I am way, way, way behind in reporting on the books I’ve read. As time goes by, the list gets longer, and the “book report” more daunting… So I’m going to do a brief book report in hopes of clearing out the backlog: What if? by Randall Munroe Really entertaining scientific answers to ridiculous questions, … Read more
Callan reviews 11 books he’s read in the past 11 months, some having to do with geology, many with the intellectual heritage of scientific insight, a few about history, two biographies, and some about random things.
Bill Bryson is a very fun writer. Like many people, I first dipped into his oeuvre when he published his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. Though I bruised my ribs laughing as hard as I did, I went back and read many of his other books – about traveling in Australia, or the UK. … Read more
Sam Harris wrote a couple of excellent missives on the downsides of modern religious thinking and religious institutions in The End of Faith and the sequel which rebutted some of the U.S. criticism from it, called Letter to a Christian Nation. He published a new major work in 2010, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can … Read more
My friend Joe Cancellare knows that I like cartoons, and that I even draw a few cartoons myself. He surprised me a couple weeks ago with a gift of a book – a new memoir by New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff. This was a real treat – it explores (a) the idea of how … Read more
On Saturday of this past weekend, I led a field trip to Sideling Hill and Paw Paw Tunnel, and on the (1.5+.75+1.5=) 3.75 total hours of driving, I listened to the audio book version of Tim Cahill’s short book on traveling around in Yellowstone National Park. It’s a fun little book, but I wished it … Read more
I recently read God’s Harvard, by Washington Post reporter Hanna Rosin. It’s a profile of the people and philosophy behind Patrick Henry College, a private Christian college located not too far from me, in Purcellville, Virginia. PHC is an Evangelical place that strives to serve its homeschooled matriculating freshmen with a sense of worldliness and … Read more
When Michael Collier came to visit last year, he recommended a couple of books to me. I finally got around to reading the first of them – Refuge, a memoir mixed with natural history of Utah by Terry Tempest Williams. The arc of the story is essentially twofold: the women in Williams’ family get cancer, … Read more
Callan reviews Bob Hazen’s latest book, “The Story of Earth,” a history of our planet that emphasizes the coevolution of minerals and life.
Some time ago, when I reviewed some books here, Thomas Hodgson left the suggestion that I might enjoy The Snoring Bird, by Bernd Heinrich. So I asked the library to order it, and they did, and as soon as it arrived, someone else checked it out. Then I got my turn, and today, when I … Read more