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| The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science | 
| Author: Natalie Angier
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
Buy New: $2.29
You Save: $24.71 (92%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  74 reviews
Sales Rank: 158416
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0618242953
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780618242955
ASIN: 0618242953
Publication Date: May 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new. Carefully packed and shipped within 24 hours with delivery confirmation! (3)
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Product Description
From the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of Woman, a playful, passionate guide to the science all around us
With the singular intelligence and exuberance that made Woman an international sensation, Natalie Angier takes us on a whirligig tour of the scientific canon. She draws on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times to create a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy. Angier's gifts are on full display in The Canon, an ebullient celebration of science that stands to become a classic.
The Canon is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time -- from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it's for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or what electricity is. Angier's sparkling prose and memorable metaphors bring the science to life, reigniting our own childhood delight in discovering how the world works. "Of course you should know about science," writes Angier, "for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun and fun is good."
The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel, why the horse is an example of evolution at work, and how we're all really made of stardust. It's Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas -- a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 69 more reviews...
 A Fine Introduction To The Major Areas of Science August 9, 2008
Sometimes the best explainers of a topic are outsiders or laymen, rather than practitioners in the field. The author isn't a scientist so she can still see complex topics from the layman's viewpoint. This is, simply put, a great book. It covers not only the nuts and bolts of science (what is the doppler effect?) but the philosophy behind science: why the scientific method so excels at explaining our world.
The writing is breezy and not stilted, using metaphors instead of math to explain difficult topics. The chapter on evolutionary biology is my favorite, and covers not only the mechanics of evolution but the controversy, and explains the tenets (and bad reasoning) of the Intelligent Design movement. After reading this chapter it seemed like a veil lifted from my eyes, and I got excited and yelled, "I get it!"
A couple of my favorite quotes:
From the chapter on evolutionary biology: "Natural selection is the force that transforms drift and randomness into the gift of extravagance. It takes the doctrinaire sloth of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of every system to get frowzier over time, and hammers it into a magic, all-purpose, purpose-making machine that turns around and breaks entropy at the knees."
From the chapter on astronomy, talking about the search for extraterrestrials: "We are such indefatigable telecommunicators that the world and its 6.5 billion content providers don't feel like enough, and we can't help but wonder, Who else can we call?"
The book is wonderful and definitely is worth reading several times. My only gripes: there is the occasional reference to some current pop culture celebrity, and I think this will make an otherwise timeless book seem dated in a few years. Also I think that the book would have been enhanced by an occasional illustration. For instance, the explanation of the galaxies flying away from each other is much easier understood if you actually see a picture of a balloon with dots on it to represent the galaxies.
 This canon needs another en August 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Natalie Angier was mad as heck and wanted some science to go wring a neck. That of her sister, who saw no need, for muse-seeums now that her children were ready for new sceneums. So she wrote and she wrote and came up with a book that should have captured the basics of science in a new look. Alas Natalie spent a lot of time writing about subjects obscure in order to educate the masses toujours.
Too clever by half, she got most of it right, but her writing got in the way- 'twas too trite. Bombeckian prose over and over again, makes for wrinkled nose, over and over again. And over and over again. And again. Every page, sometimes ten.
Not a total waste of time, some good basic science, but at the end of the day, a writing style of annoyance. Add to it some comments that are way too PC, and you have a half a book, not a great one, you see.
Frippery city August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Think of chocolate cake dipped in honey, sprinkled with powdered sugar and then drizzled with maple syrup. Blech!
Apparently, Angier has noted that the world of nonfiction has had to make due without its own version of E. Annie Proulx, and decided to fill that gap herself. (This is not a compliment.)
But I hate to be hard on her, because she is performing a real service, and obviously is quite bright and more than willing to dive into a tough subject and work until she understands it. But if her stated goal is to make the basics of science more accessible to people, why make us read in dread of the next strained metaphor or lame pun? It's hideously distracting.
(For the record, you can't really address a compendium of basic science without mentioning J. Willard Gibbs, America's greatest and most obscure science titan.)
 not amused July 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Too cute by far" is a better title for a review, but I see it's already taken. If you like Ms Angier's articles in the NY Times, as I usually do, you will be disappointed in this book. If the tone in those articles is as grating as in this book, maybe I didn't notice because they are so much shorter. After 50 pages I was ready to pull my hair out with all the flippant asides.
The Canon July 14, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Don't waste your time or your money. I throw very few books in the garbage, but this one had to go in.
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