Let’s face it; in this day of both social media and an often ill-educated general public, all of us who write about any aspect of science are involved in science communication – or as it is often identified in a hashtag, #scicomm. Consequently, we have a responsibility no only to engage our readers but to inform them in a way that they will not only remember what we wrote but also not be confused by the manner in which it was written.
“Science!” The famous exclamation from Thomas Dolby’s immortal pop hit from his 1982 “She Blinded Me With Science” (also covered to noteworthy effect by William Shatner in 2011) with which I startle my family and friends each time the subject is mentioned and I’m feeling a bit jocular.
As Johns Hopkins University Press so well and succinctly points out in the description of the their new “Sharks of the Shallows,” “few places on Earth are home to the amazing diversity of shark species that beautify the shallow waters of Florida and the Bahamas.” Consequently, its author Jeffrey C. Carrier no doubt decided that this was the region on which to focus as a new book about the lives and behaviors of some of the planet’s most often mentioned sharks.
As the fifth day of July this year marked the 330th anniversary of the publication of Sir Issac Newton’s monumental Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, it seems appropriate that a new book about him should be published only a few days later. However rather than focusing on his mathematical ideas, this one takes his religious ones as its subject.