subsequent conversations we all agreed that Coxeter's papers belonged at the University of Toronto Archives, including the ones that were currently at York. And so, that's where they are now. It was gratifying that everytime I checked a footnote in Robert's book and saw that the source was from the UofT archives that I played a small part in making sure that Coxeter's papers are accessible to scholars and journalists. It's also great to see the names of so many of the profs know from my work mentioned, like Lee Lorch, John Andraos from Chemistry and Walter Whiteley. Walter was probably the most interviewed person in the book, with many insights on the role of Coxeter's work in other areas of math and science and on the "geometry gap" -- the idea that if we don't teach geometry to scientists, they'll miss out spacial or geometric connections in their work.

Tomorrow, December 12, 2006, there's a book launch at the Fields Institute in Toronto. I hope to be there and report back my experiences.

Update 2006.12.16: I went to the book launch at the Fields institute on the 12th and it was a very nice event. Not a reading, more of a cocktail party with a short talk/film clips in the middle. The relaxed atmosphere was very congenial; it was nice to see my York colleagues Asia Ivic Weiss and Walter Whiteley as well as to meet Susan Thomas, Coxeter's daughter, again after a couple of years. As usual at such events, it's always a treat to shake the author's hand and say how much you enjoyed the book.

Heppenheimer, T. A. Countdown: A history of space flight. New York: Wiley, 1997. 398pp.

The decision to read this book was certainly not rocket science, even if it is a book about rocket science. An engaging and fascinating read, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to understand it either, as it concerns itself as much with the human challenges in the history of space flight as with the purely engineering ones.

Since this book was published in 1997, it obviously doesn't cover any of the more recent missions from the last ten years or so, but I didn't really find that to be much of a problem, as what I was really looking for was information about the early years of rocketry, and this book covers those quite well, including the programs in Germany, Russia and the USA.

I really appreciated the focus on the early careers of Wernher von Braun in Germany and, in particular, Sergei Korolev of Russia, whose name was unfamiliar to me before. The hardships of the Russian engineers and other workers who were forced to work in incredibly bad conditions for Stalin were something was also a revelation. Von Braun's story was also fascinating, perhaps the only flaw in the book's coverage is that I would liked to have learned more about the program under Nazi Germany. Von Braun was very likely an unacknowledged war criminal, and this was underplayed.

The great strides of the Soviet program in the 1950s is also well covered, including the determination by the Americans to ultimately overtake the Soviet program, which they did by the 1960s. The stories of the machinations of the US Army, Air Force and Navy and their jockeying for position and influence was very well presented. The seemless integration of the military and industry is also quite apparent, leading the Eisenhower's famous comment about watching out for the military industrial complex. Well, it's all here, laid out in the history of the space program. The main developments in ICBMs, spy planes, spy sattelites, high altitude bombers are all covered.

In some ways, the most exciting part of the book is the chapters leading up to the dramitic Apollo moon landing, contrasting with the Soviet program's declining success at that time. The chapters following the moon landing could have been anti-climactic. However, I found the history of the various unmanned, exploratory missions very interesting; Heppenheimer is definately a proponent of unmanned exploration versus the political showmanship of dangerous and expensive manned missions. This part of the book, leading up to the Challenger disaster, was very critical of the American decision to put all it's eggs in the shuttle basket and showed how the Europeans were able to capitalize on that and how even the Soviet/Russian program was able to make many positive strides.

The book ends on a positive note, hoping for a renewed international space program based on international co-operation. We're not quite there yet, but this book certainly gives the background necessary to understand where we are and how we got here.

Park, Robert. Voodoo science: The road from foolishness to fraud. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 230pp.

This year, during my sabbatical, I'm really trying to read a lot of science non-fiction, as opposed to my usual diet of science fiction. And so far, it's been great. Bryson, Suzuki and now Park have all given me both entertainment and information and perhaps even a little knowledge. Suzuki and Park, in particular, perhaps have even shared a bit of wisdom.

Both books, the Suzuki bio I finished a few weeks ago and this book, Voodoo Science by Robert Park, are about teaching the world to be a little more rational, a little more humane and a little less gullible.

