Books shelved under “Science”

I was intrigued by the description of Sam Kean’s latest book. I love learning about history in various new ways! So I was pleased to receive an eARC of Dinner with King Tut from NetGalley and publisher Little, Brown and Company. Indeed, one cannot fault Kean for his scrupulous commitment to embodying experiential archaeology—this book reads like a Discovery channel series, back when Discovey channel was good.

Kean is upfront and warns us that the…

Like most kids, I went through a dinosaur phase, though perhaps somewhat less obsessively than some. I always have trouble picking favourites, so I can’t tell you I had a favourite dinosaur. What fascinated me, like so many I suspect, was their extinction. The idea that entire species can disappear—wow. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is Riley Black’s attempt to chronicle how these incredible animals evolved, how they lived for hundreds of millions of…

Every so often I need to dip into philosophy, mix in some math, and sprinkle on some science. Give me that interdisciplinary trip, please and thank you! Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, by Adam Kucharski, seemed like just what Dr. Kara ordered for herself. Indeed, it’s illuminating enough, though it has a few flaws that prevented me from enjoying it more. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Basic Books in exchange…

Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of…

Nuclear war is … bad. That’s a premise on which most of us can agree. However, for the past eighty years, nuclear war has been possible and—at various times, including this past week as I write this review (looking at you, India and Pakistan)—more or less likely. In Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas catalogues the potential scope and consequences of nuclear war—including the dreaded but much-misunderstood nuclear winter—and then makes a passionate plea…

Space is so cool, and I love reading books that explain how we learn the stuff we know about space. That’s exactly what Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger delivers in Alien Earths. This is the story of how we look for exoplanets—worlds orbiting stars other than our own Sun—and specifically, how we might determine whether those exoplanets can support life similar life on Earth. Along the way we learn, as Kaltenegger did, so much more about…

A few years ago, probably during lockdown, I watched the excellent Netflix documentary Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know about the Event Horizon Telescope and the effort to photograph the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87. Black holes have always captivated me ever since, as a wee lass, science and science fiction came on my radar. How could they not? So even though Marcus Chown is a new-to-me science writer,…

Embodiment is so strange. We all have bodies, but we don’t all have the same body. Some bodies are judged more than others. In “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon debunks twenty prevalent anti-fatness myths. Anti-fat bias is consistently the only form of discrimination that has increased over the past decades (other types have decreased or stayed roughly the same), and sometimes it is so…

Wow, has it really been eight years since I read The Measure of All Things, by Ken Adler? It doesn’t feel that long. Referenced in Beyond Measure, that book satisfied my curiosity regarding the origins of the metre. I love history of science. In this book, James Vincent takes the story wider and further, investigating the origins of measurement and metrology (the science of measurement). It’s nerdy as all get out, but if…

When you really think about it, the idea of gender is such a fraught concept. How can we ever really know our gender? What even is gender, anyway? It shouldn’t be surprising I have spent a great deal of time in recent years thinking about this, yet I don’t know that I am any closer to an answer. So I was very intrigued by Gender Without Identity, by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. This…

Science continues to be a discipline which I love to learn about yet have no interest in doing, if that makes any sense. I studied mathematics in undergrad because I love that you can do it with a pencil and paper (or even, sometimes, in your head). Science, especially experimental parts of science, in contrast feels so … well … messy. And nothing is messier than smashing radioactive atoms together in the hopes of…

As an aromantic asexual person, all three things in this book’s title have confused me at one point or another! Attraction, Love, Sex: The Inside Story examines our scientific understanding of makes humans interested in one another, romantic stylez (yes, with a Z). Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist, brings together research from psychology, biology, chemistry, and more in order to help the reader understand the physiological, psychological, and even evolutionary underpinnings of sexuality and romance. There’s…

One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced, in fact, that media literacy is the most essential skill English classes can cover. The deluge of disinformation and morass of misinformation out there is staggering. Throw in the challenges of deepfakes, and, well, it’s starting to get depressing, how difficult it is to evaluate the…

Four years ago, after a particularly brutal winter and some damage from ice dams, pigeons took up residence in a section of my house’s eavestroughs. It was unpleasant, to say the least. My bed abutted the exterior wall where they were roosting, and my house is small enough that I generally heard their cooing throughout a quiet Sunday indoors. Eventually, at great expense, I had my eavestroughs redone and the pigeons were summarily evicted. Pests,…

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…