Kevin Davis is the author of three non-fiction books about the criminal
justice system, The Wrong Man,Defending the Damned and The Brain Defense. Davis has also authored eight
nonfiction children’s books. He’s an award-winning journalist and magazine
writer based in Chicago.
Adriane Raine has been studying the brains of convicted murderers for
decades and his fascinating and accessible book uses neuroscience to help
explain, though not excuse, their behavior due to anomalies and injuries to
their brains. Raine makes a strong case that various impairments to the brain
can inhibit the ability to put the brakes on impulsive, antisocial, and harmful
behavior.
Adrian Raine is one of the world's leading authorities on the minds of the violent, the criminal, the dangerous, the unstable. An Anatomy of Violence is the culmination of his life's work so far, offering the latest answers to some of the most difficult questions: what are the causes of violence? Can it be treated? And might it one day be stopped?
Are some criminals born, not made? What causes violence and how can we treat it? An Anatomy of Violence introduces readers to new ways of looking at these age-old questions. Drawing on the latest scientific research, Adrian Raine…
I have written four books of popular science, and edited a fifth collection of my favorite science writers. I have been a judge for the 2022 Science in Society Book Awards for the National Association of Science Writers. I taught popular science writing for 34 years to undergraduates and graduates alike. Most of all, I love the wonder and awe of understanding the world around us.
A wonderful saga of a cutting-edge research team’s quest to understand and even cure cancer, told with drama, wit and a poetic style.
This was one of the pioneering books that turned science writing into a truly literary pursuit, and the act of reading them into a pleasure like reading a novel.
As dramatic as The Double Hex and as absorbing as The Soul of a New Machine, Natural Obsessions explores the advanced reaches of molecular biology, the nature of the human cell, and the genes that control cancer. It unforgettably portrays some of the best young scientists in the world, the rewards and discouragements of scientific research, and the very process of scientific inquiry.
Psychiatric genetics is now entering its second century. Lifetimes of work, billions of dollars spent, and not a single finding that has benefitted a single patient anywhere in the world.
Moreover, these labors are a preposterous distraction from addressing the real causes of those complaints that fall under the diagnostic rubric of “mental illness” – abuse, trauma, loss, and so forth. It’s time to move on.
Schizophrenia is a widely investigated psychiatric condition, and though there have been claims of gene "associations," decades of molecular genetic studies have failed to produce confirmed causative genes. In this book, Joseph focuses on the methodological shortcomings of schizophrenia genetic research.
His findings have major implications not only on how we understand the causes of schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, but also on how we understand the causes of human behavior in general. Chapters explore the differing theoretical concepts of schizophrenia, molecular genetic research around schizophrenia, family, twin, and adoption studies, and non-medical prevention and intervention strategies. Prominent researchers and…
Even though I am a scientist who has written over 130 scientific articles, I have a longstanding passion for scientific books that are written for non-scientists. I love books about science, no matter how distant they are from my area of expertise. To me, the best science books convey the excitement of science and scientific thinking in an accessible manner, but without pandering or dumbing things down. My favorite books tackle big ideas and respect the reader’s intelligence. My choices here reflect my core interests in biology, evolution, and behavior—and the aesthetics of science, too. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
Genes have variously been described as selfish and controlling—as providing a blueprint or a program for development—as even “the cell’s brain”. These descriptions of genes get in the way of our understanding of what genes actually do—and what they don’t (and cannot) do. Evelyn Fox Keller provides an antidote to the simplistic notions of genes that permeate our society and infect our scientific discourse. She carefully walks us through the history of the field and provides us with a much more realistic view of the intricacies of DNA. By the end of this marvelous book, you may not even think that genes are a thing at all.
In a book that promises to change the way we think and talk about genes and genetic determinism, Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology's progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain.
Keller shows us that the…
This is a fascinating story of the history of science that operates at two levels.
First, Radick tells the story of the history of genetics and how the work of the Austrian friar Gregor Mendel, unknown for forty years, in ten years, became the paradigm that still rules today.
Second, Radick gives us what we might call a meta-history, showing the success of Mendelism was less a function of its own virtues and owes much to the sudden death of its chief opponent.
Question: Is the history of science the story of the success of excellent reason and experimentation, or is it more like a mystery story, all a matter of unreasoned chance?
A root-and-branch rethinking of how history has shaped the science of genetics.
In 1900, almost no one had heard of Gregor Mendel. Ten years later, he was famous as the father of a new science of heredity-genetics. Even today, Mendelian ideas serve as a standard point of entry for learning about genes. The message students receive is plain: the twenty-first century owes an enlightened understanding of how biological inheritance really works to the persistence of an intellectual inheritance that traces back to Mendel's garden.
Disputed Inheritance turns that message on its head. As Gregory Radick shows, Mendelian ideas became foundational…
I’m a sociologist, and I study how technology shapes and is shaped by people. I love my job because I am endlessly fascinated by why people do the things they do, and how our cultures, traditions, and knowledge affect how we interact with technology in our daily lives. I picked these books because they all tell fascinating stories about how different communities of people have designed, used, or been affected by technological tools.
This is one of those books that you have to read either alone or among tolerant friends, because every few pages you’ll be moved to read some bit of it aloud to everyone around you. Alondra Nelson is a brilliant sociologist of science and technology, and this book tells the story of how genetic science and racial politics intersect, sometimes in surprising ways. I love how this book intertwines cultural and political history with clear-eyed analysis of genomics, genealogy, and the life sciences—it’s a great example of how to write about the human stakes of scientific research and innovation.
