The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009

By: Tim Folger

Book Overview

Elizabeth Kolbert, one of today's leading environmental journalists, edits this year's volume of the finest science and nature writing. Bringing together promising new voices and prize-winning favorites, this collection is a delight for any fan of popular science (Publishers Weekly).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547002599
• ISBN13: 9780547002590
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great book! Interesting and easy to read.

This book is a wonderful compilation of good science writing. From Nature to National geographic and more...love it.

A Direct Hit on the Pleasure Center of the Brain

There are many excellent reasons to buy and read The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2009, ranging from the pragmatic (keeping up with what's new) to the esthetic (science writing of rock-you-back-on-your-heels quality), but the best reason is twenty-six consecutive essays in which the book suddenly sags into your lap, your head tilts back a bit, your eyes focus on the far distance, and you can FEEL your cerebral tectonic plates shift and buckle. Are these essays really that good? Yes. Emphatically yes. It is not uncommon for a scientific anthology to include topics that range from the largest scope (the multiverse) to the smallest (quantum physics), from studies of consciousness to new perspectives on psychology, from life in the deepest ocean to conjectures of life on other planets, and Best American Science and Nature is no exception to this model. What makes the book outstanding is that editor Elizabeth Kolbert's selections deeply and seductively integrate hard science with our daily human existence. Read Frederick Kaufman's Wasteland, and you'll never be able to think the same way about depressing the lever on your toilet. Ever thrown away a TV, a computer, a cell phone? Chris Carroll's wonderfully sketched portrayal of humans in developing nations sacrificing their health to extract light and heavy metals from the refuse, tossing the plastic carcasses of our castaway computers into a river, where they bob their way into the ocean, will leave a mark, if not a scar, on you. Feeling down and need to be boosted by having your socks charmed right off you? Read Mark Smith's Animalcules and Other Little Subjects. From the origin of life (in ice) to the determination of the rich and gifted to find immortality, this literary roller coaster ride is one thrill after another. By including essays on economics (you, too, can get better at avoiding being caught up in the next bubble), ethics, and health, Kolbert skillfully and forcefully brings emerging scientific insights into the space in which you dwell, redecorating your mental landscape whether or not you were satisfied with your current lay of the land. A few of the essays (including, for me, the first two of the book) require a bit of mental heavy lifting. As with any workout, the post-exertion feeling that one experiences is well worth the effort expended. My bias is that the pursuit of knowledge is a noble one, what fun that a book like The Best Science and Nature Writing can make such a pursuit utterly pleasurable!

Not a dud in the bunch!

What makes this stellar collection so special isn't just the crisp writing and well-organized stories; it's also the angle of approach. From the year's best pieces, chosen by series editor Folger, New Yorker writer Kolbert has selected those which reflect current interests, but from slightly off the well-beaten path. For Darwin's 200th birthday, for instance, Oliver Sacks' eloquent essay, explores the naturalist's lesser-known discoveries in botany and the thrill he got from this later work and his extensive collection of orchids. The environment comes in for serious scrutiny, of course, and several pieces look at big-picture human impact on the planet. Frederick Kaufman's "Wasteland" follows sewage through New York City's state-of-the-art North River treatment plant - where counterfeit money and vials of cocaine are a lot more common than alligators - to its end product as "organic" fertilizer adulterated with heavy metals, pharmaceuticals and more. Kaufman explores the politics as well as the realities we'll sometime have to face. And Chris Carroll follows our defunct computers and cell phones in "High Tech Trash," a horrifying story of capitalism at its worst. J. Madeleine Nash's "Back to the Future" tags along with scientists examining fossils in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, which 55 million years ago - after a massive carbon dioxide release - had a climate like today's Florida. In "Big Foot," Michael Spector explores food choices from a carbon footprint standpoint - with some surprising results (locavores despair!). A couple of pieces look at cutting-edge brain research. Atul Gawande's excruciating "The Itch" profiles a woman who developed an unremitting itch after a bout of shingles, an itch so awful she woke one day to find she had scratched through to her brain. One neurologist (overruled) hypothesized that the itch, like phantom limb pain, originated in the brain, not the nerves, and Gawande's detour through this research provides temporary relief. Virginia Postrel's "Pop Psychology" takes a droll look at the inevitability of economic bubbles and Nicholas Carr explores technology's effect on our thinking processes from the Gutenberg Press to the Internet in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The nature of the universe before the Big Bang has spawned myriad theories and Adam Frank tells us about them and their proponents in "The Day Before Genesis." The weirdness of quantum mechanics seems almost comprehensible in Joshua Roebke's "Reality Tests." Stephen S. Hall's "Last of the Neanderthals" explores the latest findings in the ongoing study of what killed off our sturdier cousins and Benjamin Phelan looks at new gene research which suggests that not only are we still evolving - we are evolving faster than ever. Every piece in the book engages the general reader with portraits of the people behind the science -what they do and how they feel about it. Some of the people are eccentric, like Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and author profiled i

Great Reading in Science

The very best way to find out the truth about anything is by applying the methods of science - despite human failings in its application. I look forward to reading this collection of articles every year. With this brush stroke, I get a journalist's kaleidoscopic display of what different groups of scientists are doing with our world. This year's 26 selections, chosen by guest editor Elizabeth Kolbert, came from 16 different magazines - the best represented being Harper's, National Geographic, Discover, and New Yorker, all with three articles each. *Wendell Berry - The exploding population and our use of earth's resources cannot last forever. Whichever way we turn, we run into the difficult politics of self-imposed limits. *John Broome - The ethics of climate change is just as hard as the science. Most of the cost of controlling climate change must be borne in the near future, yet the benefit will come perhaps a century later. One of my favorites: *Nicholas Carr - Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that reliance on the written word would detract from the knowledge base people used to have to carry in their heads....The arrival of Gutenberg's printing press (15th century) set off another round of teeth gnashing - the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness....When Nietzsche's vision problem forced him to use a typewriter, the new technology had an effect of his work. His prose became tighter; his arguments became aphorisms.....The clock's methodological ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific method. The conception of the world that now revolves around schedules solidified new pathways in our brains.....The internet is now subsuming most of our other basic technologies. Is Kubrick's prophecy in "2001" - that machines will become thecontrolling intelligencia - coming true? *Chris Carroll - Asia is the center of much of the world's high-tech manufacturing and it is here that the devices often return when they die. *Andrew Curry - The story of the Stasi, a sprawling East German bureaucracy almost 3 times the size of Hitler's Gestapo that was spying on a population ¼ the size of Nazi Germany. Not a lot of science, but interesting. Another favorite: *Keay Davidson - Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that makes the universe expand faster and faster over time. It now threatens to undermine fundamental beliefs about physics, cosmology, and the nature of scientific discovery - yet we don't have a clue what it is. Another favorite: *Douglas Fox - Strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down but others speed up. As an ice crystal forms, it remains pure - only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities are crowded out together. In several of Stanley Miller's hundreds of experiments, conducted over a period of decades, mixtures of cyanide, ammonia, and ice formed nucleobases and am