Tuesday, January 01, 2008

2007 Book of the Year

Before naming this year's selection, I'd like to point out that this is this blog's pick for best book related to the underlying theme of the blog that I've read in 2007 rather than best book released in '07.

With that being said, the 2007 Book of the Year is .............

The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors by John Gribbin

I will once again skip writing my own review and just link to someone else's. The reason I chose this book is because it does a fantastic job of not just surveying the 500 year history of science, but in an exceedingly captivating and reader friendly fashion, goes about demonstrating that science is not a static catelogue of facts and figures but a dynamic progressive and on-going process of inquiry that builds and improves upon previous knowledge. As a consequence, this book is a marvelous resource for refuting both leftist (postmodern) and rightist (creationist, Market fundamentalist) critiques of science as being simply the product of dominant paradigms.

This book goes along ways towards raising scientific literacy. And that's never a bad thing.

2006 Book of the Year
2005 Book of the Year

2 comments:

Paul Sunstone said...

Happy New Year, HG! Thank you so much for your wonderful blog!

Hume's Ghost said...

Happy New Year, Paul. Thanks for visiting.