So, Bob Park, physicist, author and debunker. The weekly dose of rationality in his What's New newsletter. Subscribe, you won't regret it. Every week is a few pointed notes about the world, a few skeptical take-downs of those who would cheat, coverup or manipulate science to their ends. That's what Voodoo Science is all about.

One by one, Park takes on various frauds and deceptions, both by those in the scientifif community and politicians, media or corporations, and debunks them. From homeopathy to the international space station, from perpetual motion machines to electromaganetic fields causing cancer, from Roswell & UFOs to abuses of quantum theory by Deepak Chopra and his ilk, Park is unafraid to tackle the big issues. And he always makes sure that the news media get the scorn they deserve for sloppy and ill-informed coverage.

A grim and depressing book in some ways? Sure. But Park always keeps the tone light and pace fast. A good and entertaining book, as well as an important one.

Suzuki, David. David Suzuki: An autobiobraphy. Vancouver: Greystone, 2006. 404pp.

We live in a time when the military, industry, and medicine are all applying scientific insights, with profound social, economic, and political consequences. As a result, ignoring scientific matters is very dangerous. It's not that I believe science will ultimately provide solutions to major problems we face; I think solutions to environmental issues are much more likely to result from political, social, and economic decisions than from scientific ones. but scientists can deliver best descriptions of the state of the climate, species, pollution, deforestation, and so on, and these should inform our political and economic actions. If we don't base our long-term actions on the best scientific knowledge, then I belive we are in a great danger of succumbing to the exigencies of politics and economics.

-David Suzuki.

An nice quote from noted Canadian scientist, broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki. For me, this quote pretty well sums up this entire book, a strong call for rationality, for scientific literacy, and even stronger call to save the environment, to be active, to make a difference. These are certainly what Suzuki's life have been all about. By implication, by example, these are the things he calls on us to make part of our lives too.

This is a great book, moving and impassioned, and yet still very human. Suzuki is clearly not overly impressed with himself, not caught up with his own celebrity and this makes his memoirs so engaging. There's lots of gentle humour here, often at his own expense. He also balances the story of his public life with the story of his private life. He gives enough insight into his personal to give us a good feeling of who he is without so much that it feels intrusive or exploitative.

Following up his first volume of memoirs, Metamorphosis from 1986, Suzuki mostly picks up where that one leaves off. He gives us a brief summary of his childhood, education and early academic and broadcasting career in the first few chapters. Since it's been nearly 20 years since I read Metamorphosis, I really can't recall how much is rehashed and how much is new. The following chapters are mostly telling the story of his environmental activism along with some details about his family life. The story we get the most on is his involvement with First Nations communities, particularly in BC. Also, we get three strong chapters on his involvement with Amazon forestry issues. Also various environmental summits are covered, including the Rio Earth Summit and Kyoto.

But it's the last two chapters that I really loved, "Reflections on Science and Technology" and "A Culture of Celebrity." These are almost manifestos to pay attention to the planet, to learn about our place in the ecosystem and to value science -- he takes a few digs at Canadian culture for placing such a low value on science. He also muses a bit on the whole "Greatest Canadian" thing, and our insane celebrity culture in general. It's intersting to not that the poll placed him the highest of any living Canadian. David Suzuki -- greatest living Canadian. I can live with that.

I would be remiss if I did not give some important links:

• David Suzuki Foundation.
  
• Citation for Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour
  
• Suzuki Foundation publications
  
• Suzuki's Science Matters newspaper column, since 1999.

Bryson, Bill. A short history of nearly everything. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003. 544pp.

I'm a bit of two minds on this book. Really, I almost consider it two different books that I could review separately. The first, a book I really like, that I think is an important contribution to efforts to improve scientific literacy amongst the general population. The second, a book that subtly undermines efforts to improve scientific literacy among the general public by essentially portraying most scientists as lying, egocentric freakazoids.

