With millions of people stocking up on books — old-fashioned paper and digital — for summertime reading, one of the nation’s leading journals for science educators is publishing its annual list of book and media recommendations that would delight and dazzle readers at any level of science knowledge. It appears in ACS’ Journal of Chemical Education.
Cheryl B. Frech, Brian P. Coppola, Hal Harris and C.M. Woodbridge list more than a dozen books and websites they recommend for readers “to enjoy in the summer, either in preparation for fall teaching or for sheer pleasure.” Frech, for instance, tops her list with a book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, that changed her own life. After reading about a new variety of farmed catfish developed from ancestors that once lived in outhouses, Frech contemplated that same variety at the seafood counter in her local grocery store. She bought lentils and cooked vegetarian instead.
Among the other recommendations: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot; Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science, by Marjorie C. Malley; Better Living through Science, by Mark Frary; Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative, by Ken Robinson; Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization, by Yong Zhao; The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, by Richard Dawkins; A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos, by David Sobel; Worm: The First Digital World War, by Mark Bowden; The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies –– How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, by Michael Shermer; Intuition, by Allegra Goodman; The Fluorine Murder, by Camille Minichino; For the Love of Physics, by Walter Lewin and Denying Science, by John Grant.
American Chemical Society, ACS is a congressionally chartered independent membership organization which represents professionals at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry and sciences that involve chemistry.
