Brian's Picks
When Brian isn't teaching science to high school students or being bossed around by his daughter, he likes to read poetry, literary fiction, and books about science and philosophy. Carl Dennis, John Banville, and Steven Pinker are a few of his favorite authors.
Books:
$35.00
ISBN: 9780525427575
Availability: Not Currently On Our Shelves. Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Viking - February 13th, 2018
Contrary to uncharitable mischaracterizations, Pinker is no Pollyanna; he concedes that we face challenges in these trying times - climate change and the prospect of nuclear catastrophe quickly come to mind - but he argues quite convincingly that humans, largely through the application of science and reason, have made headway on many problems that once seemed intractable: extreme poverty, illiteracy, etc. If we wish to tackle the problems we face us today, we can’t abandon the tools that built the progress we currently enjoy, for, while progress has demonstrably occurred, there is, as Pinker makes clear, nothing inevitable about it.
$27.95
ISBN: 9780393635522
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - April 3rd, 2018
I have to confess that, after finishing the The Overstory, I felt something akin to Keats’s rapturous delight while poring over the pages of Chapman’s Homer - and while I am certainly no Keats, I’m not so sure Richard Powers isn’t the Homer of trees.
In The Overstory, Powers, who won the National Book Award for his 2006 novel, The Echo Maker, has created a sort of literary zoopraxiscope in which human existence flashes against the gradual and mysterious unfolding of vegetative life. Over the course of the novel, this backdrop serves, at times, to both diminish and lend significance to human stories that become slowly and inextricably intertwined.
While telling their stories, Powers also serves as amanuensis to the trees, transcribing chemical utterances into breathtaking prose and revealing relationships hidden beyond the daily blur of human awareness. His vivid descriptions transform trees from inert, almost inanimate, objects into tragic figures in a centuries-long play we are just beginning to appreciate. To his credit, Powers never once wields the blunt weapons of didactic fiction, preferring instead the finely honed tools of his craft to make us feel a certain fellowship with the trees. When reading a novel, we don’t typically expect to have our worldview changed, much less feel “like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken”; but such is the power of great fiction. And such is the power of The Overstory!
$32.00
ISBN: 9781541617599
Availability: Not Currently On Our Shelves. Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Basic Books - June 19th, 2018
Well-written and thought provoking, The Equations of Life reveals the ways in which life's rich variety is constrained by the universal laws of physics, directing our gaze in useful ways when it comes to the search for life elsewhere.
$26.99
ISBN: 9781250111777
Availability: Not Currently On Our Shelves. Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: St. Martin's Press - March 20th, 2018
$32.00
ISBN: 9780465096053
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Basic Books - March 20th, 2018
An accessible history of quantum mechanics that celebrates the scientists whose experiments helped elucidate the theory's implications for our understanding of reality and warns us of the dangers of accepting the pronouncements of charismatic authorities (Niels Bohr) as holy writ.
$26.00
ISBN: 9780374261597
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - August 14th, 2018
$30.00
ISBN: 9781101984598
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Published: Dutton - May 29th, 2018
$27.00
ISBN: 9780525655213
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Knopf - November 20th, 2018
Gritty and sublimely beautiful, Robin Robertson's verse-novel The Long Take evokes post-WW II American in language that insists on being read aloud and savored syllable by perfect syllable. Psychologically and spiritually exiled from his edenic existence on Nova Scotia by war experiences that leave him nearly broken, Walker travels from New York to Los Angeles, where he eventually finds work as a reporter, writing about those lost in the shadows of a city's gleaming and relentless transformation.
$30.00
ISBN: 9781476776620
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Simon & Schuster - August 14th, 2018
$26.00
ISBN: 9780802128539
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Published: Grove Press - December 11th, 2018
$27.95
ISBN: 9780262038409
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Mit Press - October 30th, 2018
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