Let's do the good review first. This book is a fun read, a hard thing to say about most science books, popular or otherwise. Bryson has an engaging style and a good eye for the most accessible stories. And the emphasis is definitely on stories, on the role of individual scientists in the history of scientific discoveries. He comes at the science using the stories of the scientists and inventors, always bringing the knowledge to a human scale and understanding, always giving a good understanding and grounding of the science in everyday life. And, the search for scientific understanding as part of the everyday lives of the scientists. Like I said, the story is king here and Bryson really personalizes science in this book. If scientists often seem a little remote as they are portrayed in popular culture, well Bryson goes out of his way to make scientists seem very human.

What sciences does he concentrate on? Really what we sometimes call the hard sciences: physics and astronomy especially, chemistry, geology, all the earth sciences. The age of the universe, the earth and life (especially human life) on earth is one of his dominant themes throughout the book, so palaeontology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, particle physics all play important roles in those big questions and he treats them all engagingly.

I also admire Bryson's resolutely rational and non-supernatural approach to the material. No intelligent design theories here, only a scientific, rational, reality based approach. And a very strong environmental message. Bryson fights the good fight here, with good material on species extinction, pollution and climate change. Another bonus is an 11 page bibliography to get you going on further reading on all the subjects he tackles.

And now for the not-so-good news. The humanization-of-science thing goes a bit too far, and Bryson seems to go out of his way to dig up some unsavoury gossip on virtually every historical scientist he talks about. It's one thing to glorify and sanctify these all-too-human people, but on the other hand, I don't think portraying them all as a bunch of kooks is a good idea either. For example, on p. 357 he tell us how Linnaeus was obsessed with sex and always giving organisms slightly naughty names, such as one genus of plants he named Clitora. On p. 351 he tells us of other scientists who were in the habit of stealing hundreds of specimens from London's Natural History Museum. And on p. 385, he gives us a detailed description of Charles Darwin's mysterious disease, making him seem to be a bit of a hypocondriac. And on and on, these are just a few examples from a short stretch of the book. A bit of balance, please, Mr. Bryson.

Actually, I guess there's a third book under discussion here. The book that includes the stuff that Bryson chose not to cover. The list of scientific disciplines I mention above is pretty impressive, but I think that some areas that he covered excessively could have been trimmed and some areas that were left out could have been added. As I imply above, one candidate for trimming was his very extensive coverage of how we have come to the current age of the universe and the Earth. While interesting and useful, it could easily have been shortened. The areas I would have added, which I think would have made the book even more valuable, are math, computing, a more general coverage of biology and a bit on philosophy of science. First of all, biology. Bryson really doesn't cover biology to the same extent as the earth sciences, and what he does cover in biology is mostly human evolution, ie. paleobiology. Related to paalaeontology and really in the same strain as the earth sciences. So, at least a little more botany, a little physiology and maybe even some expanding the decent coverage of genetics to include the bioinformatics revolution. Math -- it seems to me that most of modern science rests on a foundation of mathematical reasoning and to not even cover calculus and what it means to scientific progress is shortchanging the reader. Mathophobes be damned. "Nearly everything" has to include a bit of math.

Computing -- as we know, computers are ubiquitous in the world today, and that is no less true of modern science. Computational methods are so prevalent in scientific research these days that I think Bryson owed it to his readers to give at least a taste of the growth and development of the computing field and its influence on science. And really, the pioneers of computing have to be at least as colourful as any other discipline.

And lastly, the philosophy part. I'm certainly not advocating that he go into all the gory details of the philosophy of science -- all that postmodern sociology stuff is a bit heavy for a pop science book. But I also think he owed it to his readers to talk a little bit about what the scientific method is and how it works. It seems to me that understanding a little bit about how scientists know what they claim to know is a useful bit of knowledge. With all the various wars on science going on out there, a little bit of understanding of how scientists get around to making their claims will make us all a better informed citizenry, and this book leaves us hanging a bit in that respect. Remember, "nearly everything."

But enough of all the carping. Buy the darned book. It's mostly pretty good and a surprisingly easy read with more positives than negatives. The illustrated version, which I don't have but have glanced through in the bookstores, is probably even easier to get through.

