Just in! Here's a smattering of scintillating new reads—great for leisure or study.
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes (Knopf, 2007)
RM237.73 .T38 2007
From Publishers Weekly:
"Taubes's eye-opening challenge to widely accepted ideas on nutrition and weight loss is as provocative as was his 2001 NewYork Times Magazine article, 'What if It's All a Big Fat Lie?' Taubes (Bad Science), a writer for Science magazine, begins by showing how public health data has been misinterpreted to mark dietary fat and cholesterol as the primary causes of coronary heart disease. Deeper examination, he says, shows that heart disease and other diseases of civilization appear to result from increased consumption of refined carbohydrates: sugar, white flour and white rice. When researcher John Yudkin announced these results in the 1950s, however, he was drowned out by the conventional wisdom. Taubes cites clinical evidence showing that elevated triglyceride levels, rather than high total cholesterol, are associated with increased risk of heart disease—but measuring triglycerides is more difficult than measuring cholesterol. Taubes says that the current U.S. obesity epidemic actually consists of a very small increase in the average body mass index. Taube's arguments are lucid and well supported by lengthy notes and bibliography. His call for dietary advice that is based on rigorous science, not century-old preconceptions about the penalties of gluttony and sloth is bound to be echoed loudly by many readers." --Amazon.com
A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life by J. Craig Venter (Viking, 2007)
QH31.V385 A3 2007
From Publishers Weekly:
"A great deal has been written about Venter as the head of Celera, the private research company that won a race with the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project to sequence the human genome. His role in this historic accomplishment has been both vilified and praised. Now, in a clumsily written autobiography, Venter offers his side of the story, portraying himself as the eternal underdog, fighting for truth and attempting to make scientific discoveries solely to help others. He is opposed in this struggle by a cadre of scientists out to advance their own careers, by a federal bureaucracy incapable of rationally using public funds to promote scientific advances and by the heads of corporations willing to do almost anything to make money. Venter accuses all of the big players—the Human Genome Project's Frances Collins and Nobel laureate James Watson, among many others—of outright dishonesty. Ignore the hyperbole and be skeptical of the accusations, but there's still a terribly depressing story about the politics of big science. Venter also attempts to contextualize the controversy swirling around the patenting of DNA sequences. Despite the lack of unbiased insight, this is well worth reading for the fascinating perspective it offers on one of the major scientific discoveries of all time." --Amazon.com
The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever by David M. Friedman (Ecco, 2007)
R855.3 .F75 2007
From Publishers Weekly:
"World-famous after his pioneering 1927 nonstop transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh, says Friedman, thought he was a god, and after a 1928 otherworldly experience in the Utah desert, he committed himself to exploring the science of eternal life. His sister-in-law's damaged heart valve led Lindbergh to seek out Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, whose vascular-suturing technique made open-heart surgery and other advances possible. The pair embarked on an immortality project at New York's Rockefeller Institute. Utilizing Carrel's expertise with tissue culture and Lindbergh's mechanical engineering genius, they kept extracted organs alive and functioning for weeks at a time. As Friedman (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis) demonstrates, these biological experiments were integral to the pair's obsession with eugenics, their belief that the white race was endangered by lesser organisms and to Lindbergh's later enthusiasm for the Nazis. Friedman, who has written for GQ and Esquire, makes complex science accessible and serves as an absorbing cautionary tale on how two heroic reputations were marred by fascism and anti-Semitism." --Amazon.com
The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time by H. Dieter Zeh (Springer, 2007)
QC173.59.S65 Z38 2007
"This thoroughly revised 5th edition of Zeh's classic text investigates irreversible phenomena and their foundation in classical, quantum and cosmological settings. It includes new sections on the meaning of probabilities in a cosmological context, irreversible aspects of quantum computers, and various consequences of the expansion of the Universe. Many other sections have been rewritten. In particular, the book contains an analysis of the physical concept of time, a detailed treatment of radiation damping as well as extended sections on quantum entanglement and decoherence, arrows of time hidden in various interpretations of quantum theory, and the emergence of time in quantum gravity. Both physicists and philosophers of science will find in this book a magnificent survey and a concise, technically sophisticated, up-to-date discussion which shows fine sensitivity to crucial conceptual subtleties." --Amazon.com
Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007)
Q141 .M5 2007
From Publishers Weekly:
"In this invigorating collection, American microbiologist Margulis and popular Spanish science TV-show host Punset do an excellent job making high science palatable, understandable and even exciting to lay-readers. The book is divided into four parts, and many of the interviews in Parts I and II concern the basic structure of the human brain and how different researchers study its evolution and development. The candid interviews unveil the origins of the curiosity that drives scientists to study particular questions-William Day's dissatisfaction with the standard models for the origin of life, why Steven Strogatz is intrigued by simultaneity and cyclicity. Part III delves into evolution and human history, but readers may find Part IV the most interesting, as it touches on such varied topics as time travel, other dimensions and 'atomic consciousness.' Chapters are short, move briskly and make ideal bedtime (or even beach) reading. Readers with even a casual interest in science will want to take a look." --Amazon.com