I loved My Beloved Brontosaurus. I really did. I was trying to pinpoint some sort of flaw as a reason why I would rate this book anything other than five stars, and I couldn’t. Maybe you’re not into science or dinosaurs (if that is the case, why did you pick this book up to begin with?). But I do love dinosaurs, truly, and the author takes some 200 years of paleontological research, including controversial updates, and synthesizes it into 222 pages of accessible, engaging science. […]
If Randall Munroe Invites You to Rhode Island, Don’t Go.
If you get an invitation from Randall Munroe to go to Rhode Island, say “No, Thank You” and start hoarding food and water*. It’s not that he’s trying to end the world, probably, but he has imagined a scenario that would bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Why would he do that? Because he created one of the most dangerous things in the world – a question box, and he attempts to answer questions with science and math. The answers are […]
The Story of a Life Well Lived
A few months ago, I was on a Radiolab binge at work when one of my favorite guests showed up to be interviewed. Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, author of scientific classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife as a Hat was a Radiolab staple. His enthusiasm for science and discovery shined through in his interviews, whether he was talking about his love for the Periodic Table of Elements or the strange neurological cases he’d come across in his career. But from the start, this interview […]
Love and Monsters in a New Age
Wow, what a book to start the year. The novel starts sort of mysteriously and I don’t want to spoil the mystery (though it’s been out a while now so you may know the mystery anyway–I think I knew before I bought the book, but I didn’t read it right away so I had forgotten by the time I picked it up again). I will say it’s a post-apocalyptic novel–you get that within the first three pages, so that’s not a spoiler. Also there are monsters and […]
Who knew a book about fertilizer could be so interesting?
After reading and enjoying Hager’s Demon Under the Microscope, I was curious about his other work. The Alchemy of Air is about how we made the earth sustain more than 4 billion people by taking nitrogen out of the air and turning it into fertilizer. At the turn of the 20th century, mass starvation was a real threat–the earth simply couldn’t yield enough food to keep up with the growing human population. So chemists are tasked with solving this very, very big problem. Two chemists in particular, […]
This book reminded me that I really need to start watching Masters of Sex
3.5 stars I don’t read a whole lot of non-fiction. What little I do read is usually in the celebrity biography genre. But for my Eclectic Reader Challenge, I needed to read something qualifying as Micro history. I didn’t even know what that was, but the internet was very helpful in clearing up my confusion. Goodreads even has a lot of useful suggestions of what I could read. As Bonk had a fairly high average rating, and was very highly rated by several of my […]
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