Lightman, Alan, ed. The best American science writing 2005. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. 300pp.
Weiner, Jonathan, ed. The best American science and nature writing 2005. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 304pp.

These two book series are definately self-recommending. If you like science, if you like good writing, if you have long boring commutes on busses or trains, you owe it to yourself to buy and read these books. Or, buy/suggest these books for your library and read them. Both these books have basically the same aim: to collect popular science and nature writing and present them to an interested public, hopefully from a wide and varied selection of sources. Also, they can easily function as a current awareness tool in the sciences -- you can use the books to spot trends, to keep abreast of recent developments in important areas, to monitor public reaction scientific controversies, disputes or cutting edge advances. So, good books for scitech librarians.

Do these particular editions of their respective series meet these high expectations? Mostly, yes, with a few reservations.

The Lightman books has a good selection of stories from a good selection of disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, genetics, information technology, medicine, some nature writing, a couple of profiles or memoir-type pieces. The particular hightlights for me are Oliver Sacks' "Greetings from the Island of Stability" on discovering new elements and David Quammen's "Darwin or Not" which looks carefully at the arguments in favour of evolution and darwinism and definately comes out on the side of reason and science. A significant lowlight in this collection? I can't for the life of me figure out what possesed Lightman to inlude the essay "On the Origins of the Mind" by David Berlinski. For those not in the know, Berlinski is a member of the Discovery Institute and therefore a card-carrying creationist. Coming right after the Quammen article in the table of contents, the Berlinski article completely undermines Quammen (and in a sense, the whole book). Where Quammen gives a rational, fact-based account of reality, Berlinski, when faced with unanswered questions about the origin and nature of human consciousness, says, "The rest is darkness, mystery and magic." It doesn't take too much intelligence to figure out that these are code-words for god -- if we don't know the answer, then there is no answer we can know, only supernatural intervention. Alan Lightman, what were you thinking?

On average, the Weiner book is a bit better, with no articles I was really disappointed in. A good selection of topics (anthropology, aerospace, psychology, engineering and technology), if maybe a little heavy on medical reporting and book reviews. Real highlights for me are easy to spot: Natalie Angier's "My God Problem -- and Theirs" on the place of religion in public debate in science, Jared Diamond's "Twilight at Easter" on what we can learn from Easter Island and Jerome Groopman's "The Grief Industry" about how maybe people are a lot more resilient in the face of hardship than we give them credit for. This might be the one must-read from this book. Quibbles -- and really, my problems with this book really are just quibbles. First of all, there really isn't any nature writing, despite the presence of word in the title of the book. The Easter Island story is the closest. The second is that the editor needs to get out more. Of the 25 articles in the book, 13 were from The New Yorker, The New York Times or The New York Review of Books. Not to mention, one more has The New York Times in it's title ("The Homeless Hacker vs. The New York Times") and another has The New York Review of Books in the first sentence ("The Man or the Moment"). Not that it would be easy to choose which articles to leave out, but the narrowness of sources and points of view is a bit problematic for me.

One more thing. Natalie Angier has an article in each of these collections and both are excellent. (From the Lightman book, I didn't mention "Scientist at Work: Jacqueline Barton," a terrific portrait of a female scientist.) To all you giants of the publishing industry out there in blogland, why doesn't this woman have at least a couple of essay collections already? She has to be one of the best science writers working today, probably the best without a published collection. What's taking so long?

(Also in the Other Blog)

Ullman, Ellen. The Bug. New York: Anchor, 2004. 368pp.

This is quite simply, a novel about how crazy it is being a software developer. It revolves around the a software project in the mid-1980's and a huge, impossible bug that creeps into the user interface code. The bug only appears sporadically and unpredicably, make it very difficult to figure out the underlying cause. The main characters in the novel are the programmers, Ethan Levin, and the tester, Berta Walton. Each of them have troubled personal lives that parallel the progress of the bug, while the view each other with distrust and suspicion. The soap opera aspects of their lives doesn't work as well as the portrait of the programmer's life; at about page 300 (of 350) we learn something about Ethan's relationship with his girlfriend that totally changes our view of him and the root cause of their breakup, which I think is unfair to the reader. Nevertheless, the characters and plot are certainly strong enough to support the more interesting aspect of the novel from our point of view here. For those of you who want to understand what it's like to be a programmer, working with flakey systems, uncertain requirements, killer deadlines and and the limitations of the human capacity to understand very large and complex systems, this is the novel for you. Ullman is a former software developer and it shows. Having been a software developer myself for 12 years, it rings very true. (Intially from the other blog.)

