The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

by Mary Roach (Editor)

The Best American Series®
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 includes
Atul Gawande, Jonathan Franzen, Deborah Blum, Malcolm Gladwell, Oliver Sacks, Jon Mooallem, Jon Cohen, Luke Dittrich, and others

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Essays, Nature, Anthologies, Short Stories, Natural History

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat; with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfare.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void; BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, Discover, New Scientist, the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, and Outside, among others. She serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and the Usage Panel of American Heritage Dictionary. Her 2009 TED talk made the organization's 2011 Twenty Most-Watched To Date list. She was the guest editor of the 2011 Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

These books are great additions to my lunch box. I can read most articles in one sitting & they're almost always fantastic. It's a great series & I was really interested in this one since it was edited by Mary Roach. I've been a fan of hers since she wrote a column in Reader's Digest & I've enjoyed all her books. Her quirky sense of humor meshes well with mine & she picks interesting subjects to write about, so I figured this collection had to be great & it was. Highly recommended!

A couple of times I've looked these stories up & found them available online for free. While I recommend the collection, do so if one of them particularly intrigues you.

Foreword by Tim Folger
Introduction by Mary Roach
Both of the above were good, short & to the point.

The Organ Dealer: from Discover by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee was very reminiscent of Larry Niven's Known Space stories about organ harvesting, SF stories from 40 years ago. It's not SF any more. This focuses on kidneys since they're the easiest to transplant & the need is great. China changed laws to allow them to come from condemned prisoners. In India, the poor can sell one for as little as $300 & the black market sometimes strong-arms or tricks them into it. Truly "Tales From Known Space"!

Nature's Spoils: from The New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger was definitely not lunch time reading & proof that people can take everything too far. I was raised on a farm & agree that there is a lot of waste in our society along with a trend toward extreme cleanliness. Neither are good, but the answer of opportunivores, people who make a lifestyle out of only scavenging food, is plain disgusting. Bacteriology & the science behind fermentation was very interesting, though. It can be read for free The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, so it's a bit of a preface to it. The US gov't poisoning its own citizens because they drank alcohol when it wasn't legal. These efforts caused blindness & death.

Fertility Rites: from The Atlantic by Jon Cohen is about studying the difference between chimp & human sperm in an attempt to figure out why humans have almost a 50% miscarriage rate while chimps have almost none. Sticky, sugary sperm, apparently. You can read the article here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

The Brain That Changed Everything: from Esquire by Luke Dittrich proves that brain surgery really is complicated & a moving target.

Emptying the Skies: from The New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen describes the Mediterranean appetite for migrating birds. I never knew it was such a problem, but I found this light on figures & too strident.

Fish Out of Water: from The New Yorker by Ian Frazier is about invasive species, mostly focusing on the carp problem in the Mississippi & efforts at keeping them out of the Great Lakes.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science: from The Atlantic by David H. Freedman pretty much destroyed my faith in science. Money & the need to publish are the ruin of true testing.

Letting Go: from The New Yorker by Atul Gawande is an excerpt from his book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End which I already read, but I didn't mind rereading this. It's worth it. As he points out, we're not really sure what dying is any more & we certainly aren't doing it well. IMO, we treat animals better than people in this area.

The Treatment: from The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell shows the huge step from the lab to actually selling a drug with a lot of the side roads along the way.

Cosmic Blueprint of Life: 176 from Discover by Andrew Grant discusses complex molecules in space & how they may have helped jump start life here on Earth.

The (Elusive) Theory of Everything: from Scientific American by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow is a philosophical take on the M theory showing how all 5 string theories may be correct, as far as they go.

Spectral Light: 191 from Orion by Amy Irvine is a subject near to my heart - man meeting nature on the edges of civilization, suburbanized rural areas. I understand her ambivalence, but tend to agree with her farmer friends.

The Spill Seekers: from Outside by Rowan Jacobsen is a look at the big BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from the eye of a journalist on the ground & sea.

New Dog in Town: from Orion by Christopher Ketcham is about coyotes spreading eastward & becoming acclimated to cities. I hadn't realized they were so much bigger than their western cousins.

