This category contains full-length reviews of, short essays about, and new pertaining to books.
With a format, size, and style of content that is very reminiscent of the original Golden Guides and the Observer’s Books series, the new Princeton University Press Little Books of Nature series is a welcome development indeed.
In his new book “Hearsay Is Not Excluded; A History of Natural History,” Prof. Michael R. Dove takes up the histories of four representative natural historians from the previous four centuries – Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Carl Linnaeus, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Harold C. Conklin – to examine how their own studies were undertaken in times and socio-cultural circumstances when crossing today’s more fortified disciplinary boundaries was not only allowed but expected.
In continuation of her exploration into effective ways to bridge our society’s present chasm between proponents of science and skeptics of it, Prof. Emma Frances Bloomfield’s new book “Science v. Story” examines four very pertinent present-day challenges to science communicators – climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19 – from the perspectives of their narratives and their counter narratives, to demonstrate how effective story-telling is essential to effective science communication in the modern world.
With her superb mix of erudition and wit, Dr. Hana Videen’s first book “The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English” captured both the minds and hearts of those who read it. Now, in her second book, The Deorhord; An Old English Bestiary,” she delves more deeply into the fascinating and sometimes mysterious hoard of Old English words used to describe the animals known to the medieval English world.