Friedman’s skill in populating her chapters with not only intriguing protagonists but a full cast of supporting characters results in an engrossingly textured account of the early Cold War. Freeing the era from the straightjacket of conformity to which it has been confined by hindsight and historiography, Citizenship in Cold War America reveals a society more fractious than anxious.
Rough Country clearly shows the sociological function of religion in Texas and, as a consequence, its political leanings and influence on the rest of the United States.
Lydia Denworth in her book I Can Hear You Whisper restores one’s awe at the amazing feat that is communication. As a scientific journalist, she dissects the process of language acquisition from auditory comprehension to speech production, but her quest for understanding is personal. Denworth’s third son, Alex, was born hearing-impaired.
The combination of "big data" and genomics allow medical professionals to diagnose patients genetically at risk for disease, but there are some serious hurdles to surmount before we can sequence ourselves.
Theodore Meir Bikel remembered
Mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others. The implications for world health are enormous.
Understanding mechanisms by which mosquitos sense their environment may prove pivotal to combatting diseases that kill millions.
Americans were more fully aware that modern life, urban life in the late nineteenth century, made heat more unbearable than ever. As Salvatore Basile writes in Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything: “America was realizing that a heat wave was much more unpleasant in cities than in rural areas: the larger the city, the more brick and stone and human bodies, the more hellishly hot it felt." A man-made heat was being created that could only be controlled, ultimately, by man-made cooling. Slowly, inchoately, but tenaciously, the quest for coolth had begun.
Musolino delivers a compelling narrative, inherently polemical, based on historical facts, experimental data, theories in sociology and political science, findings in experimental psychology and neuroscience, philosophical principles, and theological beliefs. While this conglomerate is conveyed admirably in layman’s terms, avoiding disciplinary jargon for the most part, it sometimes feels dizzyingly kaleidoscopic with little attempt at layering or prioritizing the relative status of component parts.
Over the millennia, holy writings and wisdom become a guide to many of us as we search for the meaning that will shape us as individuals and as communities. There is no certainty here, and doubt and questions and reconsiderations will always accompany us, as it does many who practice science. There is no simple reading of Scripture here, either.