Taking A Fall: from Popular Mechanics by Dan Koeppel is just in case you fall out of an airplane for some reason. Yes, it is possible, if unlikely, to survive.

The First Church of Robotics: from the New York Times by Jaron Lanier clears up some of the confusion between AI & true intelligence. It also discusses just how it is being misunderstood.

The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name: from the New York Times Magazine by Jon Mooallem is about homosexuality in animals & how it impacts both research into it & what humans consider 'natural' which carries an incredible amount of weight in our unnatural world. (Reading isn't natural, but who objects?) Really interesting on many levels.
An edited version is available here for free:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sci...

Could Time End"?: from Scientific American by George Musser takes gravity & quantum mechanics out into the unknown. I've read it before & wasn't impressed.

Sign Here If You Exist: from Ecotone by Jill Sisson Quinn was an interesting, but weird discussion of some insects & her lack of belief in a god. Either one was good, but not together. Still, good thoughts.

Face-Blind: from The New Yorker by Oliver Sacks is about just that, people who can't recognize faces or places & what causes it, down to the specific area of the brain. There are levels of severity. Interesting.

Waste MGMT: from Wired by Evan I. Schwartz is about space junk & how big a problem it's becoming. The human race is a bunch of litter bugs.

The Whole Fracking Enchilada: from Orion by Sandra Steingraber is all about how nasty & pervasive fracking is. No alternatives are given, though. It's easy to point out problems. Tell me solutions, better alternatives. Use numbers.

The New King of the Sea: from Smithsonian by Abigail Tucker is about how jellyfish are thriving. We've killed off their predators & polluted waters, but they don't mind the latter at all. They've been around for half a billion years or so, so what's climate change to them?

The Killer in the Pool: from Outside by Tim Zimmermann is the best article about killer whales I've ever read, but I've rarely read much. I think it's cruel to keep a big, intelligent, social wild animals in such small cages. Apparently they can go goofy & kill their trainers after some years or decades. Can't say as I blame them.

An excellent bunch of articles as usual. Again, highly recommended.

[David Rubenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these annual anthologies of essays on nature and science. They are superb. The essays cover a very wide range of subjects. For example, the illicit trade in human organs, the clean-up of oil spills in the ocean, fermentation, the government's poisoning of alcohol during the Prohibition, songbird trapping in the Mediterranean area, the flying fish (silver carp) in the Illinois River, and the high rates of error in much of the published body of medical research. Oh--that's just the beginning--there is so much more.

Each essay is a gem. The great thing about this book is that you can read a chapter, put it down, and come back to it later without having to familiarize yourself again with earlier chapters. Each essay stands on its own. Some of the essays are fun, some are horrifying, but all of them are fascinating.

The most unusual essay is the one by Jill Sisson Quinn, titled, "Sign Here if You Exist". The essay swings back and forth between two subjects; wasp flies and belief in God. She wraps it up with this last sentence, "We've had it backward all along: the body is immortal--it is the soul that dies."

Another fascinating essay is by the well-known author Oliver Sacks. It is about people who have difficulty recognizing faces. Sacks himself suffered from this pathology. People with this condition can learn to compensate, by recognizing people by the sound of their voice or their clothes or smell or even by their gait. Then there are people with exactly the opposite condition; they recognize people with just a fleeting glance, even if they only saw them momentarily years before.

Mary Roach was the editor of this compilation, and she did a great job in choosing the essays.

[Deb Oestreicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not necessarily a snapshot of the state of science in 2011; rather, it's an assemblage of some of the best articles. As it happens, a lot of the best articles are about the crappy stuff we do the planet and it's creatures. So a good number of articles are upsetting rather than uplifting. But I still learned a great deal: coyotes wandering through the streets of major cities may be an unfortunate result of what we've been doing to the environment, as may a recent explosion in jellyfish populations. The history of how killer whales were procured by institutions like Sea World is really disturbing. Fracking isn't the solution to our energy and economic problems. About a third of Laysan albatross couples--at least at one colony being studied--appear to be female-female. Scientific studies are often biased and hardly anyone notices.