Quammen, David, ed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2000. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 256pp.
Gleick, James, ed. The Best American Science Writing: 2000. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. 258pp.

Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 is the first volume in a great series. The idea was to gather together the best popular writing on science and nature from a given year. Since the operative word is popular, most of the essays come from venues such as The New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly. Both those magazines publish a lot of fine science writing that is both accurate and engaging, that stimulate and inform while entertaining. The best example is Oliver Sacks’s piece from the New Yorker, “Brilliant Light,” about his boyhood obsession with chemisty and how he was able to use science as a way of coping with many difficult and challenging family and personal problems. Sacks expanded this essay into his brilliant memoir Uncle Tungsten. A particularly topical essay on the smallpox virus talks very seriously about how unprepared we are for a major outbreak of a serious infectious disease and how shortsighted we’ve been in dealing with smallpox in particular. The other highlight has to be "Men, Women, Sex and Darwin" by Natalie Angier. It's her very interesting take on evolutionary psychology, which was included in her book Women: An Intimate Geography, a book I also highly recommend. The main tenet of evolutionary psychology is that men are by nature promiscuous and want to spread their seed and that women are by nature monogomous and want to trap men into taking care of them and their children. Well, Angier turns this upside down and asks, maybe it isn’t nature as much as we think, maybe a lot of it’s culture that we’ve just taken for granted for so long that we think it’s nature. And maybe things would be very different if the power relationships between men and women were different. Not too revolutionary an idea for us sf types, but an interesting presentation as science rather than fiction. Also of interest are a few fascinating essays on camel racing and African wild dogs, but really there is nothing weak here at all. Similar in both quality and content to Quammen’s book is HarperCollins’s The Best American Science Writing 2000. The book starts very strong with Atul Gawande’s “When Doctor’s Make Mistakes.” It is very simply about how doctors make lots of mistakes treating us every day and how we like to pretend that it shouldn’t happen, as if doctor’s weren’t just as fallible as the rest of us. Ending the book on a similar high note is a plea by Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg to cast off our superstitions and adopt a rational view of the universe – a science fictional topic if there ever was one. These series are currently up to the 2002 editions and I look forward to reading the 2003 editions when they come out. I also find it interesting that there exists two nearly identicle books featuring this kind of writing, both excellent, both aimed at the same audience, and yet they both only feature American writing. Surely one of these publishers could have broadened their scope to include essays published in Canada or the UK or Australia. Does the book have to say “American” to sell?

Berners-Lee, Tim with Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 209 pp.

This is the story of how the web was created at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland in the early 90s. It’s a pretty good story, made even more interesting by how close it seemed to never happening. Berners-Lee always seemed to be under pressure to spend more time on his real work instead of fiddling with this hypertext business. Also remarkable is Berners-Lee’s commitement to making the web as open and free as possible. If Berners-Lee hadn’t developed the web, what eventually would have come would have been very different, certainly more commercial than even today. A near miss, and an interesting idea for an alternate history story.

Florman, Samuel C. The Introspective Engineer. New York: St. Martin's Press. 3/1996. 220 pp.

Finally, a book that I like! Engineers don't have such a great reputation -- they tend to be "can do" people with a lot of confidence and, supposedly, arrogant and indifferent to social needs. Florman's rather introspective extended essay takes a long hard look at this stereotype and finds much truth in it. At the same time, however, he also finds in engineers the practical bent to do a lot of good in the world. Afterall, virtually every aspect of our material lives is engineered in some form or other, so engineers and engineering can't be all bad, can it? Personally, I've always liked engineers and valued their mindset and this book is a good examination of the strengths and weaknesses of that mindset and how they are manifested in the profession today.