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Entertainment Weekly Bemoans Lack of Great Science Books
Bryan writes "A recent headline at Entertainment Weekly suggests that the '100 Best Reads' of the last 25 years do not include a single science book (not even a popular science book). In response, cosmologist Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has given an interesting analysis of EW's disappointing list, and Soul Physics is calling for suggestions on the Greatest Physics Books of the Last 25 Years. For all the great literature that science has produced in the last 25 years, EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture." I'm not sure what Entertainment Weekly's standing to complain would come from. That aside, have science books ever in modern times been a driving force greater than ones intended as (mere) entertainment, religious instruction, etc? I'd put anything by Richard Feynman on this list, though.
But Carl Sagan documentaires were *a must* when I was a kid.
Oh, and Isaac Asimov's non-SF books are great too (the book about Physics and the one about Maths are great).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In related news, Cosmo whines about the lack of great intellectual thinkers.
My blog
Don't forget Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
What many people don't know is that in addition to being a great bongo player, Richard Feynman was also quite an accomplished physicist.
It's true!
Who needs books? Most scientists read wikipedia. Or science journals as pdf's.
Isn't this subjective with the term "best read". I can tell you right now that I'm not even moderatly interested in the majority of those books. I could name a few fantasy books I'd say would say most certainly beats many of those on that list but because of my own tastes.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking I actually found to be a great read if they need suggestions on science literature. Again, who considers science a "good read"? Not most people I would say.
"EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."
A professor once gave me a book called The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Pleasures-Engineering-Thomas-Dunne/dp/0312141041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214425954&sr=8-1), which began with a discussion of engineers as romantic, heroic figures to the people of the late 19th century. This is still true to some extent in some places like France. Right now in the US we're in an anti-intellectual upswing, but that doesn't mean we won't have another golden age of cultural interest in science.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm all for the diffusion of hard science into the mainstream, but for Entertainment Weekly to bemoan this dearth? I could see Newsweek or Time crying over this, but ET? Maybe if they actually published more reviews of science books, there could be a correlative response. I doubt that, as science doesn't sell like smexy.
I suggest The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Robert Richards. That's a good, meaty science book.
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
any and ALL books by Carl Sagan, A.C. Clark (non-fiction), A.Asimov (non-fiction) and a MUST READ Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Have the critics finally become fed up with the words "for Dummies" being appended to everything?
Sure, it was 20 years ago, but it was a pretty good book for the unwashed masses.
One might say the same about most technical subjects. Given the overwhelming list bias towards fiction, it isn't that surprising. How may of your parents or children took A New Kind of Science to the beach this summer?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I haven't read any of the books on their list, and I've only heard of about a quarter of them. They need to travel in wider circles.
I'll nominate "A history of Pi" by Petr Beckmann. Concise, witty, and very approachable for non-mathematicians.
It goes into other things through its pages, but "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman is on my top 20 list for the last 25 years, and certainly on my top 100 all-time.
I know-- it's not _really_ a physics book, but Hofstadter is (was) a physicist. And the book is amazing.
Uh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the twits and twats that read Entertainment Weekly simply aren't the same people that would read anything by Kaku or Sagan or Dawkins or anything else that would make them use that three pound enigma in their skulls.
I, for example, don't know any of the current videos on MTV or BET. I'm just not in that demographic.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Class-You-Wish-Had/dp/0399523138
"The Science Class You Wish You Had"
It covers a LOT of ground in very short time, and makes everything accessible. This is definitely for people who think that Harry Potter is the #2 best book of the last 25 years.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
har har
Everyone was interested in it. The Space Race was still ongoing, magazines like Popular Science proliferated, and we Cub Scout and Boy Scout kids worked hard on our radio and electricity or bridge-building experiments. We all wanted to be scientists when we grew up.
Now, everyone wants to be "in entertainment." Even the most well-known "scientists" are really CELEBRITIES more than anything else; they're famous for being famous. Instead of the staid, sober "Mr. Wizard," you have "Bill Nye the Science Guy" from about a decade ago, or the new Sid The Science Kid. It's all about fun and flash and, well, "celebrity," entertainment.
We used to be "entertained" by the IDEAS behind what we were learning. We had imagination enough to extrapolate ideas like "hey, if I can make this model rocket fly up to 500 feet, maybe one day I can make one that goes the the Moon or Mars!"
Now, it's all about what someone else is doing, for our entertainment, on TV. Don't need "hands-on," we can just watch someone else do "Science" that really just looks like an entertaining video game.
Perhaps if we could get the kids back to doing REAL science - after all, when you're eight years old the same experiments that the scientists of three hundred years ago were performing for the first time are certainly NEWS to you! - instead of just seeking to entertain them, they might start to take it seriously.