There are some truly mind-boggling essays, like one about whether time itself will come to an end. And simply fascinating articles, like one on on face blindness (a neurological inability to recognize faces) and another about the problem of space debris. Some of the articles constitute the epitome of "food for thought" like one about the importance of preparing for the end of life--how we all (or most all) say we want a peaceful, dignified end, but don't know how to get there.

It is a diverse selection of highly readable science and nature writing. Absolutely recommended.

[Amy L. Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: Advanced copy for review provided by Netgalley.

After providing us with several stellar science works of her own, Roach has selected some wonderful articles for this collection. Each article seems to reflect a bit of Roach's sensibilities as they contain a touch of humor, an underlying sense of concern and urgency, but an overall hopeful that science can provide a solution for our ecological, medical, and personal woes. Most of the articles are fairly easy to read and digest, and those that I wasn't able to are probably more due to my lack of interest in (meta)physics. There were some definite highlights, among them "Fertility Rites" which includes a brief and not too graphic description of how to procure a sperm sample from a chimp, "Taking a Fall" which anyone afraid of flying should read... or maybe not, "Nature's Spoils" about how rotting food is good and good for you, and less humorous but a must read "Letting Go" about the need to determine for yourself when the end of life is.

While many of the articles are humorous, and more "fun" in nature, articles like the previously mentioned "Letting Go" are the focus. Roach has pulled out articles on important topics and issues that we ought to be more concerned with. That she selected so many I was unaware of makes this volume all the more interesting and important.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most Surprising: Abigail Tucker on jellyfish and climate change
Most Appalling: Tim Zimmerman on orcas in captivity
Most Alarming: Sandra Steingraber on fracking
Most Elegantly Written: George Musser on concepts of time's end in physics
Most Anthologized-But-Still-Worth-Rereading: Burkhard Bilger on freegans and locavores
Most Frustratingly Short: Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow on the (elusive) Theory of Everything
Most Heartwrenching: Atul Gawande on palliative care and end-of-life decisions

[Georgiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed most essays in these collection. Strangely however, given that I'm an astrophysicist, my two favorite essays weren't those about space/physics, but about health/medicine; they also happen to be available for free online:

Atul Gawande, Letting Go

David H. Freedman, Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

I also liked Oliver Sacks' Face-Blind, Luke Dittrich's The Brain That Changed Everything , Jon Mooallem's The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name , and Sandra Steingraber's The Whole Fracking Enchilada .

I skipped Sign Here If You Exist, by Jill Sisson Quinn, because it was making me want to throw my Kindle against a wall...

[Jayme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Article highlights for me were:

Nature's Spoils by Burkhard Bilger: An interesting look at the extreme "opportunivore" lifestyle, where nothing goes to waste and much of what you eat and wear you make and grow yourself.

The Brain That Changed Everything by Luke Dittrich: Great article about the man who underwent an incredibly questionable brain surgery, leaving him with very limited ability to retain new information. While an incredibly sad story for the patient, studies of his brain gave scientists huge insight into how our brains function.

Letting Go by Atul Gawande: Very thoughtful piece about terminally ill patient care.

New Dog in Town by Christoper Ketcham: Focuses on the rise of the coyote in urban environments, but it's interesting to think about how our relationship with nature is going to change, as opportunistic animals (people obviously included) continue to increase and push out those more fragile animals and ecosystems.

The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name by Jon Mooallem: Unfortunately this is interesting for exactly the reason the researchers don't want it to be. The only reason this topic is getting attention is because people are egocentric and want to know what's up with the gay birds and then apply it to their life because obviously the sexual preference of an albatross holds the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

Face-Blind by Oliver Sacks: Article about prosopagnosia, which Sacks himself suffers from. I knew I'd love Sacks writing and I'm sad I've waited this long to read something of his. Must get my hands on more of his stuff asap.

Books I'd like to follow-up with:

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements from "Nature's Spoils".

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York from "The Chemist's War", an article about the same topic, by the same author.

