Product Description

A playful, passionate, ebullient guide to the science all around us by a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author. Buckle up for a joy ride through physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Drawing on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and her own work as an award-winning science writer, Natalie Angier does the impossible: She makes science fascinating and seriously fun, even for those of us who, in Angier's words, still can't tell the difference between a proton, a photon, and a moron. Most of the profound questions we will explore in our livesevolution, global warming, stem cellshave to do with science. So do a lot of everyday things, like our ice cream melting and our coffee getting cold and our vacuum cleaner running (or not). What does our liver do when we eat a caramel? How does the horse demonstrate evolution at work? Are we really made of stardust? (Yes, we are.) In The Canon, Lewis Thomas meets Lewis Carroll in a book destined to become a modern classicbecause it quenches our curiosity, sparks our interest in the world around us, reignites our childhood delight in discovering how things work, and instantly makes us smarter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1014956 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
Science is underappreciated and undervalued in a world that thrives on it. Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter Angier sets out to bring the basics of hard science (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.) into listeners' everyday lives. Rather than returning to the doldrums of a high school science class, she shows listeners where and how science is happening in everything we do. Through her discussions with scientists and her use of analogies, she makes the complex accessible. Doukas delivers her performance in an energetic, soft and welcoming voice. She emphasizes and paces so as not to overload her listeners as well as to bring home Angier's points. Doukas's tone hints of excitement but also sympathy for those listeners who may appreciate science but who have a bit of angst for learning about it. With over 13 hours of listening, though, this audiobook is best processed in small chunks. Angier covers a lot in each chapter, but trying to grasp it all may take repeated listening.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
The title tells it all. Starting with the basics of scientific thinking, probability, and statistical measurement, Angier sets us up for a wild joyride through the central scientific discoveries of the last two centuries in physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy. It is a lively, enjoyable tour meant especially for science phobes but is also a useful refresher course. Narrator Nike Doukas dances with obvious delight over some of Angiers more playful analogies. Her voice sparkles with precision and youthful vitality. She immediately takes charge of the text and seems to understand intuitively the more difficult concepts, as well as the authors offbeat, anything-but-didactic tone. If youre struggling with the transition from James Bond to the ionic bond, this is the book for you. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Popular indifference toward science regularly motivates writers to attempt mass-market enlightenment. Travel writer Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) was a best-selling smash, and Angier, better credentialed in science writing and the author of the blockbuster Woman: An Intimate Geography (1999), now makes her bid. In contrast with Bryson's fact- and history-heavy approach, Angier's way of reaching the sciencephobic relies on love of language. Angier deploys extravagantly cascading metaphors, puns, and tangents to plant awareness of central scientific concepts for those who may be vague on what causes the seasons. Covering physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and evolutionary and cell biology, Angier induces from scientists in each discipline a zeal comparable to her own for figural explanations of science. Scientific thinking, though, radically differs from our subjective experience of the natural world in a way that Angier creatively illustrates in explaining theory, probability, and scale. Some readers may find Angier's wordplay excessively indulgent, but her core audience will delight in her ecstatic exuberance for all things scientific. Gilbert Taylor
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