And that would be reflected in what we are reading and talking about as well.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
It seems to me that Stephen Hawking's contribution really catapulted him into pop-culture. He's been drawn in a number of cartoon TV shows, including Family Guy and I believe The Simpsons. (He had a cartoon role in a Dilbert TV cartoon as well, but of course, that's far less mainstream.)
Warped Passages by Lisa Randall?
Never read a 404 before.
Sometimes life is a lot like open source development. If you want it that bad, quit your whining and write it yourself ;) Or you could start an open book and start contributing...
Twinstiq, game news
First I'd have to possibly put Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time on there. It was pretty popular, and really good at explaining the comments to a mass audience.
Second, I just don't think popular culture is fertile ground for intellectual inquiry along the lines of hard science. Some popular mass-circulation magazines and newspapers used to have math and science sections of interest to general readership. You'll find nothing like that in People, Us, or USA Today.
Third, I think scientists have gone somewhat at odds with the general population in the past few decades as well. This is still largely a religious nation, but many books by the most prominent scientists now spend most of their time not only questioning things like religious belief and cherished cultural traditions, but mocking them outright as well. Richard Dawkins all but calls religious people idiots in his books. That's kind of a hard sell when nearly 90 percent of your population believes in a God of some kind.
What was that line from that movie... Contact? Palmer Joss's line?
Just possibly, making the argument to most of the population that their beliefs are nothing but twaddle probably doesn't do wonders for book sales.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time
From Wikipedia:
A Brief History of Time is a popular science book written by Stephen Hawking and first published in 1988. It rapidly became a best-seller, and had sold 9 million copies by 2002. It was also on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Sold that much and arguably changed more understanding than any science book since Einstien's Relativity.
Its much less dry than most science books trend to. If that book doesn't qualify then no science book ever will unless its written by Bill Nye or has "For Dummies" at the end of it.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Perhaps he's not written the greatest science books, but if your criteria is ease of reading, entertainment value and short enough that your average reader is likely to stay the course, then his work must be taken into account.
The shortest book of his that I have 'The Riddle of the Compass, is light and entertaining, yet also manages to include a lot of hard fact.
Also 'Entanglement' counts as being rather good, a very easy introduction to the subject of quantum entanglement.
My favourite has to be 'The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity'. The title is long winded, but I have yet to find a better introduction to the history of Set Theory.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
The Red Queen on the evolutionary benefits of sex (and how it pertains to evolution), by Matt Ridley and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a book on Evolutionary Psychology.
I still think back to both books when I ponder the behaviour of the people around me.
I can't refer to a post that was made in another discussion the other day because I'm lazy, but it stated that science has become so specialized that it is essentially pretty boring.
I agree with this statement, the most influential science books are those you will read while studying subjects to practice them in your future.. at the time they suck though, at least in my experience.
Finally, for entertainment, I have always found Michael Crichton's works... while dumbed down, were interesting because they tackled subjects that are pertinent, while also producing amusing story-lines. (Not all, but some).
"A complete history of almost everything."
It's just as advertised, and yet a great read.
it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."
I would argue that the ordinary person has turned away from Science in particular and Reason in general and allow for Faith to fill in where Reason once ruled. Therefore science is not of interest. At all.
I'm not anti-religion. For many, it provides a structure they thrive in, general health and welfare benefits are well known.
Calling it a "dark age" would be too simplistic. Maybe a "gray age" would be better?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"Entertainment Weekly too shallow to pay attention to science, blames scientific community"
What about the compilations of Gould's essays for "Natural History" magazine? My two favorites are "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus".
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
GÃdel, Escher, Bach has enough science in it (particularly cognition and neurology) to qualify as a "science book" (whatever that's supposed to mean).
Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in metacognition.
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is more of a history of science book. If you want to know something like how it is that we know the age of the earth and all the prior theories and how they were concocted then this is the kind of book for you. It is a very entertaining read as he often takes side tracks into the personalities behind the discoveries.
If their demographic is twenty- and thirty-something people who want to read about movie stars and their lives, which is what Entertainment Weekly publishes (they gave me a free subscription, which now clogs my recycle bin, unread) they're pretty unlikely to enjoy books that aren't about movie stars.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" is a fabulous read. One or two chapters each on astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, you name it. There's a reason it was a bestseller: it is accessible to people who don't know an integral from an interval.
There are scads of excelent science books out there: Sagan, Asimov, Zukav, Hofstatder. But if you want to read about Mel B's nose job, you're probably not going to rate them highly.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This book is without question the best science book I have ever read. But maybe it was too thick for Entertainment Weekly and its readership to consider...
