SCIENCE & LITERATURE--Together at Last
Top 10 SCIENCE & LITERATURE--Together at Last
: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, I, Robot, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Silent Spring, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, The Selfish Gene, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, The Mismeasure of Man, The Andromeda Strain
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
| Author | Jared Diamond |
| ISBN | 0739467352 |
"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of...
| Author | Isaac Asimov |
| ISBN | 0553803700 |
The three laws of Robotics:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as...
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
| Author | Carl Sagan |
| ISBN | 0345409469 |
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific...
| Author | Rachel Carson |
| ISBN | 0618249060 |
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land,...
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
| Author | Jared Diamond |
| ISBN | 0143036556 |
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond...
| Author | Richard Dawkins |
| ISBN | 0199291152 |
The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition—with a new Introduction by the Author
Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene....
The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
| Author | Richard Preston |
| ISBN | 0385495226 |
A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus....
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0393314251 |
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve.
How smart are you? If that question doesn't spark a dozen more questions in your mind (like "What do you mean by 'smart,'" "How do I measure it" and "Who's asking?"), then The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's masterful demolition...
| Author | Michael Crichton |
| ISBN | 0060541814 |
The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the...
A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In...
| Author | C.S. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0007157150 |
In the first novel of C.S. Lewis's classic science fiction trilogy, Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures...
The Last Days of the Incas
Kim MacQuarrie lived in Peru for five years and became fascinated by the Incas and the history of the Spanish conquest. Drawing on both native and Spanish chronicles, he vividly describes the dramatic story of the conquest, with all its savagery and suspense. This authoritative, exciting history...
| Author | Richard E. Leakey |
| ISBN | 0525171940 |
What ages would I recommend it too? – Twelve and up.
Length? – Several days read.
Characters? – Human kind throughout history.
Setting? – Earth.
Written approximately? – 1977.
Does the story leave questions in the readers mind? – Ready to...
Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
| Author | Carl Sagan |
| ISBN | 0345379187 |
In the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us. These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions...
My Life with the Chimpanzees
| Author | Jane Goodall |
| ISBN | 0671562711 |
Inspired by a stuffed toy, Jane Goodall became the first woman to study chips in the wild and in the process made history.
As a child, Jane Goodall was given a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee, and she has said her fondness for this figure started her early love of animals. While others thought...
Trouble In Mind: Stories From A Neuropsychologist's Casebook
| Author | Jenni Ogden |
| ISBN | 0199827001 |
In Trouble In Mind, neuropsychologist Jenni Ogden, author of Fractured Minds, transports the reader into the worlds of 15 of her most memorable neurological patients. There is Luke, the gang member who loses his speech but finds he can still sing, and HM, who by losing his memory becomes the most studied...
| Author | C.P. Snow |
| ISBN | 0521457300 |
The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures—the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other—has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a...
| Author | John McPhee |
| ISBN | 0374514313 |
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in...
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
| Author | Mark Kurlansky |
| ISBN | 0099268701 |
The Cod. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been triggered by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it. To the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious that gold. This book spans 1,000 years and four continents. From the...
| Author | William McDonough |
| ISBN | 0865475873 |
"Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing...
| Author | Lewis Thomas |
| ISBN | 0140243194 |
The medusa is a tiny jellfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of a man and his world begun...
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0393308189 |
More than any other modern scientists, Stephen Jay Gould has opened up to millions the wonders of evolutionary biology. His genius as an essayist lies in his unmatched ability to use his knowledge of the world, including popular culture, to illuminate the realm of science.
Ever Since Darwin,...
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
| Author | Dava Sobel |
| ISBN | 0802714625 |
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon...
The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
| Author | Richard Dawkins |
| ISBN | 1439192812 |
Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth....
| Author | George R. Stewart |
| ISBN | 0345487133 |
”The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way. Mankind had been trembling about destruction through war, and had been having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces along with their inhabitants, of animals killed, too, and of the very vegetation...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0517888246 |
Evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has perfected the art of the essay in this brilliant new collection. These thirty-four essays, most originally published in Natural History magazine, exemplify the keen insight with which Dr. Gould observes the natural world and convey...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0393311031 |
Interesting. Gould wrote these essays around the time that the Alvarez meteoric impact theory was being published. This is something that we now know to be beyond doubt. But at the time, when it was just being introduced, the theory, and especially its association with the Cretaceous extinction, was...
| Author | Pamela Zoline |
| ISBN | 0914232886 |
It was one of the science fiction-themed Great Courses I listened to last year that turned me on to Pamela Zoline. The professor described her as one of the greats, a writer ahead of her time, who had only published a single book (a brief collection of five short stories) in 1988, and radio silence ever since....
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
| Author | Margalit Fox |
| ISBN | 0062228838 |
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist...
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
| Author | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy |
| ISBN | 0674032993 |
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands...
