New Books in Science
New Books Network
Interviews with Scientists about their New BooksSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 28, 2018 • 50min
Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
Eugenic sterilization is usually associated with Nazi horrors before and during World War II. But, as Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor reminds us, it was also practiced in the United States. In her new book Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017),... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 15, 2018 • 1h 6min
Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 )
Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 12, 2018 • 1h 3min
Andrew Lees, “Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment” (Notting Hill Editions, 2017)
Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence of William Burroughs on his medical career. Dr. Andrew Lees relates how Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and troubled drug... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Mar 7, 2018 • 1h 1min
Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017)
For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 to today’s routine procedures that controls anxiety, memory formation, pain relief, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Feb 20, 2018 • 55min
Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. In... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Feb 15, 2018 • 1h 1min
Dmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016)
With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine as it was coined in the subtitle of Norbert Wiener’s field defining book of 1948. While the reflexive turn of second-order... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Feb 14, 2018 • 49min
Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso, left-handed individuals were more likely to be criminals. Hertz disagreed. For him, to restrict left-handedness was to suppress individual expression. In his book, On... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Feb 13, 2018 • 54min
Ty Tashiro, “Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome” (Harper Collins, 2017)
Some people can’t help but be ‘awkward’ despite their lifelong efforts to blend in. They feel ashamed of their social ineptitude and end up shying away from social situations, yet research offers insights that could help. In his new book, Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Jan 31, 2018 • 56min
Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017)
Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story of the “last and largest” asylum in the British Commonwealth. From its founding in the 1920s until the age of deinstitutionalization, Weyburn Mental Hospital... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
Dec 29, 2017 • 60min
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