Other candidates include just about anything from Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Hawking or Richard Feynman. I'm not into biology, but I'm sure there are great titles from biology/medicine.
If you include math as a 'science' for science writing, Mario Livio writes brilliantly, too. "Godel, Escher, Bach" actually doesn't qualify, since I bought my copy more than 25 years ago. (I had to special-order it and got a really weird look from the bookseller when it came in. A couple months later it was on the best-seller list. I just smiled...)
Also if you cover engineering in the category, then anything from Henry Petrosky would also have to be on the intelligent person's shortlist.
dave
What about "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark" By Carl Sagan,"The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins, "The fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene etc. EW is a bunch of idiots.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
I found both State of Fear and Timeline to be excellent reads. Some may vehemently disagree with State of Fear as it is as much a political book as a science book, but Timeline was definitely science related. Jurassic Park too for that matter. All three were definitely better than the excruciatingly endless "the road".
JE
Obviously we need Oprah to realize that there are some non-fiction books out there besides self-help titles, Deepak Chopra ramblings, and self-serving celebrity autobiographies.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
....is what gave us such intellectual skyscrapers as "Smashlab".
Here is the only books from the last 25 years on the list... not sure how EW feels about them being "new classics" though.
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)
Honorable mentions
5. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
6. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)
7. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (1999)
8. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986)
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
Flu by Gina Kolata, which recounts a search for the flu virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, was a great and at times harrowing read.
Gibson's "Neuromancer" is on the list, as is "Fast Food Nation" which is bit science-y in a way. It's not that much of a stretch to consider Saramago's "Blindness" to be science fiction either.
Excuse me? Penrose's "The emperor's new mind" was published in 1989 and is one wonderful book on AI - so great that I've read it a few times (I was 14-15 the first time I read it, it took pretty long to come to my country). Maybe EW should concentrate on the mindless entertainment?
I loved reading it too, so I was very disappointed to read that it was ghostwritten. It was ghostwritten by a close friend who worked with him on the book, but it was still ghostwritten...
Please help metamoderate.
...but what about "A Brief History of Time," by Stephen Hawking?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
I've read plenty of good popular science books in the last few years.
My favorite was Stephen Johnson's Emergence, which is about swarm intelligence. After that, I liked Amir Aczel's The Mystery of the Aleph ... a book about infinity, and the mathematics surrounding infinity.
Neil Turok's new book isn't half bad. I think it's called Endless Universe.
Finally, for people interested in more scientific writing that is still enjoyable, you should check out a series of collections called The Best Science Writing of 2007 (and 2006, 2005 ... so on). I've read 2 or three books in this series, and they're all good.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
In the "it's all about me and my feelings" generation, the need for, and value of, critical and objective thought has been lost.
No wonder most kids (and many adults) really believe that a cell phone can cook an egg or pop corn.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
He's written a bunch of books that should be on the list: "Selfish Gene", "The Blind Watchmaker", "Ancestor's Tale" and last but not least "The God Delusion".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Science Weekly's list of "The 100 Best Reads" includes not one single piece of popular culture fluff. Nor does it only go back 25 years, which is about how long people with no other useful purpose have been making money by turning information about entertainment (as opposed to entertainment itself) into a money making venture.
When EW's history goes back far enough and has enough quality material listed that they can claim to have their equivalent to Principia Mathematia, then they'll have something significant to say about their own field. And they will probably still have no background from which to judge science literature.
I read an entertaining and educational science book once a week whether I need to or not. Anyone wanting some suggestions along these lines, go read Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" on MSNBC and look up the archives of his Used Book Of The Month Club. Those who already read such things should keep an eye out for his next request for suggestions, and submit one. If it gets used, you get a prize -- usually another good science book he'd recently reviewed or otherwise acquired.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
And what about good old Stevie H.? Brief History of time anyone? Great book, widely read... and a damn good read at that...
The God Particle by Leon Ledderman is one of my favourite Physics books. It offers an incredibly accessible introduction to particle physics for the non science oriented while at the same time provides a fascinating look (for the science oriented) into the history of particle physics by someone involved in several of the key discoveries of the last 50 years.
enough said...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas Hofstadter
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, and Basin and Range by John McPhee. All three were popular enough to make it onto the NYT best seller lists and were widely discussed as pop lit.
Jacques Cousteau had a great series of books that more or less paralleled his TV series in the 60' and 70's.
Crichton writes science fiction NOT science. There is a huge difference! I have not read State of Fear but Timeline is clearly fictitious. Surely you don't think the 'science' behind the space-time machine was real?
