| Title | : | The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2014 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 054400342X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780544003422 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 318 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2014 |
“A stimulating compendium.” — Kirkus Reviews
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Deborah Blum selects the year’s top science and nature writing from writers who balance research with humanity and in the process uncover riveting stories of discovery across the disciplines.
The Best American Science And Nature Writing 2014 Reviews
-
Science is a wonderful thing, and it has contributed so much to our modern lives. Even more importantly, to those of us who have dedicated our lives to careers in science, it has been the means of providing us with ever more intriguing insight into the fundamental nature of the Physical world. Unfortunately, as a consequence of its success, it has become increasingly hard to keep track of even a small sliver of scientific writing and discoveries these days. I try to read, when time permits, as much of the “popular” scientific writing outside of my field of expertise. There are quite a few good books that I come across each year that really excite me and enlighten me about many fascinating scientific topics. This “Best American …” collection of essays is most definitely not one of those books.
One of the fundamental things that I look for in science writing is, well, very clear exposition of what the basic science issues are. In most of the essays that I’ve read in this collection that is far from clear. The problem is compounded by the fact that the editors seem to fall pray to the common attitude of treating science and technology as pretty much the same thing and interchangeable with each other. This, in the story on our overreliance on autopilots I am not sure if the “science connection” is the autopilot technology or the psychology of the pilots.
Second, most of the essays in this collection seem to be written from the perspective of some social, political or economic issue that has a “science” component, and not the other way around. In other words, science is never written about or appreciated in its own right.
Finally, all the essays I managed to read are incredibly depressing, even morbid. The species are changing or becoming extinct, airplanes are falling from the sky, fruits are dying, political prisoners are being tortured, and lonely people are dying because their immune system is getting messed up. I finally gave up reading this collection when I came across a story that was all about euthanasia. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more depressing book.
If you are interested in reading some interesting and fun essays on the latest scientific discoveries and developments I’d strongly recommend that you look elsewhere. Any other source would do. -
This year's Best American Science and Nature Writing is even broader than usual, including stories on climate, wildlife, genetics, cosmology, medicine, and more. None of the articles is too technical for a curious general reader. And to top it off, it's an especially fat volume, clocking in at just over 300 pages.
There are several takes on why we are doomed -- antibiotic-resistant bacteria, increasing catastrophic weather events, chunks of planets crashing into earth. There are essays that aren't traditional science and nature articles as much as they are personal opinion pieces, such as Barbara Kingsolver's ode to autumn. I usually like Kingsolver's essays, but this seemed almost out of place.
I especially enjoyed Nicholas Carr's article on how we are letting our computers do our thinking for us, to our likely peril. Use it or lose it. Ferris Jabr's piece on reading on paper vs. reading on screens also advises caution in throwing out the old ways altogether.
A nice collection, the best in several years. -
This collection was, inevitably, depressing and terrifying by turns. It's entirely reasonable that it would be largely about climate change and the anthropocene, but wow that made this panic-inducing to read. And where it wasn't about climate change, it tended to be about dead animals.
I enjoyed some of these articles, but overall I think I need to take a break from this series. -
I just love this series. Thanks, Melissa!
-
I've grown to become a huge fan of this yearly release. I loved the 2012 edition, but was a bit lukewarm about the 2013 edition. This 2014 edition was another one I loved - packed with fascinating articles with a few less compelling ones here and there.
Some standouts for me:
-"A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA" discusses efforts to modify the genetic makeup of oranges to help save them from a rampant disease. This changed my outlook on GMO foods.
-"Why the Brain Prefers Paper" - I am not alone in preferring hard copy books to e-books! Science backs me up!
-"Awakening" explores efforts to better anesthesia through monitoring consciousness, framed through the lens of people who went through surgeries not fully under.
-"Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future" discusses the rapid increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, even as fewer and fewer pharmaceutical companies are investing in antibiotics because bacteria increasingly mutate so quickly that there's no return on investment. Freaked me out.
-"The Separating Sickness" - Who knew that leprosy still exists? I knew pretty much nothing about the disease.
On a whim, I gave this book to a number of friends as a Christmas gift, and I hope they read it soon. [Hint, hint, those of you who are also Goodreads friends.] -
It's books like this that make me wish half stars were an option, because this was a solid 4.5 star book. Most of the articles/essays in this book were amazing. A few were duds and a few horrified me, but the grand majority of them were excellent and I am very glad that I read this book. I learned a lot and one article, the one about how the brain prefers paper, made me melt in a little puddle of happy goo.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who entered my store, especially to those who are pro book. That article alone would be worth the purchase of the entire book. So good.
My thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an eARC of this book to read and review. -
I read this book for my English class. We only read a couple of essays, but some of them were enjoyable..
