"Kate Jackson is one of those special God-struck individuals with a consuming passion for snakes. She is not alone in this passion, but it is a rare phenomenon to have the passion combined with a dedication to rigorous scientific inquiry."
That from George Zug of the Smithsonian Institution, introducing Jackson on Sunday at the National Museum of Natural History. Jackson's book Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo is out now from HUP.
We publish great books. But don't take our word for it--take Esquire's. From their latest "75 Things Every Man Should Master" feature:
No. 29--Understand quantum physics well enough that he can accept that a quarter might, at some point, pass straight through the table when dropped.
Sometimes the laws of physics aren't laws at all. Read The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone, by Kenneth W. Ford.
We agree wholeheartedly. More on Ford's book here at the main HUP site.
Fascinating profile of photographer and HUP author Felice Frankel, whose On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, co-authored with George Whitesides, uses innovative photographic technology to find startling abstract beauty on the surfaces of objects all around us. Newsweek has called Frankel's work the kind that "makes you look, and look again."
Robert Paarlberg, in a recent Reason interview:
My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
This and other dicey issues are tackled with grace by the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, out now from HUP. Paarlberg, an advocate of GMO seed varieties for African fams, takes this unpopular position because he believes that improvements in seed varieties and farming techniques are African farmers' ticket out of a low-yield agriculture that keeps most of them mired in hunger and poverty. He wrote Starved for Science in order to explain, in Reason editor Kerry Howley's words, just why "cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed." Also available online is a talk Paarlberg gave recently at the International Food Policy Research Institute, which works to find "sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty."
Maybe celebrate by picking up a copy of HUP's brand-new Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius? Initial reviews are good, including this, from SEED Magazine:
You'd be forgiven for thinking there is little we don't know already about Einstein and Oppenheimer. Yet this book plots the lives of the 20th century's most charismatic physicists to a greater end than biography. Focusing on the cultural milieus in which they thrived, Schweber investigates Einstein and Oppenheimer's very different manifestations of genius--one solitary, one social. Schweber's depth of analysis, particularly in describing both scientists' affinities for Buddhist thought, insists that there is much more to learn about each.
More on the book at HUP's main site.
At "Paper Cuts," the blog of the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler wonders "How Would Darwin Read?" as she discusses William Flesch's Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction.
Check out a Q&A with Janet Hope, author of Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology, featured in this week's Technica newsletter from Powells.com.
Our friend Marshal Zeringue over at the Campaign for the American Reader also runs the Page 99 Test, which tests Ford Madox Ford's assertion that you can "open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Up today is Jim Endersby, author of A Guinea Pig's History of Biology, a quirky, enlightening, and thoroughly engaging perspective on the history of heredity and genetics, tracing the slow, uncertain path—complete with entertaining diversions and dead ends—that led us from the ancient world’s understanding of inheritance to modern genetics.
A new article in Technology Review profiles Norman Borlaug, "green revolutionary" and co-author, with former US President Jimmy Carter, of the Foreword to Robert Paarlberg's Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, which details how poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies by Western government's and NGOs intent on keeping the GMO bogeyman out of the hands of the people who might need it most. Starved for Science will be out in March 2008, but this subject isn't going anywhere, as this recent Des Moines Register article quoting Dr. Paarlberg indicates.
Jim Endersby's A Guinea Pig's History of Biology has made Barnes & Noble's "The Long List--50 books, CDS, and DVDs to know about now." And you know what?--the best way to "know about it now" might just be to purchase a copy from our oh-so-user-friendly website! Never too late for a late Christmas present for the science-lovers among your friends and loved ones. With a cover like that, who could resist?
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