2016 books: 10-14

[the_siobhan]

    

The Illustrated Origin of Species by Charles Darwin with commentary by Richard Leakey Somebody figured out that they could sell a bunch of new copies of Darwin's apocryphal work by adding a chapter describing his life and work by another well-known anthropologist, and then including a bunch of gorgeous colour photos and diagrams illustrating different facets of evolution. And it worked! Because I bought one.

    

Life on Earth by David Attenborough Apparently this started out as a BBC series. It has chapters on various taxonomic groups such as insects, reptiles, plants etc. The information is pretty general, the real point of this book is the gorgeous glossy photographs that adorn every page. I have no idea where this one came from. I strongly suspect a family member who had no idea what to give me and thought, "Well, she likes sciencey things..."

    

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould When I was in University, I my entertainment reading tended to the light and fluffy. It was When I was working in bars and my brain was bored that I tended to read non-fiction. My brain must have been really bored when I bought this. It's a very detailed description of life during the Cambrian Period, and it is the exact opposite of the Attenborough book, being very heavy text and a few diagrams. I honestly gave up on this fairly early, not just because the material is very dense (and my brain is very full); but also because I find the writing itself slow going. His writing style is very formal and I often found to difficult to follow his point.

    

Cosmos by Carl Sagan Just like the Attanborough book, this is an accompaniment to the TV show of the same name. It has chapters on evolution, space exploration etc, again accompanied by pages of glossy photographs.

    

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris A very brief history of the study of astronomy, from Archimedes to SETI. Compared to Gould, Ferris is a much more accessible author. He gives a comprehensive overview of the hard science without getting bogged down in the math, and explains how significant individuals made their discoveries and their impact of those discoveries on scientific progress. I have to confess that he kind of loses me when he gets into quantum mechanics and string theory. I am much more a fan of stories like the one from the 1760's, when a group of people figured out the distance to Venus by triangulating it's position during eclipse from different locations on the earth.

Time to switch back to fiction for a while, I think. I need something lighter for a while.