-
Four articles rise to the top in this collection of twenty-six:
— Under Water. Climate change in our modern world means endless disaster responses to Katrina, Sandy and others to come. And why do we continue to rebuild on flood plains? The federal government spends billions after each disaster but almost nothing to prevent these foreseeable events. This fine article advocates fiscal sanity. Talking to Congress about climate change goes nowhere. But reframing the same problem as a financial one gets attention. "An appeal to fiscal sanity will get decision-makers to care about climate." Kate Sheppard wrote this excellent piece for Mother Jones, which weaves science, nature and advocacy into one.
— Why the Brain Prefers Paper. Better retention and comprehension when reading paper. Also, fewer distractions than with pads, smartphones and e-readers. Ferris Jabr's article originally appeared in Scientific American. Pairs well with and can work as an update to
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, which I awarded four stars.
— The Great Forgetting. Our brain forgets how to do things when we let computers do the work. Airplane pilots, for example, sit at computers that do the thinking. Drivers, meanwhile, become too dependent on GPS systems, forgetting navigation, orientation, scale. There is a substitution myth that computers can replace many human functions. Our brain needs to weave concepts with know-how. Nicholas Carr's article first appeared in the November 2013 issue of The Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...
— Bringing Them Back to Life. We all like "Jurassic Park." We'll never bring back dinosaurs of sixty-five million years ago. But we could bring back animals that disappeared in the past twenty thousand years. We would all enjoy seeing woolly mammoths, for example. It would take two years for a surrogate elephant to gestate a mammoth. National Geographic published this article about de-extinction by George Zimmer.
Essays in this collection appear in alphabetical order by the author's last name. I prefer it when this book organizes the articles in related groups by theme or topic.
Deborah Blum, the guest editor of this year's volume, lives in Madison. "The time I spent reading through the selections brightened some ice-gray days in my winter home," she wrote in her introduction. -
I usually love these anthologies for including well-written and inspiring science articles from a wide variety of fields. This edition was too depressing for my taste. The first article was about the effects of global warming on animals. The next was about how recently major airplane crashes were traced to airline pilots who lost their skills due to the overuse of automatic pilots. The fourth was about how astronomers in Chile could see galaxies a million light years away while 2 miles from the telescopes a dictator had run a huge prison camp for dissidents. Next was an article on the use of genetic reprogramming to save the current orange crop.
There were more articles how bleak the future of our civilization will be when climate change destroys our coastlines, when antibiotic-resistant bacteria will ruin our medical system, how deadly viruses will return due to anti-vaccine crazies, and how fire ants will make our environments into horror shows. I get the point - the world is a hostile place and some of it is our own fault. Still, if I wanted a diet of bad news, I'd watch it on TV every evening.
I wanted more hopeful articles like E.O. Wilson's, The Rebirth of Gorongosa, which described how people were re-building a mountain rainforest habitat that was destroyed in a civil war, and Rebecca Solnit's, The Separating Sickness, which described how much progress has been made in treating people who are infected with leprosy. -
Usually I can only read so much about climate change and endangered species and rare diseases without becoming depressed, but this collection was absolutely riveting. With the exception of maybe one or two, I experienced true joy and wonder as I read each article, fascinated by the things I learned and excited with their correlation with what I've retained from other science-y things I've been reading lately. Genealogy-based genetic testing, living in Antarctica, the rise of fire ants, modern-day leprosy, trapping otter, bioethics, soap operas as birth control around the world, waking up from anesthesia during surgery, the chaos of our solar system.... With each piece I just kept thinking, "How cool is it to be a human on earth right now and learn all of these things that we have already and are currently figuring out?" I can't tell you how much I love reading something that just makes me want to learn as much as I can about the subject being discussed, so hats off to these authors for writing in a way that made their stories so compelling.
-
A wide-ranging collection that represents many different science and nature topics. Most of these were interesting and well-written, though not every grabbed me. And a couple of times, I found myself thinking, “Yes, it’s an important issue, but is this the best science and nature writing?”
I especially enjoyed the essays on anesthesia, Hansen’s disease, O-rings, genetic genealogy, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, genetic engineering, and de-extinction (bringing extinct forms back to life).
I’ve bought these Best American collections for many years. This time, after taking a look at the book in a store, I opted for an ebook, since I’m nearsighted and the typeface is pretty small. -
As promised by my sage friend
Lisa, this was a fascinating and very readable collection of essays. I was surprised to find that there were very few essays that I didn't fully enjoy. I may have to join her in picking this collection up and reading it each year! Thanks for a great recommendation (and gift), Lisa! -
The best yet of the books I've read in this series, I think. A great variety of topics and moods ranging from genetics to space science to animal behavior and more, and from simple fascination to deep sadness to blossoming optimism about different subjects.
