OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson

Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:

Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."

Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."

Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."

The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde