Here We Are: Notes For Living On Planet Earth, by Oliver Jeffersįrom one of the great visual storytellers of our time comes a lovely primer on our place in the universe and a tender reminder that we share this precious Pale Blue Dot. Read more on Brain Pickings, listen to Janna Levin on SciFri, and read an excerpt. On her pages, each of the scientists involved in this colossal half-century climb comes alive with Dostoyevskian insight into character, revealing what a profoundly human endeavor science is and how inseparable its triumphs are from the personal flairs and foibles of its practitioners. One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicist, Levin is also a masterly novelist who brings her gift as a literary artist to the greatest scientific leap in our understanding of the universe since Galileo first pointed his crude brass telescope at the sky. This definitive chronicle of the quest to hear the sound of spacetime-the landmark detection of gravitational waves that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics-is one of those rare achievements where a science book enchants not only with the thrill of its subject, but with the splendor of its prose.
Sacks brings the friendly curiosity for which he is so beloved to this ultimate testing ground of character, emerging once more as the brilliant, lovable human he was. In his signature Sacksian way, he gets at the universal through the deeply personal-not only with case studies of his patients, as he has done so beautifully for nearly half a century across his books, but this time with the case study of his own self as his body goes through the process of aging and eventually dying. In this posthumous collection of Oliver Sacks’s essays, including many never before published, his warm genius comes alive as he tackles everything from memory to Darwin’s love of flowers to Freud’s little-known contributions to neurology to the nature of creativity. The River of Consciousness, by Oliver Sacks Check out their picks below.Īnd don’t forget about the kids! We’ve curated a list of the best science books for children, complete with activities for when you’re finished reading…because it’s never too early to inspire the budding scientists in your life. Maria Popova, founder of Brain Pickings, and Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism program, join Ira to wrap up the best science books of 2017. From women codebreakers during WWII, to Oliver Sacks on consciousness, to a graphic novel about theoretical physics, there’s something for everyone on this year’s list of best science books.
It’s been a bumpy road for science in 2017, and now’s a good time to reflect on what makes science so great: Stories of discovery and wonder, and the majesty of nature and space.