Science: A History

Dec 23, 2024 3:32 AM

Author:John Gribbin

Science: A History

From award-winning science writer John Gribbin, Science: A History is the enthralling story of the men and women who changed the way we see the world, and the turbulent times they lived in.

From Galileo, tried by the Inquisition for his ideas, to Newton, who wrote his rivals out of the history books; from Marie Curie, forced to work apart from male students for fear she might excite them, to Louis Agassiz, who marched his colleagues up a mountain to prove that the ice ages had occurred.

Filled with pioneers, visionaries, eccentrics and madmen, this is the history of science as it has never been told before.

'Gripping and entertaining ... Wonderfully and pleasurably accessible'

  Independent on Sunday

'Tremendous ... moves me to bestow a reviewer's cliché I long ago vowed never to use: a tour de force'

  Spectator

'A magnificent history ... enormously entertaining'

  Daily Telegraph

'A splendid book ... demolishes innumerable myths and exposes the factual roots of some of science's well known tales (for example, Galileo never dropped weights of different sizes from Pisa's leaning tower)'

  Economist

'We experience his subjects' triumphs and failures as if we knew them personally ... I found myself whizzing through the pages'

  Sunday Telegraph

John Gribbin is one of today's greatest writers of popular science and the author of bestselling books, including In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, Stardust, Science: A History and In Search of the Multiverse. Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.

Reviews

An astounding work which seeks to prove that the ancient Hebrew writers of the Book of Genesis knew all about evolution - 3,000 years before Darwin

—— Daily Mail

Fascinating

—— Daily Mail

James Orbinski has lived for years in the middle of the worst that humans can be, and somehow emerged with both his compassion and his desire to understand us intact...the stories he has to tell are some of the most powerful I have ever read

—— Stephanie Nolen, author of 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa

In a narrative of grace and power, [Orbinski] displays the intense components of his remarkable life: integrity, compassion and principle

—— Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and author of Race Against Time

An essential text for our dire times. Orbinski plunges into the heartbreak, the maelstrom, the moral dilemmas of the genocide territories of the world - Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan - and finds there enough courage and redemption for us all to feel there is hope for our sad humanity.

—— Ariel Dorfman

Orbinski captures exactly the horror of the surgeon overwhelmed by casualties...It is his sheer, human, stick-at-your-post courage that is most estimable

—— Financial Times Weekend

Clarity, compassion and commitment are presented in spades in this book

—— L Gen Romeo Dallaire, author of Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Excellent

—— Sunday Times

Strangely delightful ... Dillon's book is constantly intelligent

—— Scotland on Sunday

You don't need to be a hypochondriac to enjoy this series of discursive, insightful essays that are full of quirky details and fascinating anecdotes

—— Mail on Sunday

Illuminating

—— Philip Hoare , Sunday Telegraph

Eloquent and incisive

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent

Dillon's mind is as interesting as those of the people he writes about ... bizarrely unputdownable

—— Eileen Battersby , Irish Times

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

—— Victoria Segal , The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

—— Elizabeth Day , Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

—— Rachel Cusk

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

—— Daily Telegraph

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

—— Daily Telegraph

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

—— National Center for Science Education

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

—— Sarah Lyall , New York Times

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

—— Marc E. Miquel , SCOPE

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be

—— Matt Ridley, author of "Nature via Nurture"

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