Major publishers just do not fact check. They simply don't, and there have been a number of minor hubbubs over similarly stupid errors in the last few years. Argh!
I'm sure everyone and their uncle has told you to read Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, the social history of cancer treatment, which truly is that good. (His book on the gene I felt a little more 'eh' about but is also just packed with information.) I also really enjoy Peter Godfrey-Smith on the mind and consciousness: both his octopus-centric book Other Minds and his slightly less octopus-centric book Metazoa hit that spot for me. You've likely seen the little circle of people who read M.T. Anderson's Symphony for the City of the Dead after I reviewed it several months ago -- social history of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony -- and I still highly recommend it! I also reviewed and recommend Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Edmund de Waal's The White Road, a social history of porcelain, is SO. GOOD. Back to the biosciences, Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life is sort of on the edge -- it's a biography, and also about Stanford University, but it really truly did convince me that fish don't exist and was a fascinating window into taxonomy.
no subject
I'm sure everyone and their uncle has told you to read Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, the social history of cancer treatment, which truly is that good. (His book on the gene I felt a little more 'eh' about but is also just packed with information.) I also really enjoy Peter Godfrey-Smith on the mind and consciousness: both his octopus-centric book Other Minds and his slightly less octopus-centric book Metazoa hit that spot for me. You've likely seen the little circle of people who read M.T. Anderson's Symphony for the City of the Dead after I reviewed it several months ago -- social history of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony -- and I still highly recommend it! I also reviewed and recommend Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. Edmund de Waal's The White Road, a social history of porcelain, is SO. GOOD. Back to the biosciences, Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life is sort of on the edge -- it's a biography, and also about Stanford University, but it really truly did convince me that fish don't exist and was a fascinating window into taxonomy.