Highly recommended. What else can I say? -
Phenomenal collection of the finest writing about science and nature. This collection's particular gems were Rebecca Solnit's "The Separating Sickness", a sensitive inquiry into Hansen's disease and people who still suffer from the disease and the people who work with these patients. Also notable was Barbara Kingsolver's "Where it Begins", a rich linguistic ode to autumn. But the jewel in the crown is undoubtedly Sarah Stewart Johnson's O-Rings, such a delicious investigation into two remarkably tragic scientific explorations. Overall a collection of writing that is so excellent that you never want the book to end.
-
I didn't read all of the articles, but most that i read were utterly fascinating and well read. I did bring it on vacation and it's not really a beach read but i learned more than i would have if i had pursued a typical spring break novel. Thank you lisa for the gift that is this book -- i know when i read your review after reading this i had cherry picked the same stories you mentioned in your review, purely by chance, and all were exceptional.
-
Bravo to the editors for selecting these 26 compelling short stories, covering topics as diverse as reading via electronics vs. paper, the return of measles, fiery red ants marching north, mourning animals, boredom in space and what happens when automation fails.
For me, the most unforgettable was learning how tiny, malfunctioning O-Rings caused the horrific Challenger Shuttle explosion and the tragic end to Capt. Robert A. Scott's Antarctic expedition, events nearly 75 years apart. -
I found most of these stories very thought provoking and well written. I only gave up on one article out of the entire bunch after slogging through its first few pages. I agree with other reviewers that this collection includes a lot of depressing topics, but I think that's an accurate reflection of the environmental and ethical challenges that we're facing versus a contrived attempt to bum us all out. I appreciated the diversity of topics and added the 2018 edition to my "want to read" list.
-
6 years later, many pauses and resumptions later. I've finally finished it.
It's the book great? Yes.
Is it also very dense? Definitely.
It's like eating a very rich Browney. You will enjoy the first two bites, but then you need to take a pause.
My favorite part of taking so much to finish this book, it's that now 5 years later, you can Google inmediately where are they now. Clonning, GMOs, antibiotics, and more. -
All the articles were well written and good reads. Many panted some dark pictures of where the planet is headed but that is really the price of truth.
-
Always a great read. I hope that this series exists when my (future) children are able to read them.
-
Excellent stories.
-
Some stores are good but some (many) wander way off the mark. It seems like they are just trying to fill their word requirement for the newspaper.
-
One could be excused for mistaking the latest volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing for a horror collection. We've got articles in here on the rising tides caused by climate change, a future where antibiotics are useless, the return of measles, mass extinctions, people waking up during surgery, and even invincible ants, all raising the hair on one's head. It almost makes me glad I'll be dead before much of this kicks in.
Edited by Deborah Blum, the 2014 edition is lively reading, even for those who are not of a scientific bent, as I am. In fact, I was able to comprehend all of the articles this year--none of them were too heavy on the math. Some of them were quite benign and even poetic, such as David Treuer's "Trapline," in which he spent some time trapping beavers in norther Minnesota, or Bill Sherwont's "Twelve Ways of Viewing Alaska's Whild, White Sheep."
But a large number of the articles are causes for concern, many of them dealing with the repercussions of man's meddling with nature. Two articles mention that we are now in a new age, which is known as the Anthropocene. Elizabeth Kolbert, as part of her book The Sixth Extinction, discusses the very notion of studying mass extinctions, She points out the work of Georges Cuvier, the first scientist to posit the notion of extinctions (this before many fossils of extinct animals were found) and warns of the next one, the sixth. Roy Scranton outlines an even bleaker forecast in "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene." But fear not! In "Bringing Them Back to Life," Carl Zimmer writes about attempts to bring back extinct species by cloning them, sort of like was imagined in Jurassic Park. But he wonders about the ethics--do we really want the sky clouded with passenger pigeons again?
In medical news, I found the scariest article to be Marilyn McKenna's "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future." Antibiotics have to be constantly updated, because bacteria keep adapting to them (the easiest proof of evolution that there is). Pharmaceutical companies don't make money on short-use drugs like antibiotics, so aren't eager to pour research dollars into them. Which we means one day we may be back to the day when a mosquito bite, followed by infection, could kill someone. If that doesn't make you scared, maybe "The Return of Measles," by Seth Mnookin, will. It's been in the news--the nutty anti-vaccination crowd are personally responsible for the uptick in measles, which is the most contagious microbe in existence (it has a 90 percent rate of infection) which was completely eradicated. Of, if you have different fears, there's Joshua Lang's "Awakening," about patients who wake up during surgery, but can't move. They then have traumatic memories of the pain. It could make you want to high-tail it into the mountains.
On the other hand, Rebecca Solnit's article on leprosy, "The Separating Sickness," is heartening--leprosy is not quite done with, but can be easily cured, and maybe one day the phrase "treated like a leper" will be obsolete. And "TV as Birth Control," by Fred Pearce, discusses how the impact of television, particularly of strong women characters, has changed birth control rates in third-world countries. When women see fictional versions of themselves with more options than just being incubators, birth rates go down.
