Why am I passionate about this?

I am a scientist with a love for fiction, and I’m very intrigued by and like to explore the intersections of science with the rest of the world— art, fiction, race, religion, life, and death.  I bring these intersections into my teaching and writing. Over the past 30 years, I’ve taught Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns, undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, physicians and professors at Emory University, cadets at the Air Force Academy, and the general public. Why does science matter? Why is it beautiful? Dangerous? It’s the novelists who tell us best.


I wrote

The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence That Explains the World

By Arri Eisen, Yungdrung Konchok,

Book cover of The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence That Explains the World

What is my book about?

Karma and epigenetics?  Sentient beings and the microbiome? This book tells the story of how, at the Dalai Lama’s request,…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Gold Bug Variations

Arri Eisen Why did I love this book?

All of Powers’ books are brilliant, for all kinds of reasons. I remember this book when it first came out decades ago. First of all, it’s just great entertainment, a great story with rich characters. Then, at the same time, Powers captures the beauty of science and discovery as he immerses the reader in the time after the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA when there was a mad rush to figure out how DNA could encode proteins. Powers captures it all and gets the science right and brings in similarities between the DNA code and music and captures what it’s like working in a lab. How is this possible?

By Richard Powers,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Gold Bug Variations as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A novel which follows the lives of four scientific researchers as they twist about each other in a double helix of desire, weaving intricately through the themes of music, science, language and love. By the author of "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" and "Prisoner's Dilemma".


Book cover of Darwin's Radio

Arri Eisen Why did I love this book?

I guess this book is officially qualified as ‘science fiction’ but I think of it instead as great fiction that appreciates and then grabs the very edges of our current knowledge and extends them like a wild rubber band in ways that captivate. Bear takes some of the guesses and hints about what lies within the 95% of our DNA that at first seems to have no clear ‘purpose’ and imagines it is part of a sensor that is able to catalyze the creation of new versions of life in response to the kinds of dramatic stressors— climate change, etc— that humans have made for ourselves. 

By Greg Bear,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Darwin's Radio as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A 2000 HUGO AWARD NOMINEE

Ancient diseases encoded in the DNA of humans wait like sleeping dragons to wake and infect again--or so molecular biologist Kaye Lang believes. And now it looks as if her controversial theory is in fact chilling reality. For Christopher Dicken, a "virus hunter" at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, has pursued an elusive flu-like disease that strikes down expectant mothers and their offspring. Then a major discovery high in the Alps --the preserved bodies of a prehistoric family--reveals a shocking link: something that has slept in our genes for millions of years is waking up.

Now,…


Book cover of Parable of the Sower

Arri Eisen Why did I love this book?

Here is a writer with unlimited brilliance and imagination, who transports us into places where we have been or are forcing ourselves to go as a species. With colorful threads of science, race, memory, human potential, and apocalypse, Butler weaves a spellbinding tale. You keep hoping she’s not right about where we’re headed, but you’re terrified she is.

By Octavia E. Butler,

Why should I read it?

28 authors picked Parable of the Sower as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.

'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM

'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI

--

We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.

America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…


Book cover of 1984

Arri Eisen Why did I love this book?

Science and technology seem so great— the internet, social media, self-driving cars, websites about great books. . . but how about the downside? The dark side? Well, in his classic from 72 years ago, Orwell— if you step outside, read the news, or turn on your computer — might’ve gotten it about right.

By George Orwell,

Why should I read it?

50 authors picked 1984 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU . . .

1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…


Book cover of Frankenstein

Arri Eisen Why did I love this book?

Okay, so there’s not exactly any real science here, but that’s not the point. What is? Well, that not only is this book a milestone, a future-shaping venture that opened the door for so many others into fiction about science, that also challenges and warns and imagines science in momentous ways, but also that it was written by a teenager in 1818-19.

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,

Why should I read it?

47 authors picked Frankenstein as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'

'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times

Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…


Explore my book 😀

The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence That Explains the World

By Arri Eisen, Yungdrung Konchok,

Book cover of The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence That Explains the World

What is my book about?

Karma and epigenetics?  Sentient beings and the microbiome? This book tells the story of how, at the Dalai Lama’s request, modern science is being integrated into the curriculum of Tibetan Buddhist monastic universities— this curriculum’s first significant change in 600 years.

We tell this story through the eyes of us two very different authors who helped initiate the project now in its fifteenth year— a Jewish, white biochemist from the American South and a Buddhist monk who grew up herding yak on the Tibetan plateau. How all of us— teachers and students— think about science, life, and teaching and learning is transformed.

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Sor Juana, My Beloved

By MaryAnn Shank,

Book cover of Sor Juana, My Beloved

MaryAnn Shank Author Of Sor Juana, My Beloved

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.

MaryAnn's book list on the mystical Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

What is my book about?

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.

Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…

Sor Juana, My Beloved

By MaryAnn Shank,

What is this book about?

This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.

One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…


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