We are going to have some wonderful reading programs at the Linda Hall Library in 2008! The books chosen represent an interesting cross-section of contemporary issues in science, engineering, and technology.
One Book Program
On Tuesday, February 5 we will host our second One Book program. The book for this program will be Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. There are a couple of different editions of the book, but you can read any edition you can pick up and participate fully in the discussion. The Selfish Gene introduced a new way of thinking about biological evolution, and the book has maintained a steady readership and an influence on popular and scientific thought for the past thirty years. Please join us in reading Dawkins and discussing what the fuss is all about.
Periodic Roundtable Book Discussion Programs
Our smaller, more informal book discussion group will have five meetings through June 2008. Here are the offerings:
Monday, January 14 - Jenny Bruenger will host a discussion of the eccentric and funny Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character. Find out how Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, played bongos, cracked safes at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, and generally (but playfully) tweaked authority and "the serious" among us throughout his career.
Saturday, March 1 - Jenny will host a discussion of The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science by Elga Wasserman. This Roundtable will be heavily promoted to women at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate stages of preparing for careers in the sciences. The event occurs on the first day of Women's History Month. Please consider joining this special conversation.
Monday, April 7 - Christine Taft will host a discussion of At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea by Carl Zimmer. According to reviews, this book discusses how life forms evolved to survive on land, and provides a readily understandable account that could promote public understanding of macroevolution, and serve as a popular companion to the description of microevolution given in Jon Weiner's The Beak of the Finch.
Monday, May 5 - Eric Ward will host a discussion of Hope is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds by Christopher Cokinos. The author, a professor of English at Kansas State University, tells the stories of six North American birds that have become extinct: their natural history, the people who killed them off, and the people who tried to save them. Each of these losses - the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon, the Labrador Duck, the Heath Hen, the Great Auk and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker - represents a tragedy for the ecosystem and, Cokinos argues, for human civilization.
Monday, June 9 - Scott Curtis will host a discussion of Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes. Calling upon his background as a petroleum industry geologist and university professor, Ken Deffeyes argues that we have just passed “peak oil” and are headed for diminishing returns. He pragmatically addresses how we can extract more oil from the earth, the economic costs involved in these extraction methods, and the energy alternatives available beyond oil.
For more information, call Scott Curtis at 816-926-8739 or e-mail at curtiss@lindahall.org.
