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The Best American Science Writing 2008
by: Sylvia Nasar, Jesse Cohen

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780061340413
ISBN: 0061340413
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: September 01, 2008
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: September 09, 2008
Sales Rank: 14298
Studio: Harper Perennial

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:

Edited by Sylvia Nasar, bestselling author of A Beautiful Mind and former economics correspondent for the New York Times, The Best American Science Writing 2008 brings together the premiere science writing of the year. Distinguished by the foremost voices and publications—among them Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Harmon, Nobel Prizewinner Al Gore, and award-winning and bestselling author Oliver Sacks—this anthology is a comprehensive overview of our most advanced and most relevant scientific inquiries.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Disappointing "best of" volume
I agree with some of the other reviewers. The topics included in this "best of" volume are far too narrow. After reading three stories about doctors getting paid by big pharma, I gave up and jumped ahead - only to find more biomedical stories. While these may have been the most prominent in the news, surely there were other examples of outstanding scientific writing that deserved to be included here. I've found this series to be full of interesting reading in the past, but not this year (unless you want to read only about pharmaceuticals and genetics).

Rating:

- Surprisingly weak installment in the series
I'm a huge fan of this series, vastly preferring it to the competing "Best Science and Nature Writing." But this is easily the weakest volume yet, largely due to an amazingly lazy job by editor Sylvia Nasar. There are four basic problems with the book:

1. The ridiculously narrow range of publications from which the essays are drawn. See "David M. Giltinan"'s review for details, and I completely agree with his analysis. To me, it seems like Nasar, a Columbia U journalism prof, essentially picked articles in publications she herself reads regularly and did little if any digging around in other sources. Pretty pathetic, really. But one can only blame Nasar so much. This has been a trend in the series as a whole. Someone should make a chart to confirm my impression, but it seems early volumes were much, much more diverse, with an increasing New York-centrism in recent years. Maybe series editor Cohen needs ... Read More

Rating:

- A disappointingly narrow selection
In a series that's usually reliably interesting and intellectually stimulating, this year's collection was somewhat disappointing, due to an unusually narrow focus. In her introduction, Sylvia Nasar tells us that she gravitated to the stories that "people were talking about". An idiosyncratic interpretation of the criterion "best", and it shows. The articles in this book come from -

The New York Times : 9
The New Yorker : 6
The Wall Street Journal : 1
Wired : 1
Scientific American : 1
Policy Review : 1

Biomedical research : 15
The environment : 4

Based on this collection, one would be led to believe that there was nothing of note during the past year in - for example - astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, oceanography, marine biology, economics, game theory, artificial intelligence, or nanotechnology.

One ... Read More

Rating:

- Delightful
I anxiously await the publication of this annual edition and the 2008 version does not disappoint. The guest editor this year (Sylvia Nasar - "A Beautiful Mind") picks which articles she thinks are the best and the selections reflect her interests. Whether you consider it good or bad, there is not a single hard science article. The selections are heavy on medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and the pharmaceutical industry. For a guaranteed good time - grab a copy, curl up, and enjoy yourself.

Amy Harmon - *one of my favorites - Would you want to know if you had the gene that led to an inheritable disease that was both physically and mentally crippling? The subject of this essay is a young woman whose grandfather died of Huntington's chorea.

Richard Preston - Lesch-Nyhan syndrome - so rare that one of the researchers knows almost every individual on earth that has been diagnosed. Those afflicted ... Read More

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