BOOKS
Top Science Books of the Year
Dinos in the dining room, monsters in the mind: Discover takes a look at 20 superlative science books published in 2003
(Published in the January 2004 issue of Discover)
Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe
Charles Seife, Viking, $24.95
Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe
In the sixth century B.C., Thales, a Greek mathematician, claimed that Earth was a vast cork floating upon a colossal ocean. Aristotle later argued that Earth sat motionless at the center of the universe, encircled by the sun and planets. Seife supplies the intervening history of cosmological contemplation, ending with the atom smashers and dark-matter detectives.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land
Subhankar Banerjee, The Mountaineers Books, $35
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land
Banerjee traveled 4,000 miles by foot, raft, kayak, and snowmobile to photograph the animals, people, and landscape of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. His lush images of glaciers, polar bears, caribou, and lichens (on show in New York at the American Museum of Natural History through March 7) remind us how fragile these lands really are.
A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer
George Johnson, Knopf, $24
A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer
At long last, quantum computing for dummies. Johnson, a writer for The New York Times, explains how handfuls of atoms will one day solve in seconds mathematical problems that would take today’s supercomputers billions of years to crunch.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson, Broadway Books, $27.50
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Step off a spaceship from the planet Xarc and consult this all-embracing field guide to Earth, its inhabitants, and beyond. Celebrated travel writer Bryson sprinkles this saga with sharp-witted portraits of such scientists as the sex-obsessed Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who invented the modern biological classification system and named one plant genus Clitoria.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon, Doubleday, $22.95
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Written in the meticulous voice of an autistic boy and mathematical savant, this moving debut novel traces its hero’s travails as he tracks down the killer of his neighbor’s poodle.
The Discovery of Global Warming
Spencer R. Weart, Harvard University Press, $24.95
The Discovery of Global Warming
Weart, a science historian with the American Institute of Physics, honors the scientists who spent close to a century marshaling a mountain of evidence that proves that humans were changing the “capricious beast” of climate.
Eating Apes
Dale Peterson, with an afterward and photographs by Karl Ammann, University of California Press, $24.95
Our closest primate relatives—chimps, bonobos, and gorillas—may be among the few animals capable of laughter. But there’s little mirth in this merciless exposé of the exploding African bush-meat trade—fueled, say the authors, by poverty, the logging industry, and wars that crisscross the continent.
Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death
Mark Essig, Walker & Company, $26
Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death
An American icon bites the dust. Thomas Edison was an early and eager advocate of electrocuting criminals using alternating current—the system promoted by his rival George Westinghouse. Though Edison claimed that AC was lethal but more humane than hanging, Essig argues that a desire to quash his competitor was a likelier goal.
Extraordinary Pigeons
Stephen Green-Armytage, Harry N. Abrams, $24.95
Sky rat, gutter feeder, statue splotcher: The pigeon is a bird of ill repute. Perhaps unfairly so, for as photographer Stephen Green-Armytage shows in this weird and wonderful book, the pigeon is not only a creature of grace and beauty but also, to quote the writer T. H. White, “a kind of Quaker . . . , a dutiful child, a constant lover, and a wise parent.” Domesticated by the Egyptians as long ago as 2500 B.C., pigeons have served as mail carriers, ship navigators and, in the days before the telegraph, transmitters of stock market reports. The eyesight of pigeons is so keen that the U.S. Coast Guard has trained them to spot orange life jackets bobbing up and down in the water. In this book they star mainly as ornamental show breeds, such as this curly-feathered crested frillback (above), but others, such as the white-breasted Australian wonga-wonga pigeon, or the lustrous Mindanao bleeding-heart dove, are wild birds. Spend an hour admiring Extraordinary Pigeons and you’ll never again look at that curb-scrabbler with quite the same contempt.
Fruit: An Illustrated History
Peter Blackburne-Maze, Firefly Books, $60
From the Garden of Eden to the tale of England’s King John (who died in 1216 after a surfeit of green peaches), this succulent book and its delectable drawings tell the story of fleshy, seed-bearing fruits including apples and berries, papayas and pineapples, olives, avocados, loquats, lychees, and more.