I read this book on a Kindle, but there is still a longing for paper, and that might be because of something in the brain, so says Ferris Jabr in "Why the Brain Prefers Paper." "Surveys and consumer reports suggest that the sensory aspects of reading on paper matter to people more than one might assume: the feel of paper and kin; the option to smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the distinctive sound a page makes when turned. So far digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated such sensations."
When I was a kid in Texas, we knew about fire ants--my sister sat in an anthill when she was two; it was not pretty. Justin Nobel writes in "Ants Go Marching" that's there's just no good way of getting rid of them: "Eliminating fire ants seemed a bit like making cornbread: every Southerner had his own favorite recipe."
I think my favorite article is Corey S. Powell's "The Madness of Planets," which is about how chaos really is the norm in cosmology. For instance, Jupiter, it is thought, was roaming around untethered in the solar system. "Fortunately for us, Earth had not yet formed when Jupiter was on the move; if it had, our planet might have plunged into the sun or spun off into dark oblivion." Jupiter smashed through objects that were there, including "thick swarms of icy comets and asteroids." This sent water-rich objects onto Earth's surface as it was forming. "Whenever you take a swim, or just take a drink, you are benefiting from the solar system's foundational instability."
All of this was news to me. Fascinating news. -
The Best American Science and Nature Writing collection is published every year to showcase exemplary popular science and nature essays. This year's guest editor was Deborah Blum, who you might know as the author of The Poisoner's Handbook. Contributors you might recognize include Barbara Kingsolver (author of The Poisonwood Bible) and E. O. Wilson (author of The Social Conquest of Earth).
There were several aspects of this collection which really impressed me. First, the majority of the essays were about science and almost all of them were about science which people interact with on a daily basis. Of particular interest to readers was an essay on the merits of reading in print versus reading on a screen. Other particularly relevant and fascinating essays covered global warming; the use of genetic engineering to save oranges from disease; the way TV shows can lead to social change; and the failure of antibiotics. Second, all of these essays, even those dealing with more challenging scientific topics, were written in engaging and approachable ways. (As you can probably tell, my favorites were these science-focused essays, but I think Barbara Kingsolver's meditation on knitting and the circle of life also deserves particular mention. Her beautiful prose blew me away.)
Another great thing about this collection was the number of essays I loved and how very few I disliked. There were a few about nature that bored me (I just don't care that much about sheep!) or grossed me out (if you share my intense dislike of reading about animals getting hurt, definitely skip the essay on trapping!). However, these were rare exceptions in a fantastic collection. If you're a scientist, I recommend this collection as a way to catch up with fields outside your own and as a good reminder of the way our work impacts lives. If you're a non-scientist, but would just like to know what's going on, this collection would be perfect for introducing you to the latest, most relevant work in a number of fields. I'm already looking forward to reading next year's collection!This review was originally posted on
Doing Dewey. -
I most certainly did not like all the pieces in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014, but I'll do my best to recall what resonated with me. Nicholas Carr's "The Great Forgetting" is about some of the serious harms of relying on automation. David Dobbs' "The Social Life of Genes" is about the effects of the environments on machines, about who we as creatures fundamentally are. According to the scientist interviewed, our bodies are machines that turn experience into biology. Amy Harmon's "A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA" is at least in part a defense of genetically modified foods. Robin Marantz Henig's "A Life-or-Death Situation" should be required reading for any human being: it's about a person's "tangled, sometimes contradictory" opinions on the right to die when life gets to be too tough. Maggie Koreth-Baker's "Danger! This Mission to Mars Could Bore You to Death!" is partially about how boredom is a form of stress and not to be taken for granted when thinking about the problems that come with being alone and unoccupied. Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Lost World" might be the most important essay in the collection, about possibly the end of human sustainability in about 60 years. Seth Mnookin's "The Return of Measles" is about how measles is coming back because of the anti-vaccination movement. Kate Sheppard's "Under Water" is an essay on how the United States is hopelessly under-prepared for the possibility of flash floods.
Those are the essays I liked best. Looks to be about eight essays, which is eight essays out of 26 essays. Eh. -
My favorites(which I think are must read in that order are) ...
1. Editor's Into -
Deborah Blum
2. Race to Save the Orange -
Amy Harmon
3. O-Rings - Sarah Stewart Johnson
4. When Animals Mourn -
Barbara J. King
5. Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future -
Maryn McKenna
6. The Return of Measles -
Seth Mnookin
7. The Madness of Planets -
Corey S. Powell
8. Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene -
Roy Scranton
9. What Our Telescopes Couldn't See -
Pippa Goldschmidt