If you are ever in doubt about whether us physicists have invented time travel a good check is whether we are still asking for research grants. If we ever manage to invent a time machine then, thanks to a little magic called 'compound interest', research funding worries will be a thing of the past.
Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne is an excellent read. It's both informative and (I think) easily read by the average person.
The Demon-Haunted World by Sagan is a must-read.
For math books, William Dunham's books are amazing: full of stories and history, but also explains the mathematics in question in elegant terms.
Charles Darwin
I read this in high school and it was very readable. It was also a seminal work.
Richard Hofstadter's book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was originally written in 1963. As such it discusses McCarthyism and "eggheads" like Adlai Stevenson, but the arguments are as current now as they were then.
Entertainment Weekly will never find a science book that reaches its audience because no book that could legitimately be called science would ever fall far enough down the intellectual spectrum to be approachable by that magazine's readers.
My favorite recent science read was _The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved_, by Mario Livio (Amazon listing). It's a great book about symmetry, group theory, and the lives of several of the mathematicians that discovered and advanced the field, such as Galois and Abel. It has some slightly fluffy chapters but there's a nice mix of mathematics and human interest. Not sure if it would play on Oprah, but Galois's story alone is pretty intense stuff.
-- Conserve binary trees; recycle your email. --
One of the best books on science I've read in the past decade is "A People's History of Science," by Clifford D. Conner. Along the same lines as Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" (and Chris Harman's "A People's History of the World") this book explains the development of science from the standpoint of regular people. It debunks the myth that scientific advances come primarily from "great minds" and shows how much of our scientific knowledge (and the basis for advances) comes from the knowledge gained by workers--people interacting with their environment on a daily basis. Miners, midwives, sailors and others have played an invaluable role in the development of science, and while great minds have played their part, most history books give them far too much credit. My little paragraph here can hardly do the book justice, so grab a copy from the library and read it for yourself!
...than their choice of the "Top 100 Reads" of the past 25 years. Any such list that omits The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is seriously broken. Others have already mentioned many books that should be on such a list.
Without the 25 year limit, there's Asimov, Clarke, Bronowski, and Bertrand Russell for science, Jagjit Singh, Hogben, and Polya for math, just to mention a very few.
I've read several glowing reviews of Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer (this one is from Ars Technica), and I'm deeply intrigued by what I've heard of it. Reviewers agree that Zimmer does a wonderful job of explaining the science, as well as the attendant politics (stem cells, intelligent design), rendering it understandable to the layman, while not insulting the more knowledgeable. Would anyone here who has read it care to comment?
QED came out in 1985, making it only 23 years old. It'd definitely go on my favorite science book list. It explained virtual photons and summing of probability amplitudes quite well, I though, without calling in the heavy math.
I'm also a fan of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
--sabre86
Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick [1987]
Excellent science book for the non-specialist. Informative, entertaining, versatile.
Link.
-kgj
Did I miss something? Is medicine no longer science? And the Band Played On shows up as number 86 and deals primarily with the social and governmental response to the AIDS epidemic but also discusses the initial epidemic and the medical response. Not pure science but as close to science as one will find on a "popular" list of books. Also, I found the the graphic novels interesting: Sandman, Maus, Watchmen all show up...not science but definitive evidence the geek culture has gone mainstream...
I think old science books make excellent "Time Capsules". It pretty fun reading about things that were cutting-edge for their time, and postulations and things that were mysteries back then.
When I was little, I went to a book fair in the town next to me and bought about 2 dozen old sets of encyclopedias, engineering, biology, chemistry, and physics books from the '40s, '50s, and '60s. My parents went absolutely crazy when they saw how much I bought, even though I spent $25 for them (but the sheer VOLUME of what I bought is what pissed them off). I managed to save one book from the garbage can: an old encyclopedia for the '60s, but was also given a book on steam engine engineering that my great-great-great (I can't remember exactly) from the mid-1800s by my mother.
Reading them, it makes understaning present-day material much more comprehensible.
Personally, I think old and out-of-date books are just as helpful, if not more helpful, than current editions, since when you read an old book, you are reading about things that are the basics and building blocks of what is taught today. Since you are reading about these "building blocks", you have a better grasp on what led up to present knowledge and discoveries.
Understanding a subject or concept is much easier when you start from the basics at the bottom, then jumping in at the middle, or starting from the top.
In autoshop, we learned about engines and their basic design evolution, and modern engines and cars. But you aren't able to understand why cars and engines are built the way they are, and what developments in metallurgy, mechanics, physics, and engineering led to prediscoveries and present-day technology.
By reading old publications, you can follow the full lifespan of a technology, concept, or idea from theory, inception, research, discovery, development, implementation, refinement, and either continued refinement, advancement, or termination. You are able to understand the mindset, thinking, and knowledge of the researchers of that particular time, instead of learing by being told "We use A instead of B because B was found to be better".
