Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

by Natalie Angier

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... (more)

Fermat's Last Theorem

by Simon Singh

The story of the solving of a puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th century. The solution of Fermat's Last Theorem is the most important mathematical development of the 20th century. In 1963, a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across the world's greatest mathematical problem: Fermat's Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can understand but which has baffled mathematicians for... (more)

The Great Influenza

The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

by John M. Barry

At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of... (more)

An Inconvenient Truth

by Albert Gore

An Inconvenient Truth —Gore’s groundbreaking, battle cry of a follow-up to the bestselling Earth in the Balance —is being published to tie in with a documentary film of the same name. Both the book and film were inspired by a series of multimedia presentations on global warming that Gore created and delivers to groups around the world. With this book, Gore, who is one of our environmental heroes—and a leading... (more)

The Black Swan

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of... (more)

The Greatest Show on Earth

The Evidence for Evolution

by Richard Dawkins

In a brilliant follow-up to his blockbuster The God Delusion , Dawkins lays out the evidence for evolution.

Linked

How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means

by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

A cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate. All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-L&aacuteszló Barab&aacutesi, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously... (more)

In Defense of Food

An Eater's Manifesto

by Michael Pollan

What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food , the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma . Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were... (more)

A Natural History of the Senses (Vintage)

A Natural History of the Senses (Vintage)

by Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. "Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in."--The New York Times. (Literature--Classics... (more)

The Singularity is Near

When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines , he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and... (more)

An Anthropologist on Mars

Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

To these seven narratives of neurological disorder Dr. Sacks brings the same humanity, poetic observation, and infectious sense of wonder that are apparent in his bestsellers Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality.

Pale Blue Dot

by Carl Sagan

"FASCINATING . . . MEMORABLE . . . REVEALING . . . PERHAPS THE BEST OF CARL SAGAN'S BOOKS." --The Washington Post Book World (front page review) In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the world. Now in this stunning sequel, Carl Sagan completes his revolutionary journey through space and time. Future... (more)

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

On the 10th anniversary of his death, brilliant astrophysisist and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan's prescient exploration of the relationship between religion and science and his personal search for God. Carl Sagan is considered one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. His remarkable ability to explain science in terms easily understandable to the layman in bestselling books such as Cosmos , The... (more)

The Language Instinct

How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker

In this classic study, the world's leading expert on language and the mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about languages: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it envolved. With wit, erudition, and deft use it everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a... (more)

Rocket Boys (aka October Sky)

by Homer H. Hickam

The true story, originally published as Rocket Boys , that inspired the Universal Pictures film. It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying. Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine’s superintendent and a mother determined to get him out... (more)

Parallel Worlds

A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

by Michio Kaku

In this thrilling journey into the mysteries of our cosmos, bestselling author Michio Kaku takes us on a dizzying ride to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and, most tantalizing of all, the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own. Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our... (more)

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

by Bstan-?dzin-rgya-mtsho

Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Niels Bohr, Einstein. Their insights shook our perception of who we are and where we stand in the world, and in their wake have left an uneasy coexistence: science vs. religion, faith vs. empirical inquiry. Which is the keeper of truth? Which is the true path to understanding reality? After forty years of study with some of the greatest scientific minds, as well as a lifetime of... (more)

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics And Reality

In Search of Schrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics And Reality

by John Gribbin

Part history book and part remedial physics text for those who lost interest when the equations started getting unintuitive, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat explains quantum physics in a way that's not only clear, but also enjoyable. Gribbin opens with the subjects that most physics professors have just started to examine at the end of the semester: The mysterious character of light, the valence concept in... (more)

The Origin Of Species

by Charles Darwin, Gillian Beer, Philip Appleman, L. Harrison Matthews

Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is here. A monumental literary feat that follows the author's critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Cryptonomicon , it is history, adventure, science, truth, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death, and alchemy. It sweeps across continents and decades with the power of a roaring tornado, upending kings, armies, religious beliefs, and all expectations. It is... (more)

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