Science and nature book reviews: popular science, natural history, biology, physics, and environmental writing.
George and the Blue Moon, published in September 2016, is the fifth book in the George’s Secret Key to the Universe series begun by Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking in 2007. George Greenby and his best friend Annie have appeared in four previous adventures involving black holes, the Big Bang, robots on Mars, and quantum…
Pascal Baudar has spent years exploring the intersection of wild food, fermentation, and culinary creativity in the chaparral and mountains outside Los Angeles. His earlier books, including The New Wildcrafted Cuisine and Wildcrafted Fermentation, established him as one of the most inventive practitioners working at the edges of food culture: foragers who actually cook, fermenters…
Bruce Rettig is a visual artist and teacher based in the Pacific Northwest whose son Jackson died of a drug overdose at twenty-three. Refraction: A Memoir of Art, Science, and Loss, published by Wayfarer Books in 2022, is his attempt to understand that death and to understand himself in the aftermath. The book takes its…
Richard Feynman was one of the twentieth century’s most important physicists, a Nobel laureate who helped develop quantum electrodynamics and whose path integral formulation of quantum mechanics transformed how physicists think about their subject. He was also, by most accounts, one of the most entertaining people who ever sat at a bar or a blackboard….
April Falcon Doss spent years as a senior intelligence lawyer at the National Security Agency before moving to private practice as a cybersecurity attorney. Cyber Privacy: Who Has Your Data and Why You Should Care, published by BenBella Books in October 2020, draws on that experience to produce something genuinely useful: a clear-eyed, comprehensive account…
In 1961, Richard Feynman stood before a room of Caltech freshmen and began a two-year lecture course in introductory physics that his colleagues had designed to address a specific problem: too many physics students were emerging from their first courses technically competent but fundamentally incurious, able to solve problems on exams but not sure why…
Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in 1675 that if he had seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Stephen Hawking borrowed that phrase as the title for this anthology, published by Running Press in 2002, which brings together five landmark texts in the history of astronomy and physics: excerpts from…
R.E. Burrillo is an archaeologist who has spent years working in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, recording rock art, documenting sites, and watching the landscape he studies come under intensifying pressure from extraction industries, recreational overuse, and political maneuvering. This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments, published…
Jeffrey Bennett is a science educator and author whose previous books include textbooks on astronomy, mathematics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. A Global Warming Primer: Answering Your Questions about the Science, the Consequences, and the Solutions, self-published through his Big Kid Science imprint in 2016, takes a format that sounds simple and executes it…
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