Science Books

THE ILLUSTRATED TIMELINE OF SCIENCE: A Crash Course in Words & Pictures
by Sidney Strickland, PhD. with Eliza Strickland. Wonderful graphics - color & B&W era photos with era B&W drawings, portraits, charts. Condition: NEW 2006 Sterling soft cover, first printing. Content: This book is compiled and presented in the manner of a DK history book or a Discoveries book - in other words, excellent and detailed. Early hominids in east Africa fashion the earliest stone tools. The world gets its first glimpse of a functional internal combustion engine that uses coal gas as fuel. And the atomic era begins with a frightening flash, changing life as we know it forever. More than two million years of science and technology unfold, with all the milestone achievements in biology, chemistry, and physics placed in their broader social context and shown in plentiful images. The far-ranging feats include everything from the anonymous invention of the sewing needle to heart transplants. [1 copy available]
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LEONARDO ON FLIGHT
by Domenico Laurenza. Wonderful color repros of Da Vinci's art, sculptures, paintings, and drawings of all things "in flight." Condition: New 2007 Johns Hopkins University Press large soft cover, first printing. Beautiful production values. Content:A genius for all time, Leonardo da Vinci contributed artistic masterpieces, spectacular inventions, and scientific research to Western culture. This beautifully illustrated volume reconstructs the origin of one of the most fascinating and fundamental aspects of Leonardo's life and work: his dream of human flight. With masterfully reproduced drawings from his vast library of manuscripts and folios -- especially from the Codex "On the Flight of Birds" and the Codex "Atlanticus" -- this book traces the development of Leonardo's theories and experiments over time. Detailed descriptions and unique readings of these exquisite sketches, letters, and notes reveal the inner workings of the artist-scientist. [2 copies available]
$ 12.49 + $ 3.39 media shipping.

WORLDS IN COLLISION
by the great Immanuel Velikovsky. Preface (original) and a new Preface to the paperback ediiton. Condition: UNREAD 1977 Pocket paperback, 7th printing. Perfect but for a name written top Title Page. Content: Whether you agree with Velikovsky (in part or totally), you wuld have to admit his books and theories have had an impact on the scientific community (who despise him) or on popular science (the general public likes him). Oh - and don't forget Carl Sagan - who, I understand, used Velikovsky's theories about Venus as a part of his own Ph.D. dissertation. Supposedly, Broca's Brain" is Sagan's answer to this book. Reviewer: "What makes up the book's core and focus is the element of science and validity in ancient myth. Any modern reader who picks up the Bible and leafs to Exodus will wonder about the events being described there. If it was not a series of actual divine intervention, than what was it? The account is too similar in detail with the symptoms of a great natural disaster to be wholly fabricated. More importantly: what caused the fairly obvious similarities in myths from all over the world? A language-like trade and distribution? Are their rough contents features of human subconsciousness common to us all? Nobody has the answer. In fact many still stubbornly persist there is no science here at all: myths are made-up stories and wishful thinking. Velikovsky's "error" was drawing his major conclusions from myth and folklore alone. There was no geological or astronomical evidence to back him up. Instead, he called for these sciences to adapt to his theories. Nevertheless, his method had a logic and clarity that was rudely ripped aside by critics, who wanted to put him on display and eliminate another threat to mainstream scientific thought. And thus leaving the actual question unchallenged: where is the science and the truth in myth and folklore?" A fascinating read. And then read Broca's Brain. [1 copy available]
$ 29.49 + $ 2.94 media shipping.

CHARLES DARWIN: The Naturalist Who Started a Scientific Revolution
by Cyril Aydon. Two B&W photo sections and B&W maps. Condition: NEW 2002 Carroll & Graff hardcover & DJ (in mylar jacket), assumed first printing. Content: While there are weighty biographies of Charles Darwin for the specialist and brief introductions for beginners, Cyril Aydon’s work presents Darwin for the general reader, in a winning combination of historical accuracy and exemplary, lucid science. Aydon begins with one of the overlooked factors in the great man’s success—he was rich. Thanks to his family’s wealth and position, Darwin could turn down careers in medicine and the clergy to devote his life to science, an undoubted factor in his becoming one of the undisputed giants of the field. Pursuing his studies on his own terms, he made major contributions to geology and virtually invented ecology. And he wrote two books, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, that changed forever our view of life on earth and man’s place in the natural order. Charles Darwin places Darwin the devoted father and husband in the context of his scientific career, as well as elucidating his intellectual principles. It not only explains what The Origin of Species was about, but also portrays how the epochal controversy of its publication affected him and his family personally. And it immerses the reader in both the physical and the intellectual excitement of the Beagle voyage. To round out this captivating biography, Aydon supplies an extended postscript analyzing the secret of Darwin’s success, following the changing fortunes of his theories according to fashions in intellectual thought, and explaining his significance to two centuries of evolutionary speculation and discovery. 16 pages of full-color and black-and-white photographs are included in this portrait of the father of evolutionary theory. [1 copy available]
$ 4.49 + $ 3.29 media shipping.

MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS?: The Scientist and the Cinema
by Christopher Frayling. Wonderful B&W era photos and movie posters illustrate. Condition: NEW 2005 Reakton hardcover & DJ (in m ylar jacket), assumed first printing. Content: Frayling (Vampyres), chairman of the Arts Council of England, goes beyond horror films like Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau to survey Hollywood's scientist-as-savior films of the 1930s and '40s (Madame Curie), lesser-known British "boffin" films of the '40s and '50s (The Dam Busters) and films of space exploration (1902's Voyage to the Moon). His extensive study, which occasionally sidetracks into books, comics and television, charts the evolving public perceptions of scientists. His conclusions are occasionally surprising: Rotwang in Metropolis is "the most influential scientist in the history of cinema"—a prototype who contributed the iconography of white lab coat, unruly hair and physical disability (a damaged hand); at the same time, Frayling shows how the appearance of celebrity scientists like Einstein and Stephen Hawking reinforced that imagery. An examination of students' artistic depictions of scientists will probably appeal mainly to scholars, and the overlong treatment of Wernher von Braun, whose appearances on a series of 1950s specials about space exploration, has a detectable British resentment of the German's history with the Nazis and his rehabilitation as a U.S. space program hero. But given Hollywood's abiding interest in sci-fi, this is a timely and insightful book. [1 copy available]
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MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP: Amazing Phenomena in Our World's Waterways
compiled & edited by Frank Spaeth. Condition: UNREAD 1998 Llewellyn Trade Paperback, first edition, first printing. Tiny edgewear. Content: Since 1948 FATE Magazine has been bringing to the public true stories of strange and amazing stories of water monsters, thostly vessels, & oceanic oddities. These are the best of those stories from the past 60 years. [1 copy available]
$ 5.49 + $ 2.94 media shipping.