"The Median Isn't the Message" and article by Stephen Jay Gould mentioned in "Letting Go".

The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator's Deadly Return to Suburban America from "Spectral Light".

Biological Exuberance : Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity from "The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name".

Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe from "Could Time End?"

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales from "Face-Blind".

Stinker Award:

Emptying the Skies by Jonathan Franzen: Article on "ambelopoulia", tiny songbirds trapped during migration and served as delicacies. This was a prime example of all the things I hate about travel journalism and I could write an entire review on how annoyed reading this piece of crap made me, but that would be a lot of effort. So to sum up: if you want to participate in something you (pretend to?) find morally reprehensible because you're curious, then man up and just say so. Don't blame it on having to participate for "journalistic integrity", that doesn't make any sense. Here's a great quote where he gets all weepy after eating one of the birds: "The world was feeling especially empty of meaning, and the best I could do to fight this feeling was to unwrap the two dead birds from the napkin, put them in the hole, and tamp some dirt down on them." That's right...he buried the leftover songbirds he felt too guilty to continue eating. Barf.

[Barb Middleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the University of Minnesota's Journalism School I kept a dozen or so articles and poems that unlocked my writer's block like a "polyrhythmic jam session." This book reminds me of those inspirations. The in-depth reporting, clever arrangement, extensive resources, and beautiful writing has made this a favorite I won't be forgetting about in the near future.

A collection of nonfiction nature and science stories; my favorite was about fermentation. That's right. Fermentation. Author Burkhard Bilger includes all the elements of a fiction story giving readers a sense of setting, characters, and wit. What a gem. Bilger explores the world of Sandor Katz, famous fermentation guru who travels the country espousing the power of eating bacteria transformed foods and fermenting foods such as sauerkraut and dill pickles. Katz would have gladly picked up that moldy cheese on the basketball court that inspired such revulsion in Greg and Rowley, in "Diary of a Wimpy Kid." Bilger begins the article with his lunch date at a house with a group, he dubs, the "oppotunivores," because they scavenge food from dumpsters. He describes the lentil soup made from the dumpster carrots and onions having a color that reminded him of the structures house paint. "The whole compound was painted a sickly greenish gray - the unhappy marriage of twenty-three cans of surplus paint from Home Depot." Bilger shows how Katz changes from a political activist to a "fermentation fetishist." The tale is so bizarre it will suck you in and leave you pickled, or tickled, afterwards.

Christopher Ketcham is a great article for studying similies and metaphors while learning about the adaptation of coyotes throughout history. His comparison of coyotes howling to gamelan music of Indonesia couldn't have been more timely as I read this book in Bali. Dan Koeppel creates suspense as he puts the reader in the place of free falling from 35,000 feet and surviving the impact. The "polyrhythmic jam session" comes from Geroge Mussler's piece on death, afterlife, and quantum physics. Or is it M-theory? Or cosmic singularities? His was somewhat technical and I can't remember specifics (obviously), although I liked his music metaphor.

My personal inclination was to focus on the nature stories more than the medical or space ones. Stephen Hawkings was too technical and theoretical for my short attention span, but it was still well written. Oliver Sacks story on prosopagnosia, people who can't recognize the faces of other people, was fascinating; however, a part of me shuts down after reading sentences such as "Here the data are clear: virtually all patients with prospagnosia, irrespective of the cause, have lesions in the right visual-association cortex, in particular on the underside of the occipitotemporal cortex." The article is quite clear, but medical terminology reminds me of learning a second language or suffocating in Beijing's air pollution.

These authors make magazine writing look like a stroll next to a waterfall, instead masking the hard climb to the mountaintop. The difficulty of taking multiple interviews, combining them with facts into a seamless story where the individuals become real is very difficult. Remember that these authors are collecting stories from a gaggle of folks attempting to get colorful quotes that spice up their articles. Not only do they succeed in seasoning their pieces, they surround factual details with rich sensory input that makes for a great reading experience. Hard for this lousy ex-journalism major to not admire their excellence in craft. If you are looking for ideas to write a novel, want a change from your normal reading fare, or love nonfiction, then pick up this winner.

