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jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews
The Hunt by Jennifer Sturman
5.0
Fantastic, everything you could want in a chick lit mystery and more.
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan W. Hirshfeld
4.0
If you read just one biography of Michael Faraday make it this one.
Actually I haven't read any others and probably won't. But this was one well worth it. As Dickensian as the Wire, but more David Copperfield than Little Dorrit. Faraday picked up science by browsing books in the store that he worked in. And then worked his way up from essentially an errand boy to one of the world's premier experimentalist in electricity and magnetism.
Hirshfeld does a nice job mixing the life of Faraday with his science.
Actually I haven't read any others and probably won't. But this was one well worth it. As Dickensian as the Wire, but more David Copperfield than Little Dorrit. Faraday picked up science by browsing books in the store that he worked in. And then worked his way up from essentially an errand boy to one of the world's premier experimentalist in electricity and magnetism.
Hirshfeld does a nice job mixing the life of Faraday with his science.
Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
4.0
The title and cover warrant five stars. But the rest of the book was more like three and a half stars. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the scientific process and how paleontologists go about finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I also liked the way the author brought together paleontology, genetics, and embryology into a coherent story. Some of the particular topics, like that anatomy of hands and teeth were fascinating.
But going through each aspect of our anatomy, bit by bit, with relatively little analytic content (or at least not much that was new to me) could drag at times. And there wasn't nearly as much to take away from the book as there was from, for example, Sean Carroll's Making of the Fittest.
But going through each aspect of our anatomy, bit by bit, with relatively little analytic content (or at least not much that was new to me) could drag at times. And there wasn't nearly as much to take away from the book as there was from, for example, Sean Carroll's Making of the Fittest.