Books shelved under “Science”

This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity when I read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, and that made a lot of things click for me. So When Are You Having Kids?: The Definitive Guide for Those Who Aren't Sure If, When, or How They Want to Become Parents is a practical guide for addressing a very…

Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant.

Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butts, and specifically women’s butts. Heather Radke—a curvy, queer white woman—wanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Frankly, I’m glad. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC…

Philosophy of the mind has always been one of my favourite realms of philosophy. I love thinking about how we think. About why we think. Consciousness, sentience, intelligence—how did these traits evolve? How do they even work? Patrick House explores Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness (literally what it says on the tin) and tries to address these questions. As he admits in the introduction, he doesn’t have all the answers—none of us do—but…

Talk about lengthy subtitles! This book has a retro styling to it, but scratch the surface and you’ll find it quite modern in its outlook. Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table: its history, the properties of its elements, and how those elements have fascinated/charmed/influenced our lives from ancient times to the modern era. The Disappearing Spoon is a blend of physics and history, science and sociology.

Although loosely chronological, Kean’s…

I am such a junkie for popular science books, especially popular physics books. The Disordered Cosmos appealed for a few reasons: I want to read more popular science books by people of colour; from the description, it sounded like it also would address discrimination within the fields of science; and I enjoy Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s tweets.

The first few chapters are heavy on physics. It is tempting to be lazy and call it your “standard” rendition…

I received this book nearly a year ago (maybe a whole year ago) from my friend and former teaching colleague Emma. I had gifted her Come As You Are, Dr. Emily Nagoski’s earlier book about sex. Burnout is, as the title implies, about the sustained sensation many of us feel when we have overextended ourselves and depleted our resources. As the subtitle implies, this book promises to deepen our understanding of burnout. It is…

Somewhere along the way—likely from Inferior, but I can’t remember—I learned that women are excluded from most clinical trials for medication because our hormonal cycles are considered “too complicated” and they might throw off the trial results. Consequently, most of the medicines that make it to market have only truly been tested on men. Then there are inevitably—you guessed it—complications in some women who take these drugs, except doctors are just as likely to…

Dinosaurs grabbed me, as usual, when I was a kid, but I wouldn’t say that my fascination has endured as it has with some. Nevertheless, at some point last year, I had a moment where I decided to seek out more information on these creatures and their extinction. This is not the first book I added to my to-read list, but it happens to be the first book I’ve read, mostly thanks to getting an…

There is a story going around about Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time wherein his publisher told him that each equation included in his book would halve the book’s sales. Consequently, Hawking chose to include only Einstein’s equation from special relativity, E=mc^2. The book was beyond successful for any book about theoretical physics in its day (and I quite liked it when I read it, especially the special illustrated edition). Michael Dine has…

Let me begin by saying that everyone who says this book’s illustrations and layout are beautiful is absolutely right. As a print book, I suspect this would be gorgeous. I received an eARC from NetGalley and MIT Press, and it was a little harder to read on my phone screen, but that isn’t why I didn’t finish Rewilding. Rather, as beautiful and perhaps comprehensive a review of this subject as it is, I found…

Not so sure about the brief part of this title. Aside from that, A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks indeed covers quite the range of timekeeping science and history—and you all know how much I love science books, and how much I love history books, so in case it isn’t clear, science history books are absolutely some of my favourite non-fiction. Applying to read this eARC…

When reading books like this, I often approach them from the point of view of my students. As a teacher, especially as a white teacher, it is important that I bring issues of race into my classroom. I seldom have the time or opportunity to use entire books. Still, you never know when a chapter or couple of pages might come in handy. In the case of Racism, Not Race, this book provided an…

I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all time is A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it is getting on in years and could use some updating. I rather naively hoped that The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) might be a worthy spiritual successor to that volume. Both Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford…

I can’t say that I have ever personally wanted to clone a mammoth, but you reach a point in your life where you should probably be prepared for certain things, right? Thankfully, Beth Shapiro has my back. How to Clone a Mammoth is a tour through what it would take to resurrect extinct species. It’s a perfect length, and while Shapiro occasionally gets into more complicated biochemistry concepts that you’ll need to skim over, the…

I don’t remember when and how I was taught about climate change in school! I wish I did, because it would be interesting to compare my experience with the various experiences cited in Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America! Katie Worth is very thorough in how she seeks to understand such a broad topic, for the States is vast and populous and full of fragmented education systems.

I received a free eARC…

Dava Sobel is perhaps my favourite non-fiction author. She has this ability to discuss the history of science in an enlightening and inspiring way. Her books make these historical figures come alive. While Galileo is far better known than the subjects of her more recent The Glass Universe, Sobel takes a new approach to biography of him by including letters from his daughter, Maria Celeste. Though I’m not sure the amount of letters and…

Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to teach us about ecological awareness, the bar rises further. Back to Earth has a certain kind of charm to its optimistic idea that orbiting the planet helps you feel like we’re all in this together. Maybe I’m just getting pessimistic at the…

This was recommended to me by my bestie (and podcast cohost), Rebecca. She has a talent for pointing me in the direction of books that might feel like self-help to an extent but are actually interesting dives into specific topics in psychology. She most recently finally got me to read Quiet, by Susan Cain, a book that definitely has overlap with The Highly Sensitive Person. In particular, Cain actually mentions this term,…

This book came on my radar after reading Fossil Men. Whereas that book is a deep dive into one spectacular fossil’s story and the stories of those involved in its finding and analysis, Lone Survivors is more of an overview of human evolution entire. Chris Stringer focuses in particular on the origins of modern humans, i.e., Homo sapiens and our relationship with our cousins the Neanderthals. In so doing, he furnishes us with vital…

As Lee McIntyre reflects in the book, this topic seems even more relevant now than it did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have very effective vaccines that will help us mitigate the harms of COVID-19, yet a shocking proportion of people are hesitant to get vaccinated. A perhaps less-shocking proportion have decried public health measures, like mask mandates, designed to keep people safe. In How to Talk to a Science Denier, McIntyre tries…