In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn’t released their “Ten Best Books” list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there’s nothing on it that wasn’t also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.
Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of “Do they ever list science books?” I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly broad definition of “science book”– I’ll list titles below the fold):
- 2006: 3
- 2005: 5
- 2004: 6
- 2003:10
The huge drop from 2003 to 2004 is deceptive, because the whole list was longer in 2003. I didn’t count, but if I had to guess, I’d say they went from 100 fiction and 100 non-fiction in 2003 to 100 total in 2004. This is another data point in the “watch the slow death of American intellectual life” series…
On a more upbeat note, if you’d like some positive recommendations (other than what’s in the comments to my earlier post, and the non-Jane Austen parts of the Making Light post, Carl Zimmer also notes the existence of the “Stevens Seventy,” John Horgan’s list of the seventy “greatest science books” in his estimation.
The list of science books deemed “Notable” by the Times in recent years:
2006:
- Field Notes from a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
- The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
- Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd
2005:
- American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
- Collapse, by Jared Diamond
- 1491, by Charles Mann
- Spook, by Mary Roach
- Warped Passages, by Lisa Randall
(Notes: American Prometheus is a biography of Robert Oppenheimer. I’m not entirely sure about whether 1491 should count– it might be more history than archaeology, based on some of what I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t read it.)
2004:
- The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins
- Beasts of Eden, by David Wallace
- The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene
- On the Wing, by Alan Tennant
- Out of Gas, by David Goodstein
- Soul Made Flesh, by Carl Zimmer
(Notes: Again, I’m not entirely sure about Out of Gas, which is a “Peak Oil” argument, and could easily be more of a politics/ economics book than a science book. The blurb notes that the author is a physicist, though, so I put it on.)
2003:
- Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps, by Peter Galison
- The Empty Ocean, by Richard Ellis
- The Founding Fish, by John McPhee
- Isaac Newton, by James Gleick
- Merchants of Immortality, by Stephen Hall
- Monster of God, by David Quammen
- Our Own Devices, by Edward Tanner
- Shortcut Through Time, by George Johnson
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
- The White Rock, by Hugh Thomson
Now, the inclusion of some of the books on that list might be a little dodgy, and some of them might not be all that great as science, but there’s no doubt that the Times has considered science books “Notable” in the recent past. You can also see a hint of a decline in the number of science books included, even without the precipitous 2003-2004 drop. It’s not due to a decrease in the number of science books published, either, as 2005-6 was loaded up with String Theory Wars books– Krauss, Susskind, Smolin, Woit, not to mention Oerter’s The Theory of Almost Everything which was outstanding. And, of course, there’s no shortage of books about the life sciences– I just tend to remember the physics books.
As I’ve said in several of the other threads discussing this, I also don’t believe that there weren’t any worthy science books published this year– again, I would point to David Lindley’s Uncertainty and Natalie Angier’s The Canon, both of which I thought were excellent. I also hear good things about Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography, and a number of people have suggested The World Without Us as a worthy candidate.
There might not have been as many outstanding science books as in some other years, but I have a hard time believing that there were no science books more deserving than Tina Brown’s book about Princess Diana.