“I’m not a scientist” is a familiar refrain among people asked to evaluate scientific claims they feel are beyond their ken. Most citizens learn about science from media coverage, and even the most conscientious reporters sometimes struggle to offer a clear, unbiased explanation to readers. Politicians, activists, business spokespersons, and religious leaders with their own agendas to pursue also influence the way science is reported and discussed. Meanwhile, anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, risk of terrorist attack, or other topics in the news must sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions and self-interested spin.
Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the scientific claims and controversies that shape our lives. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science journalist with the New York Times to expose the flawed reasoning and knowledge gaps that handicap readers with little background in science. Shortcomings in K–12 education are partly to blame, but so too is the public’s indifference to the way science is done and communicated. Dean shows how venues such as courtrooms and talk shows become fonts of scientific misinformation. She also calls attention to the conflicts of interest that color scientific research, as well as the price society pays when science journalism declines and government funding for research dries up.
Timely and provocative, Making Sense of Science warns us all that we can no longer afford to make a virtue of our collective scientific ignorance.

Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin

Politics & Social Sciences

Dean, Cornelia

Social Sciences

Belknap Pr

In 1953, reflecting on early ventures in quantum theory, J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke of terror and exaltation, of history happening in a realm so remote from common experience that it was “unlikely to be known to any poet or historian.” Yet now, anyone can Google “quantum theory” and find more than 34 million entries―from poets and historians, certainly, as well as film critics and Buddhist monks. How―and how pervasively―quantum mechanics has entered the general culture is the subject of this book, an engaging, eclectic, and thought-provoking look at the curious, boundlessly fertile intersection of scientific thought and everyday life.Including recollections of encounters with the theory and the people responsible for it, Jeremy Bernstein’s account ranges from the cross-pollination of quantum mechanics with Marxist ideology and Christian and Buddhist mysticism to its influence on theater, film, and fiction. Along the way, Bernstein focuses on those―such as Niels Bohr, the Dalai Lama, W. H. Auden, and Tom Stoppard―who have made quantum physics; who have argued over it, pondered it, or taken literary inspiration from it, and who have misunderstood, misconstrued, or misapplied it. One person in particular supplies a narrative thread: John Bell, a notable yet underappreciated physicist who did groundbreaking research in quantum physics. In Bell’s story, Bernstein provides a uniquely readable account of what physicists call the “measurement problem.”Quantum Leaps is a lively, erudite book on a subject that Bernstein has lived with for most of its history. His experience and deep understanding are apparent on every page.

Quantum Leaps

Science & Math

BERNSTEIN, JEREMY

History & Philosophy

Gould’s final essay collection is based on his remarkable series for Natural History magazine―exactly 300 consecutive essays, with never a month missed, published from 1974 to 2001. Both an intellectually thrilling journey into the nature of scientific discovery and the most personal book he ever published.

I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History

Gould, Stephen Jay.

Biological Sciences

The Diary of Beatrice Webb 1892-1905: All the Good Things of Life

Webb, Beatrice

Biographies & Memoirs

With the two-thousand-year history of the Japanese experience as his foundation, Edwin O. Reischauer brings us an incomparable description of Japan today in all its complexity and uniqueness, both material and spiritual. His description and analysis present us with the paradox that is present-day Japan: thoroughly international, depending for its livelihood almost entirely on foreign trade, its products coveted everywhere--yet not entirely liked or trusted, still feared for its past military adventurism and for its current economic aggressiveness.Reischauer begins with the rich heritage of the island nation, identifying incidents and trends that have significantly affected Japan's modern development. Much of the geographic and historical material on Japan's earlier years is drawn from his renowned study The Japanese, but the present book deepens and broadens that earlier interpretation: our knowledge of Japan has increased enormously in the intervening decade and our attitudes have become more ambivalent, while Japan too has changed, often not so subtly.Moving to contemporary Japanese society, Reischauer explores both the constants in Japanese life and the aspects that are rapidly changing. In the section on government and politics he gives pithy descriptions of the formal workings of the various organs of government and the decision-making process, as well as the most contentious issues in Japanese life-pollution, nuclear power, organized labor-and the elusive matter of political style.In what will become classic statements on business management and organization, Reischauer sketches the early background of trade and commerce in Japan, contrasts the struggling prewar economy with today's assertive manufacturing, and brilliantly characterizes the remarkable postwar economic miracle of Japanese heavy industry, consumer product development, and money management. In a final section, "Japan and the World' he attempts to explain to skeptical Westerners that country's growing and painful dilemma between neutrality and alignment, between trade imbalance and "fair" practices, and the ever-vexing issue of that embodiment of Japanese specialness, a unique and difficult language that affects personal and national behavior.

The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity

History

Jansen, Marius B.

Reischauer, Edwin O.

Asia

Compares the presidencies and accomplishments of Wilson and Roosevelt

Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt

Cooper, John Milton

Historical

A Guardian Best Book of the Year A Poets &amp; Writers “Best Books for Writers” Selection A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Harvard Book Store “Holiday Hundred” Selection A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of the Year
 “[Burt] approaches a stunning variety of verse with the obsessiveness and knowledge of a scholar and a fan. Burt is an ideal guide for this trip through contemporary American poetry…Burt’s close readings are sharp and illuminating…The death of poetry has been proclaimed time and time again. But the sixty universes that Burt uncovers in these poems show us how alive poetry is, and how it needs to be read and appreciated for all its weirdness and cacophonous music.” —Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Bookforum
“It is refreshing to find a book that gives equal weight and relish to avant-garde minimalism, New Formalism, and so many of the stations in between…Each essay is obviously a product of enjoyment, and encourages us to treat poems with the same enthusiasm—to embrace difficulty and difference in exchange for the articulate and involved pleasure that poetry, of all the arts, can best provide.” —Rory Waterman, Times Literary Supplement

The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

Literature & Fiction

Burt, Steph

History & Criticism

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