Haven’t done any archive posting for a while, but this new one just appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science (Sep). Two books that relate, rather differently, to the entirety of human history, seemed worth tackling together… Posted here for those without library access (which these days includes me) Patrick Manning, A […]
Category Archives: book review
Posts here remain sparse, although I’ll delve further into the archive one day, probably… Meantime, here’s a review of a couple of the recent slew of moon books. It appeared a month or so ago in a publication which raised its paywall higher around the same time, so posting here for ease of archiving. When […]
No posts here for a while, but this review just published in Public Understanding of Science seemed worth reposting. The book is a nice complement to Poole’s Earthrise, and a good way into varipous strands of thinking about the Anthropocene, a current preoccupation of mine (and lots of other people…) Spaceship Earth is a metaphor […]
Epidemics provoke sober analysis and hysterical fantasy. Both can already be discerned in responses to the Zika outbreaks currently provoking anxiety around the world. A good time, perhaps to reflect on the history of AIDS as both the writers discussed here did, one to rather better effect than the other. This review drew a response, […]
This review of John Maddox’s rather good overview, What Remains to be Discovered, dates back almost two decades. He knew about a really huge range of stuff – I’ve an interview with John I did to mark the 125th anniversary of Nature that I must dig out. This review is worth reposting, I think, because […]
I’m posting this one as a reminder – to myself, mainly. I am just getting down to writing a new essay about the immune system, and came across a reference to David Napier’s book, which I no longer own. I sort of remembered it, but had no recollection of actually writing this review. Slightly disquieting […]
I mentioned the Baltimore affair in the previous post about scientific fraud. Here’s a review of Daniel Kevles’ definitive book about the case. I don’t usually mention where these things appeared, but it’s relevant here as its publication, in Nature, drew a comment from the author. He says I miss a point about the historical […]
The focus of concern about scientific standards seems to have shifted a bit since this piece on scientific fraud was written. There have been some more very high profile cases (still mainly in life sciences), but there’s more attention now to things like poor statistical analysis (many disciplines), and to results that can’t be replicated […]
The idea that boundaries between nature and culture have dissolved is pretty commonplace nowadays, as we contemplate the Anthropocene. But it’s been developing for some time, as this review from the 1990s indicates. I am, in hindsight, amused by the casual reference here to the “boring old futures studies of the 1960s” – my later book, […]
This is a recent review, of Unger and Smolin’s The SIngular Universe and the Reality of Time. It’s a book described by the authors as a contribution to natural philosophy. It’s quite long, and my review was short, so I didn’t have scope to reflect on that aspect much, but it remained on my mind. […]
Science Observed 