Modern textbooks teach from basic generalizations, and without understanding the evolution of the concept, and the different schools of thought with regards to different levels of knowledge from different time periods, you don't really understand that "A is better than B" because you don't know *why* it is, *how* it is, how the concept progressed from "A" to "B", and why the concept worked without "B" in the first place, and the reasons for progression from neither, to "A" and then "B".
Modern publications tech you what you know: Old textbooks tech you how you know it, why you know it, and how to understand it.
The problem with modern education is too much empasis is placed on knowing things, and way, way too little emphasis is spent on understanding things.
If you disagree with me, you either know more or less than I do, or you need to read an old book.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Godel Escher Bach? Chaos? Cosmos? Bueller?
Where is the nonfiction in general? It's not just science that got short-changed, but what about art, philosophy, technology (surely TECHNOLOGY has had a few "classic" texts in the past 25 years besides Nueromancer!), or politics?
They included "Fast Food Nation" and "Nickel and Dimed", but what about, say, Chomsky? Surely you can't include, "America: The Book", and not have a single piece by any real activists. I mean, really, what a bunch of shit.
Also, a lot of people don't want their fantasies dashed. It's not just the ones who don't want to hear about evolution, many people think they understand all sorts of scientific theories and don't want to hear that they are wrong.
Anyone check what percentage of those books came off Oprah's bookclub list?
When the only books your audience reads was recommended by their favorite talk show host.....
I see a distinct lack of forethought in your plan ...
Chaos: Making a new science, by James Gleick is an excellent book. It covers the history of fractals/chaos and reads a bit like a novel. The mini biographies of many cutting edge scientists that are discussed along the way are very interesting too. I highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501
OK, so let's look at what they've got ... best read of the last 25 years?
1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
OK, well, 25 years makes for a crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let's see what else we've got...
2.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Ah yes, another literary triumph. Not quite as good as The Road, mind you, but almost. And clearly, someone's thought extensively about this. Note that they didn't drone on and on, naming all the Harry Potter books one after the other. No, they chose to focus on the one book in the series that's actually any good. Which happens to be the fourth one (the one in the middle).
16.) The Handmaid's Tale
17.) Love in the Time of Cholera
Hmmm, rankings aren't that good. But what could they really expect? They were competing against Harry Potter. And The Watchmen, which has pictures. Bonus points for Handmaid, though; they at least made a movie out of that.
21.) On Writing
Shame on Stephen King. Since 1983 he's written Christine, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, most of the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and countless others, but damn him, not one of those books can compare to a 288-page memoir he wrote about what it's like to be a fiction writer. In fact, I'm surprised he even claims to know what it's like. And even this book, in the end, lost out to Bridget Jones's Diary.
40.) His Dark Materials
Because, let's face it, Martin Amis is just too potty-mouthed to take the #40 spot. And The Kite Runner is about Afghanistan, and you know how we feel about those people.
71.) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
A book about the American healthcare system and a culture clash between Western doctors and an ethnic minority that fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War? Interesting choice. Frankly I'm surprised that frivolous stuff like this even made the list. You can see why it rates 25 lower than Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.
80.) Bright Lights, Big City
Take that, Bret Easton Ellis! McInerny rates, but you get zip.
87.) The Ruins
Now there's real talent for you! Who else but Scott Smith could write publish his second book ever -- a short horror novel about bloodsucking plants -- get it made into a B-movie, then still make the list above Annie Proulx (who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1994)? Way to go, Scott!
96.) The Da Vinci Code
Boo, Dan Brown! See how we hate you? We're so tired of hearing your name -- and reading and re-reading all your books on airplane flights -- that we only rated you #96 on the list of the greatest classics of our age. That, and Tom Hanks's hair looked really weird in the movie.
For the sarcasm impaired: Get yourself a library card and go read some real books, already.
Breakfast served all day!
Far from it, it's just that for the most part the garage engineer has been replaced by the garage coder in popular culture.
:P
I doubt non-geeks can name 1 engineer (unless you count programmers).
Designers like Hideo Kojima, software devs like Gates, Woz, Jobs and the brother's Google get more credit.
Why? Well they are more likely to make all the subsequent developments needed for a brilliant idea to become a functioning product.
I suppose the DWave engineers will probably cross this boundary... when their software guys get their product out the door.
It's not hard to figure out, people have learned that construction acheivements are usually in materials and design not engineering. The continued existence of the 747 with all of its technical problems, high fuel costs, low seating #s and high maintenance show that some of the most powerful corporations haven't been able to find two brilliant aerospace engineers to rub together.