A Favorite Book of 2016, Wall Street Journal 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction (Finalist) 2017 Day of Common Learning Selection, Seattle Pacific University 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize (Honorable Mention) 2020 Best Books of the Year, Writers' Trust of Canada
The unexpected story of how genetic testing is affecting race in America We know DNA is a master key that unlocks medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life is both revelatory and endlessly fascinating. Tracing genealogy is now the second-most popular hobby amongst Americans, as well as the second-most visited online category. This billion-dollar industry has spawned popular television…
I love to hear stories about how people solve problems, and I have been curious about how science works since I was 12 years old. A decade later, when I was 22 years old, some of my friends joked that I "spoke DNA," and it’s true that I have been obsessed with trying to understand the physical structures of DNA for more than four decades now. I live my life vicariously through my students and help them to learn to tinker, troubleshoot, and recover from their failures.
I love François Jacob’s book. One of my favorite quotes from this is, "Evolution is a tinkerer."
I think that this is a great insight from one of the founders in the field, who shared the Nobel prize in 1965, for showing how genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein and that the control or regulation of this could come from proteins binding to regions of DNA upstream from genes.
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."-Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches-focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules-each have their own…
My education began in a one room school in rural western New York. A lonely, curious childhood led me to love reading, and to explore woods, fields, and creeks. After high school I had no expectations of college, but serendipity led me to earn science degrees from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts. Soon serendipity struck again: I was hired for a rookie editing/writing job at a children's science magazine. Lucky me, my curiosity about "how" and "why" questions led to being an award-winning author of 125 books, some for adults, nearly all children's nonfiction—about history, environmental problems, ecology, lives of scientists, and many creatures—including some that fascinated me as a kid.
I am impressed by how the author packs into just 94 pages a wealth of basic information, and even some fascinating obscure details about the process of evolution.
It is generously illustrated with color photographs and charts. Drawings and captions show "How Fossils Form," "Geological Time," and "Evidence in the Rocks," and Anne Wanjie's text is inviting and clear.
This compelling text examines evolution, its definition, the scientific evidence that evolution has taken place, natural selection, Darwin’s Origin of Species, genetics and evolution, population genetics, patterns in evolution and species concepts, the story of life and geological time, and human evolution. The easy-to-follow narrative offers students additional biological information in sidebars, such as “Closeup” boxes that give details about main concepts, “Try This” boxes that provide safe experiments for readers to perform, “What Do You Think?” panels that challenge students’ reading comprehension, “Applications” boxes that describe how biological knowledge improves daily life, “Red Herring” boxes that profile failed theories,…
From my first foray into poetry when I was in high school, I've been creative writing for over fifty years. Poetry proceeded into writing alternative song lyrics to established songs while in college. After graduating I naively pursued a career as a professional song lyricist, achieving limited success and unable to continue. While in the midst of a long career in the landscape industry, upon realizing that I wanted to write a novel based on an idea I had, I eventually completed a supernatural thriller titled, The Poe Consequence. Years of watching detective shows and reading memorable crime thrillers provided the inspiration to write a murder mystery as well. You Say Goodbye is the result.
Scientific cloning fears come to life and the possible consequences of that dynamic?The protagonist, a geneticist, makes a startling and extremely consequential discovery and away we go. The story is a combination of science, crime drama, and bad guy intrigue that keeps the reader wondering how things will play out in terms of experiments and mysterious, secretive plots. Follett offers an array of engaging characters that left me pulling for some and proverbially punching others. As with the other Ken Follett novels I’ve read, the man does his research which offers educational elements as a bonus without it interfering with the flow.And the ending is a beauty.
Questions about who we really are in terms of ourselves and maybe, just maybe, a cloned twin ‘out there’ who apparently isn’t the nice person you are?Why and how could that be? Creative ideas such as this, from the imagination…
A thrilling, chilling story of hidden evil, The Third Twin is a heart-stopping, spine-tingling story from master of suspense, Ken Follett.
An Impossible Result Jeannie Ferrami, a scientific researcher investigating the behaviour of identical twins who have been raised separately, uncovers a perplexing mystery; identical twins who were born on different days, to different mothers, in different places.
A Blossoming Love One, Steve, is a law student and the other, Dennis, a convicted murderer. As Jeannie works with Steve on her project she finds herself falling in love with him, but their world is shattered when he is accused of…
My name is Rachel Drummond, and I've had a passion for reading since primary school. Drawn to the books where the protagonist finds themselves needing to survive on their own. My mum challenged me to actually try write something to publish and I finally took her up on this. I wanted to create a world that skates the edge of ‘this could happen’ and superimpose a fictional situation over a place that is so recognisable, that if you drove through the town, you could use the book as a map. I write because I enjoy it, and because sometimes you need to kill someone without getting your hands dirty.
I pulled this book out not really expecting much, I had read so many zombie stories that they were all starting to blend together at this point. So I was pleasantly surprised to read a new take, a group of terrorists threatening to use a bioweapon to create a race of zombies. This had very few dead spots, plenty of human/human and human/zombie action to keep me interested while still showing humanity and the conflict of morals when you need to take a life.
'When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there's nothing wrong with my skills.' Police officer Joe Ledger, martial arts expert, ex-army, self-confessed brutal warrior is scared. The man he's just killed is the same man he killed a week ago. He never expected to see the man again, definitely not alive, and definitely not as part of the recruitment process for the hyper-secret government agency the Department for Military Sciences. But the DMS are scared too - they have word…
