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Nature and Science April 2020
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Explore Our Digital Library While the library is closed, all digital resources will remain available. Visit this link to see all the eBooks, audiobooks, magazines, videos and more that you have access to with your library card. |
Recent Releases |
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A Song for the River
by Philip Connors
The person: veteran fire lookout Philip Connors, author of the National Outdoor Book Award-winning Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.
The place: New Mexico's Gila National Forest.
The prose: "To watch a mountain you love murmur and chirp and howl and green up from rain and bloom with flowers, then see it succumb to flame and be blackened by heat only to live once more from the ashes, was to absorb an object lesson in transience and renewal."
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Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas
by Mark Kurlansky
What it is: As he did in works such as Paper and Salt, historian Mark Kurlansky provides an illuminating microhistory of another familiar item: milk.
Why you should read it: This sweeping history of milk is also the story of human civilization itself, reaching across continents and throughout time. (And of course, recipes are included.)
You might also like: For more microhistories of edibles, try Tea by Laura C. Martin and Spice by Jack Turner.
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| Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'NeilWhat it's about: Big Data's capacity for reinforcing and exacerbating existing social inequalities, due to its scale and lack of transparency.
About the author: Mathematician Cathy O'Neil was a professor and a Wall Street quantitative analyst before becoming a blogger and activist.
You might also like: Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality, or John Cheney-Lippold's We Are Data. |
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| Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-PerezIntroducing: the "default male," a construct that sets the standards in everything from automobile safety to medical research to urban planning.
Why it matters: Journalist Caroline Criado-Perez argues that an emphasis on male data creates a gender data gap that renders women doubly invisible: their absence from research data is compounded by their occasional inclusion in research data that isn't dis-aggregated by sex.
The takeaway: "the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly." |
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A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life
by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II
From spontaneous generation to evolution, humans have always based their theories about the origins of life on their observations of the natural world. Sometimes, these observations were wrong -- for example, geese are not fish, nor are they created by mixing pine resin and sea salt (as medieval English naturalist Alexander Neckham believed). Others were ahead of their time, like Renaissance man Jan Baptist van Helmont's coining of the word "gas" when he identified carbon dioxide's role in plant growth. This sweeping, yet accessible, history of science shows how human curiosity has contributed to our understanding of how life began.
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| Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really... by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz; foreword by Steven PinkerThe big idea: "The everyday act of typing a word into a compact, rectangular white box leaves a small trace of truth that, when multiplied by millions, eventually reveals profound realities."
In other words: our online behavior, in aggregate, reveals things about us that we would never admit -- and may not even be aware of!
You might also like: Christian Rudder's Dataclysm, another eye-opening examination of what our data can teach us about ourselves. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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