Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
BOOK REVIEW
Biography
This group separates out biographies. Or does it in fact? Is not many an abstract volume a good bit of a biography? The name of C harles Darwin adds importance, and the late date of the chosen edition brings the reader closer to the intentions of that seminal author, whose candid impieties were at first edited out by his devout and loving widow. Hardy's is a rarely subjective reflection, and young Watson's superb tale opens the inner life of one decisive investigator. C harles Darwin, Autobiography (1950) G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940) James Watson, The Double Helix (1968) Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979) Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
Field Guides
Rather than call these "field guides," we might have simply called them "nouns." They compile and compactly describe many nouns of modern science, the substance of which all tomes of meaning are compounded. We emphasize those with the widest readership (gardens, birds, words), for amateurs have long joined with professionals to sample them. Others include special landscapes or an elusive sample. We have included some that require extensive means typical of our own century, such as aircraft, satellites and great telescopes. Images are of central importance here. One great exception is the Oxford English Dictionary , all text. William Garnett, Aerial Photographs (1994) Jonathan Kingdon, East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa (1971) Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (1998, 3rd ed.) Ward Ritchie Press, Photo-Atlas of the United States: A Complete Photographic Atlas of the USA Using Satellite Photography (1975) Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds (1934) Allan Sandage, The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies (1961) John S. Shelton, Geology Illustrated (1966) John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez (1941) H. Bradley, W. A. C raigie, J. A. H. Murray and C . T. Onions (eds.), Oxford English Dictionary (1933) Liberty Hyde Bailey, Hortus (1930)
Explorations
Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang (1997)
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George Gamow, One, Two, Three? Infinity (1947) Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988) Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, The Mind's I (1981) Kenneth Hsu and William Ryan, The Mediterranean Was a Desert (1983) Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers (1985) Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1984) John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (1998) C arl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot (1994) Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) Herman Weyl, Symmetry (1952)
Monographs
Paul Dirac, Quantum Mechanics (1930) Albert Einstein, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: The Swiss Years: Writings, 190209 (1930) Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Fractals (1977) Linus Pauling, Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939) Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (191013, 3 vols.) C yril Smith, Search For Structure (1981) John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (1948) R. B. Woodward and Roald Hoffmann, Conservation of Orbital Symmetry (1970) Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (1922) Richard Feynman, QED (1985) Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming (1968)
History of Science
Some books trace a single theme, like Pais's volume, about the journey of physicists toward finer and finer scales in the analysis of matter until in the mid-1980s the realm of quarks inside the nuclear particles was reached. The best account of nuclear bomb-making through World War II is the volume by Richard Rhodes. A few splendid encyclopedic sets are truly important. The two mentioned here are magnificent histories of science and technology. The Singer volumes are copiously and beautifully illustrated with the highest care and credibility. Although they are aging, their visual impact doth not fade. The Needham booksnow 16 or 18 volumes and countingare not only unique in opening C hinese civilization at depth to a largely ignorant West but also are so helpfully comparative that they are no bad source for the history of science everywhere. A. Pais, Inward Bound (1986) John Desmond Bernal, Science in History (1954) Paul de Kruif, Microbe Hunters (1926) Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science (reprinted as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science ) (1952) Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936) Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (1947) Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) C harles Singer, E. J. Holmyard and A. R. Hall, A History of Technology (1954) Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979)
Many-Sided Life
The diversity of living forms is mirrored by the books that recount them. Jacob and Monod, long colleagues in Paris, offer two brief assessments of molecular biology. Before them came Schrdinger, life as the work of a protean crystalrealized by the double helix. Here too are the jeweled plankton and fish of the seas, the calls of birds, the ecology of countryside, ice and jungle, viral threats, dinosaur finds, all cellsmany-sided life viewed many ways.
Explorations
William Beebe, Jungle Days (1925) Rachel C arson, Silent Spring (1962) John R. Horner and James Gorman, Digging Dinosaurs (1988) Francois Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (1982) Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring (1952) Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (1971) Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (1994) Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974)
Monographs
Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata, Tropical Nature (1984) Stephen S. Morse (ed.), Emerging Viruses (1993) Erwin Schrdinger, What Is Life? (1944) D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917) Vladimir Vernadskii, The Biosphere (1998; French version, 1929) Alister C lavering Hardy, The Open Sea: Its Natural History (195659, 2 vols.) Edward O. Wilson, The Insect Societies (1971)
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Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1977) Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (1994) Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) Ronald Aylmer Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966) Howard Gruber, with Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (1974)
Explorations
Elizabeth Barber, Women's Work (1994) Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (1972) Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1965) Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (1988) R. L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye (1970) Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954) L. S. B. Leakey, Adam's Ancestors: The Evolution of Man and His Culture (1934) Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994) Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (1996) George B. Schaller, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior (1963) Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (1987) Pierre Teilhard de C hardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1959) Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Thought and Language (1962) C harles Leonard Wooley, Discovering the Royal Tombs at Ur (1969) Monographs C . K. Brain, Hunter and Hunted (1981) Noam C homsky, Syntactic Structure (1957) Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920) Mary Leakey; Laetoli: A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania (1987) Richard Lee, The Kung San (1979) Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art (1967) Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986) Peter and Iona Oppie, Children's Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Duelling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, Pretending (1969) Ivan P. Pavlov, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (1926) Oskar Pfungst, Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology (1911)
Novels
We could not close the book list of the most literate and populous of all centuries without attending to what the art of fiction brings, both of tears and laughter. H. G. Wells wrote his book in the first decade of the century. The science was truly prescient, and his portrayals both of the advertisers' culturestill dominantand of the life of a young scientist have hardly been bettered. Rainbow is an utterly brilliant novel of WWII framed around science, but its light is chillingly cold. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925) Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle (1963) H. G. Wells, Tono Bungay (1908) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
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