The Research Triangle Science Book Club
The Science Book Club was founded in September 2003. It meets on the first Thursday of every month at 3:15 PM in the Bishop’s House on Duke University’s east campus. Every month, club members choose one science book for discussion the following month and then thrash out the pros and cons of the current month’s book. The discussions are lively, informative, but without testiness — although members often have strong opinions on the book chosen. The books selected by the club are listed below.
May 2008
A Scientist Audits the Earth by Stuart L. Pimm. This is the paperback version of the hardback which was published in 2001 with the title The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth. The paperback is available from Amazon for $17.12.
April 2008
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution by Michael J. Behe. Free Press, first Paperback edition March 20, 1998; $15; 307 pages.
March 2008
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee. Bloomsbury, $25.95, 352 pages. Publication date September 18, 2007.
February 2008
The Best American Science Writing 2007 edited by Gina Kolata. Ecco, $14.95, 330 pages.
January 2008
Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World by Jessica Snyder Sachs. Hill and Wang, $25, 290 pages.
December 2007
The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers by Alfred S. Posamentier and Ingmar Lehman. Prometheus, $28, 385 pages.
November 2007
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. Penguin; hardback published in 2006, paperback now available for $15; 314 pages.
October 2007
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal.
September 2007
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond.
June 2007
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom by Sean B. Carroll. W.W. Norton, $25.95, 350 pages. Now available in paperback.
May 2007
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg, Crown Publishing, $25.95, 416 pages. The author is a cofounder of Salon.com. This book attempts to answer the question, “if our civilization now runs on software, why is the art of creating it still such a dark mystery?”
April 2007
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Knopf, Paperback available for $15.95, 560 pages.
March 2007
Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics by Jennifer Ouellette. Penguin Original, $15 paperback, 320 pages. How does an English major and "self-confessed “physics phobe” construct a book about the history of physics? Jennifer Ouellette -- an editor and columnist at the American Physical Society's APS News -- uses characters from television shows, books and movies to introduce most of her 38 chapters, each of which explores a breakthrough in physics.
February 2007
Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages by Richard E. Rubenstein. Harcourt Brace, $27, 368 pages. Rubenstein re-creates the revolutionary excitement sparked by the rediscovery of Aristotle's works in medieval Europe, which shined a light that ended the Dark Ages. Aristotle taught reason and optimism to a people whose religion held that “man is born to suffer in this world, and that his only real hope for happiness is in heaven.”
January 2007
Best American Science Writing 2006 edited this year by Atul Gawande.
December 2006
The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain by Simon Baron-Cohen.
November 2006
The Future of Life by E.O. Wilson. Paperback available from Amazon.com for $11.20.
October 2006
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Paperback available at Amazon.com for $11.70
September 2006
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley. Atlas/HarperCollins, $19.95, 213 pages. Publication date June 12. Ridley is a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the author of four other books, including The Agile Gene, which won the National Academy of Science's best science book award for 2003. "This is the first biography of this scientific titan, who as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA led the revolution in biology that continues to change our fundamental understanding of life."
August 2006
The Northern Lights: The True Story of the Man Who Unlocked the Secrets of the Aurora Borealis by Lucy Jago. Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 297 pages. Lucy Jago tells the story of Kristian Birkeland (1867-1917), the Norwegian physicist who devoted his life to discovering the source of the northern lights.
July 2006
The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses by Dorothy Crawford. Oxford, $15.95, 288 pages.
June 2006
The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World by Paul Roberts. Houghton Mifflin, $26, 389 pages. The author is business and environmental journalist. He “talks to both oil optimists and pessimists, delves deeply into the economics and politics of oil ... and shows that ... disruption and violent dislocation are almost assured if we do not take a more proactive stance.
May 2006
The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. Atlantic Monthly Press, $25, 332 pages. Publication date March. Flannery is Director of the South Australian Museum, a professor at the University of Adelaide, and the author of several books, including an ecological history of North America titled The Eternal Frontier. In this book, he writes that global warming is an undeniable fact and "argues that we are approaching some sort of global tipping point -- one that we still may have time to avoid if both governments and individuals take the right action."
April 2006
Radiation and Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie's Dream by Alan E. Waltar. Prometheus, $28, 336 pages. The author, formerly a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A & M University, is Director of Nuclear Energy for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This book offers "a lucid overview of radiation's many great benefits and ongoing potential...."
March 2006
Islands of Hope: Lessons from North America’s Great Wildlife Sanctuaries by Phillip Manning. Blair Publishing, $15.95, 211 pages.
February 2006
Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain. Penguin paperback, $16, 448 pages.
January 2006
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Penguin, Amazon.com paperback $11.20, 256 pages.
December 2005
The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon. Wiley, paperback edition $14.95, 226 pages.
November 2005
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 by Jonathan Weiner, ed. Houghton Mifflin, $27.50 (paperback $14), 304 pages.
October 2005
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion by Alan Burdick. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 325 pages.
September 2005
Biotechnology Unzipped: Promises & Realities by Eric S. Grace. Joseph Henry Press paperback, $18.95, 248 pages.
August 2005
Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Modern Age, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal by Deborah Cadbury. Perennial paperback, $14.95, 316 pages.
July 2005
The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells and Their Promise for Medicine by Ann B. Parsons. Joseph Henry Press, $24.95, 301 pages.
June 2005
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Oxford, paperback $15.95, 352 pages.
May 2005
Kindness in a Cruel World: The Evolution of Altruism by Nigel Barber. Prometheus, $28, 415 pages.
April 2005
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith. W.W. Norton, $27.95, 345 pages.
March 2005
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of he Cosmos by Michio Kaku. Doubleday, $27.95, 428.
February 2005
Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientists View of Genetically Modified Foods by Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown. Joseph Henry Press, $24.95, 370 pages.
January 2005
The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It by Marcia Angell. Random House, $24.95, 336 pages.
December 2004
Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson. Paperback by W.W. Norton, $13.95, 272 pages.
November 2004
The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley. Paperback by Free Press, $15, 320 pages.
October 2004
Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time by Tom Siegfried. Joseph Henry Press, $24.95, 307 pages.
September 2004
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Paperback by Free Press, $16, 912 pages.
August 2004
The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson. Harvard University Press, $29.95 (hardback), 424 pages.
July 2004
His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine by Jonathan Weiner. Ecco, $26.95, 356 pages.
June 2004
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Paperback edition by W.W. Norton, $17.95 , 660 pages.
May 2004
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. Paperback edition by Perennial, $14, 320 pages.
April 2004
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Paperback by W.W. Norton, $16.95, 480 pages.
March 2004
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick. Paperback by Vintage, $16, 531 pages.
February 2004
The Silver Lining: The Benefits of Natural Disasters by Seth Reice. Princeton University Press, $16.95, 232 pages.
January 2004
In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality by John Gribbin. Bantam, $15.95, 320 pages.
December 2003
Prometheans in the Lab by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. McGraw-Hill, $14.95, 224 pages.
November 2003
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris. Perennial, $15.95, 512 pages,
October 2003
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley. Paperback by Perennial, $14, 344 pages.