Part of the problem is that society has taken a very negative view of risks created through engineering. Huge systems to level mountains, de-salinize seas and lakes, irrigate the Sahara, experiment with cloud cover to resolve global warming, etc. are not fashionable.
The only other thing big enough to capture the public's immagination, projects with huge personal or financial risk, are rare because technology has largely caught up to Scientific theory.
Meh, there's some good pseudo science... Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" or Atomic Bomb's for Dumbies are both good reading, partially because the ideas contained are so facinating and controversial.
About half way through Bomb you realize you could have made one by now
A Short History of Time
The Emperor's New Mind
(I was going to say anything by Asimov, but that's more than 25 years ago.)
Ah, I liked "Chaos" also - but I'm a mathematician, so maybe not.
How could they leave this off the list of most entertaining books of the last 25 years. Not only does it teach a lot about gravity but you can use it experimentally as a central mass.
Squirrel!
"Song of the Dodo" is probably the most engaging science book I've read. "The Blind Watchmaker" was quite readable, too, and I look forward to more Dawkins. "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos" was quite entertaining, even if it was as much biography as science. Like others have mentioned, "Brief History of Time" and several books by Sagan have a lot of sticking power. (Even Sagan's novel, "Contact," got across a bit of science.) Personally, the much mentioned "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" is why I studied physics in college. There are others, that's just off the top of my head.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
James Burke - Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, etc. Simon Singh - The Code Book Schneier - Beyond Fear
EW's list is almost entirely light fiction. Except for a few memoirs, there aren't any non-fiction books, let alone science books. I've enjoyed several of the books on the list, but it might be better titled "100 classic beach books".
I'm not sure if the EW article changed since the Slashdot article was posted, but it doesn't look like EW made any remark about the lack o f science books. I think that was just the submitter's editorial comment.
What about "A Brief History of Time"? Just outstanding. Also, "Einstein's Dreams" By Allen Lightman.
"Fermat's last theorem", by Simon Singh
Great book about math, gives a good insight into what math really is and how mathematicians think and are...
imo should be read by any pupil in an early grade level, before they start thinking math was difficult or boring...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Gravity, George Gamow
Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow
Birth of a New Physics, I Bernard Cohen
The nice thing about these is that they don't pander or sensationalize the way much of what passes for current science writing does.
As far as more recent work goes, I found "Subtle is the Lord", an Einstein biography by Abraham Pais to be quite good.
Errm.. Didn't Godel, Escher, Bach receive a Pulitzer Prize? The popular physics (Feynman, Sagan) and evolution (Dennett, Dawkins) titles have all received literary accolades in addition to welcome reception from the scientific community. Why should EW have anything to do with science? They should only be reviewing the pop sci-movies and TV shows and continue to neglect any material that requires thought.
"EW's list seems to represent a major shortcoming in the field: it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."
They've got a couple of pop-social science books on the list: Gladwell's Tipping Point (neuropsych), Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (sociology), and Fast Food Nation (medicine/sociology/psychology sort of). Which means that even EW's audience doesn't mind science, so long as it's of the really soft no math, instant applications to people, can't even really see the science variety. (And actually, Gladwell's is decently scientific for being science lite). 3 out of 100 isn't that much worse than the percentage for some of the more popular fields (there are about 4/5 children's books on the list.)
open source modern art: laser taggi
There's a huge amount of good work in the last 25 years. People who are interested in ideas will either read popular science, or science fiction. Here's a few recommendations.
Popular science:
An interesting history of mathematics.
A history of society to date, explaining in detail why some people did well and invaded others instead of vice-versa.
As for science fiction, well...
Created the metaverse which inspired Second Life, and really opened up a genre.
The first of his Culture novels, sets the scene for a utopian future where human and machine intelligence coexist.
These barely skim the surface, but I'd rather not spend all day posting on slashdot.
Thank you! I thought I was the only person who realized that The DaVinci Code is poo....
He was the overpriveleged, aristocratic-background free-market, governments-only-screw-things-up, good-genes-rise-to-the-top guy who used to lecture us in the Economist about how we ought to rein back government regulation of stuff like banking.
Well, he landed a nice job as Chairman of a place called Northern Rock (where his daddy had previously been Chairman), where he got to see how real economics and market forces work.
He crashed it.
In an act of supreme irony, the UK government then had to bail the company out to prevent a national disaster, and clean up Ridley's mess. The taxpayer got saddled with a bill strongly into the double-digit billions, and potential liabilities also in the double-digit billions. So this rather sours the suggestion that we might like to buy his book. He doesn't need the money. We do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_rockEric Baird
How about mathematical gems like "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" by Walter Rudin or "Algebra" by MacLane & Birkhoff? Or even "Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea"?
http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters-Overview/dp/055326382X
Social Credit would solve everything...
