Re: The Case For Mars

I have mixed feelings about The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin. The second half is full of reasonable-looking ideas for using the resources available on the nearest terrestrial planet to build a liveable place. But the first half is a hard slog through the self-congratulation about how brilliant he was for coming up with […]

Scalzi on Writing

When you hear so much about blogging being good advertising for your writing, it’s ironic to find a book that serves as a great advertisement for a blog. Consider John Scalzi‘s collection of writing-related posts, You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to the Coffeeshop: Scalzi on Writing . It’s a great title […]

Re: How To Write A Lot

Sounds great doesn’t it? Although How To Write A Lot is directed at academics, any writer will find the difficulties described by Paul J. Silvia all too familiar. The solution is simple. As he advocates firmly, convincingly, and wittily, the only way to write a lot is to set a schedule of writing times and […]

Re: Mind of the Raven

Bernd Heinrich’s first book about ravens, Ravens in Winter, was less about ravens than about how he and his students learned about ravens. Think long hours of shivering in an unheated cabin watching ravens feed on roadkill. In Mind of the Raven, he decides to get up close and personal by raising young ravens, which […]

Re: Chimpanzee Politics

The first in a series of books by Franz de Waal about chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, Chimpanzee Politics is a very readable account of the power struggles in a small troup of chimpanzees at the Arnhelm Ape Colony in the Netherlands. While de Waal is sometimes controversial for how quick he is to draw parallels […]

Re:Bumblebee Economics

Honeybees get all the glamor but I like the fat, fuzzy, comical bumblebee. So naturally I enjoyed Bumblebee Economics, by Bernd Heinrich. The economics of the title refer to the energy economy of how bumblebees spend their energy to gather energy in the form of nectar and pollen. It’s a problem every organism has to […]

The Dinosaur Heresies

While The Dinosaur Heresies, by Robert T. Bakker was published over twenty years ago, it remains the seminal book that shifted the popular image of dinosaurs from plodding swamp things that were justly extinguished, to lively, rutting beasts whose children are birds. As the book acknowledges its debt to 19th century paleontologists, it’s an interesting […]

Re: In the Company of Crows and Ravens

If you’re interested in corvids or the intelligence in birds, you’ll enjoy In the Company of Crows and Ravens, by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell. You can hear them discuss the book and more stories in a pair of interviews on KUOW. In the first one, Tony Angell does some amazing crow calls, and […]

Re: Sweetness and Light

There’s so many books about bees, and especially honeybees, you might think people are trying write a book for every bee in a hive. One expression of our fascination is Sweetness and Light, by Hattie Ellis, an overview of the history of human relations with honeybees, focusing on some real characters who spent their lives […]

Re: Bonk

An amusing book about the ingenious ways scientists have studied sex and overcome the social barriers to their research, Bonk, by Mary Roach is filled with weird science facts. Most of them are pretty trivial, like the way porcupines do it. Some of them you may not want to know, like how to ape the […]