Let me start right out with a confession - I tried to read Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert’s much admired memoir, but I never finished it. I have rarely disliked a book more than I disliked that one. I found the writing mawkish, the author annoying and her problems silly.

However, I was reading nothing but good reviews for The Signature of All Things ( Read more... )

This book really left me in a tizzy.  On one hand, it's an excellent (and I do mean excellent) primer on the scientific method and how it's used to know things (altho there are things he acknowledges skipping because he's not an expert on those), and on the other hand it's a primer in the most condescending sense of the word.  I'm not sure I've ( Read more... )

I was nearly to the end of Raymo's book before I came across his definition of a natural prayer, and this he took from fellow naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger: stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully.  I used to do this when I was younger, all the time -- can't pin down when it became so much less frequent but eventually my life ( Read more... )

Subtitled A Personal View of the Search for God, this book was edited by Ann Druyan some 10 years after Sagan's death, using the talks he gave as part of the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow in 1985.  I am so glad Druyan did this altho it has given me yet another reason to mourn Sagan's death -- he was such a good ( Read more... )

Being sick has done great things for my reading -- I not only finished all 4 library books but have made great headway on Carl Sagan's "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the search for god". Sagan's collection of lectures begins as close to the beginning as humans are capable of knowing or making damned good theories about ( Read more... )

A very chewy but nevertheless enjoyable and easily read book.  Using the metaphor of Descartes' skull being separated from the rest of his skeleton shortly after death (it isn't absolutely certain, but there's strong evidence one of the guards put on Descartes' corpse to safeguard it during its disinterment in Sweden until its re-internment in ( Read more... )

Finally finished this, and did not expect it to be such a depressing book.  I know that was not the author's intention, she meant to inform and enlighten and she did, but I can't help but react to the seemingly inevitable loss of yet another species, however small a cog it may seem -- frogs, honeybees, now monarch butterflies.

Altho I hadn't thought ( Read more... )

From Four Wings and A Prayer, on butterfly tagging:

The best time to tag a butterfly is in the morning.  The air is cool then, and the sun is just rising, and the butterfly, too cold to sustain flight, is nearly paralyzed.  Pick it off a tree limb or off a flower and it will seem docile, nearly tame.  (It will also seem stuck there: its feet have a ( Read more... )

From Descartes' Bones comes another example an old philosophical problem that dogs us to this day: the debate over whether mind and brain are one entity or two.  Generally the religious hold for two, the non-religious for one, altho Descartes', a devout Catholic, was the first to put forward the materialist (now days called physicalist) belief that ( Read more... )

We all know that politics insinuates itself into nearly every situation, it's just odd to find it mixed in with butterflies.  This excerpt is Halpern writing about a conference she attended in Mexico, the purpose of which was to address the needs of butterflies who winter in Mexican forests vs. the human residents who need to work those same ( Read more... )