Some of Feynman's books are rather inaccessible, even to the great majority of Slashdotters: I have in my hand "Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics - The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures" by Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg. I love this book, and I wish I could participate to the lectures, but only after a thorough preparation. I thought my postgrad knowledge of material science and semiconductor physics will be enough to follow the book, but no. And with all that both authors/lecturers are extremely talented science pedagogysts!
By the way, I highly recommend this little gem, if you're into particle physics.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Really, the biggest changes in science in the past 25 years have been in biology.
Try anything by Jared Diamond, esp. 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. Or 'The Beak of the Finch' by Weiner. Or most anything by Gould or Dawkins.
Recently, I've been reading 'Endless Forms Most Beautiful, The New Science of Evo Devo' by Sean Carroll. I highly recommend it. That, and 'At the Water's Edge' by Zimmer highlight the fascinating developments in the past 25 years.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Large format, lots of pictures. Not a lot of depth, but started reading these in second grade. At first it was just the pictures and captions, but as I grew older I eventually got to the narrative as well. This instilled in me a lifelong interest in science, as I'm sure it would plenty of bright grade school students now days.
If you post it, they will read.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
You're right - it doesn't deserve to be in the top 1000 let alone the top 100. They do deserve some kudos for including Neuromancer, Sandman, and Watchmen though.I didn't see anyone mention him, so I thought I'd throw Paul Davies' name into the ring. My favorite of his (or any popular science book) is "The Last Three Minutes" which is a mirror to "The First Three Minutes." Whereas the latter discusses the birth of the universe, Davies' book explores what will be going on for the final moments of the universe. Very cool read.
My wife wants my 8 year old daughter to be a writer. (She is an English major who works at a hedge fund). I want my daughter to be scientist. (I am a psychology major, now building web apps).
Finally I realized: why not both?
In my opinion 2 of the top 10 most important books (in any field) written in the last 500 years are science books:
Newton's Principia Mathematica
and
Darwin's On the Origin of Species
My favorite book for understand the nature of mathematics, physics, etc. has always been Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing.
I can think of lots of other scientific books I like better and might put on my list, of course. Not a single one places the kind of emphasis on cosmology or unified theory authors.
The parent, GP, and GGP are all pretty much confined to these areas. Why does popular science book = book about those things?
Perhaps that's the root of the problem. These things are areas science delving into realms of speculation that we can't verify or test, and for the most part, can't apply to anything, and that requires highly advanced training to really understand the concepts (rather than just the facts that people tell you). Unusable knowledge isn't exactly the most gratifying knowledge to be had.
Perhaps we need to find a way to promote the more attainable bits of knowledge.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
First off, I second G.E.B. (hofstadter) and The Demon-Haunted World (sagan) second, lets add The Fractal Geometry of Nature (mandelbrot) -- see dialogue with curator of MOMA and benoit in an article in seed magazine about six months ago. The Selfish Gene (dawkins), maybe, just maybe, The Quark and the Jaguar (murray gell-mann) Neuronal Man (changeaux) .....
But we can't blame the writers of E.W. for pandering to their audiences so self-destructively, they probably don't read much science.
Entertainment Weekly, despite the implications of trashiness in its name, has a book section. Although it's not as comprehensive as the New York Times or Washington Post Book World, it does treat literature seriously.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
How could celebrity-enamored EW ignore a book written by former child TV star Danica McKellar?
The two Richard Rhodes bomb books are genius.
The first one tells the story of 20th century physics and the rise of the Nazis. The second one ends with the Cuban Missle Crisis. Both are white knuckle history with the physics moving from ceiling wax to Mike.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
It has its moments but mostly I was disappointed. Even for an autobiography it was self-serving to the nth degree.
Maybe it was all the tales of, for instance, hot young women finding him attractive and "cute" (to quote him); or the breathless mentions of the famous VIPs he put in their places; Basically how he impressed everybody at every turn with every thing he did.
I'm not necessarily denying the book's factual basis (he was a major achiever, after all), but the utterly relentless "I'm so amazingly great!" tone wore me down and soured my opinion of the man.
8? Isn't that a bit young for an English major?
Connections, Day the Universe Changed. But that's more like history that explains the impact of science.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos has a companion book. I happen to have the nice big hardcover version.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
I was tempted to buy it once, but then refrained out of disgust for using "God" in a science title.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
by Roger Penrose.
Heavy at times, but the best physics book I've read in a long time.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm not trying to flamebait here, so please don't read this as something more than just a critical review of Sagan's books.
