Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker, is another "provocative and thoroughly enjoyable [collection] from start to finish" (Publishers Weekly). Here is the best and newest on science and nature: the psychology of suicide terrorism, desperate measures in surgery, the weird world of octopuses, Sex Week at Yale, the linguistics of click languages, the worst news about cloning, and much more.
Synopsis
The bestselling author Brian Greene--the first physicist to edit this prestigious series--offers a fresh take on the year's most brilliant and mind-bending science writing. Contributors include John Horgan, Daniel Dennett, Dennis Overbye, and others.
Synopsis
Bestselling author and staff writer for "The New Yorker" Groopman edits this year's volume of the finest science and nature writing. Contributors include Walter Kirn, Ron Rosenbaum, Jeffrey Toobin, and Oliver Sacks.
About the Author
'Tim Folger has been an editor and reporter for Discover and Science Digest.Steven Pinker is author of the bestselling The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and Words and Rules. Of Pinker, The Guardian says that he takes \"the guiding principle of the pioneer thinker on psychology, Noam Chomsky, that language is an inherited ability, created and refined by natural selections, and made it comprehensible for the masses.\" He is Peter de Florenz Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been listed in Newsweek as a One Hundred Americans for the Next Century.'