I've had the opportunity to read several of Dr. Sagan's books, and frankly I find them to be some of the worst prose that I've ever had the chance to read from anybody who put a pen to a piece of paper. I don't mean that lightly either, as I've read some awful content before as well, but in this case it was from a major publishing house and supposedly professionally edited.
This said, if you look past the awful writing and some of the cheesy plot elements (in the fiction like Contact) there are some kernels of very interesting and amazing ideas. If anything, it is these ideas that carry the books.
Contact is a good example of what I'm talking about, where more than once I had to throw the book into the corner of my bedroom as I was reading it due to the awful writing. I just couldn't spend that much time polluting my brain with such awful English. Still, the idea of E.T. contact was excellent, and as adapted into a movie (with Jody Foster!) made such an improvement over the book that I would strongly recommend that you skip the book and just watch the movie. Whomever the Hollywood producers got to write the script actually knew more about the English language and how to craft a story.
I'm not going to fault Dr. Sagan for not trying to express his ideas, but he is far more popular than the quality of his books.
BTW, I could say nearly the exact opposite of Dr. Feynman, as I think his writing is excellent and by far and away under-rated.
You're not alone.
Start with an unproven, unprovable, undocumented and undocumentable assertion about a conspiracy involving one of the pivotal figures in history. Add in a number of simplistic puzzles anyone with a 19th century education could solve (NONE of which involve ANYTHING da Vinci did). Use an obscure conservative branch of the Catholic church as the villain, because of course conservative Catholics MUST be conspiratorial villains.
And then write it in 4th grade-level English.
It's tripe. I bought the book at Goodwill, and threw it away after reading it. I didn't see any point in subjecting someone else to that dreck.
(Back on topic): Of course, the lack of SCIENCE books is basically because it's a list of FICTION...
EW should know-
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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That aside, have science books ever in modern times been a driving force greater than ones intended as (mere) entertainment, religious instruction, etc?
Silent Spring comes to mind.
Simon Winchester is the finest living prose stylist in the English language, IMHO. He's not strictly a science writer, but his popular geology books (The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa, and A Crack in the Edge of the World) are not to be missed
I've enjoyed all of Simon Singh's books, but Fermat's Enigma really stands out.
"Math's Greatest Riddle" stood for 350 years taking swings from many a great thinker.
Singh makes the math easy to understand,
but what's REALLY interesting is the people who made progress towards the proof.
Like Sophie Germain who disguised herself as a man, "Monsieur Le Blanc" in order to become a mathematician.
He also did a similar treatment for Physics in "The Big Bang".
Thanks to you fine slashdotters, I watched his entertaining talk on the book at the Perimeter Institute.
Feynman's QED, Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Gamow's Gravity and 30 Years That Shook Physics (if only he were better at titles), Weinman's The First Three Minutes, The Faber Book of Science, Galileo's Daughter and Longitude by Dava Sobel, oh, and a wonderful read: Arthur Koestler's The Watershed (a book about Newton which only mentions him on the last page). A Brief History of Time is not a good beginner's text. Gamow is much more approachable.
While their book list is silly, at least they have some decent Sci-Fi in their movie and TV list.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Given all of the physics books mentioned, I'm surprised no one has brought up Steven Weinberg's 1992 "Dreams of a Final Theory". It's one of the best "popular" science books I've ever read, and a great argument for the role of "beauty" in physical theory.
I also nominate "The Atoms of Language" by Mark Baker (disclaimer: I had him as a graduate syntax prof) on linguistics as science. It's a great read, even for people trained in linguistics.
Also, John Casti's "Paradigms Lost" and "Paradigms Regained".
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
If we took 10% of our defense budget and put it into education I believe we would solve a lot of our problems.
The general population wouldn't be as xenophobic, thus less willing to go after the "evil doers" as our current leader labels them.
George Bush has actually increased federal educational spending by more than any US President since Lyndon Johnson.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-02-federal-spending-inside_x.htm
And I wouldn't call Americans Xenophobic when the overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of legal immigration. It's really only the unions and the cultural right wing that are against even illegal immigration.
This is my sig.
Is that most of us interested in science literature have a somewhat esoteric interest when compared to the mainstream of civilization. It's easy to assume that everybody should be interested in some specialized field of interest when we are interested in it so completely. Which is why I liked Carl Sagan's ability to bring science, and correctly so, down to street level understanding for the masses. He was both entertaining and informative to listen to or read. He was a bridge between the esoteric and the general.
And we have to stop condemning people simply because they don't find science compelling. As far as I'm concerned that's the fault of those in the fields of science for not making it more compelling outside of their circle of peers and fellow enthusiasts.
Atheism is just another religion!