[Dennis Schvejda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compilation of 25 articles, if not the best, then at least good reads all. I read this book on a Kindle, a Christmas gift from my daughter and her husband.

A few interesting items from the book:

* Nearly all the DNA in bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our own cells nine to one.

*By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, a federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

* The differences between chimp and human sperm can help explain why humans miscarry nearly 50 percent of all conceptions, while chimps seem rarely to lose an embryo or fetus.

* Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean.

* The Great Lakes is a hot spot for aquatic invasions. In the lakes there are a hundred and six species nonnative to North America that are not in the Mississippi, while there are only fifty in the Mississippi that are not in the Great Lakes. An even greater threat, really, is of invasions going in the opposite direction from the carp's—that is, going from the lakes to the Mississippi. The Mississippi system holds the richest heritage of biodiversity in North America.

* 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.

* Twenty-five percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months

* Every natural gas well drilled—and 32,000 wells per year are planned—a couple million gallons of fresh water are transformed into toxic fracking fluid.

* The number of manufactured objects (now 500,000) cluttering the sky (near space) is now expected to double every few years as large objects weaken and split apart and new collisions create more debris, leading to yet more collisions.

[Lachinchon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This anthology contains a number of excellent articles, but there are more sub-par pieces than I recall from past editions. But this aside, the tenor of the book as a whole is of depression and resignation. Most of the articles deal with death or how grossly and irredeemably we have messed up this planet (including the orbital space around the planet). Even coyotes are characterized as "weed species". I hoped for a few stories that would engender wonder and awe. This is not to say that I didn't learn a lot from all of the pieces, but I certainly was not uplifted. These might be the end times, but there are still marvelous things to behold.

[Sarah Wiles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative without being boring; good variety in subject matter.

[Sadie Woolman-Schlukebier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never finished this book but I did read the essays that Emma liked. I really enjoyed it and maybe one day I’ll read them all.

[Sandie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each year, a series of best of writing books are released in various categories such as travel, short stories, mystery, etc. This year's edition of the science and nature writing genre was edited by Mary Roach and Tim Folger. Mary Roach has made the focal point of her writing life in the science field, popularizing the research into fields such as sex, death and various other topics. Tim Folger is a contributing editor at Discover magazine and is familiar with a wide range of scientific fields.

The articles range across many scientific fields of inquiry. There are articles about the problem of space debris, the emergence of bears as pest animals into residential areas with the disappearance of their natural habitats, the issue of organ transplants. There are more difficult articles such as ones on the space-time continuum and discoveries in that area. Introduced species that later become predators, crowding out the native animals, get an article, focusing on a species of fish that nature scientists are trying to prevent from reaching the Great Lakes. There is an interesting article on face-blindness, a condition in which people never become familiar with the faces around them daily and who don't recognize people they deal with daily.

The series is well done. The articles are written to educate but the reading level is such that anyone can read and understand the concepts. There are a wide range of topics, spanning the various areas of scientific inquiry. This is an anthology that can be dipped into for food for thought, a way to expand understanding of the natural world around us. This book is recommended for readers interested in how the world works and the discoveries made by scientists.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, this was a fun read. From now on I'm ignoring the Best American Stories collection and going straight for Science & Nature Writing. There are a few misses here, but Roach overall is a great curator. Most notably, there's a typically fantastic Atul Gawande piece on end-of-life care, "The Organ Dealer" on (yeah, duh) selling kidneys on the black market, Franzen's bit on the hunting of songbirds in Europe, Frazier's "Fish Out of Water" about the silver carp invasion of American waterways, and Oliver Sacks on recognizing (or not recognizing) faces.

And Dan Koeppel's "Taking a Fall" (click the link and read it, trust me), about surviving a fall of 35,000 feet. I am not sure I breathed the entire time I read this article, and though Koeppel ends with a reassuring note on the rarity of plane crashes and midair explosions...I am dreading a flight I have next week.

[Mallory · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a wide variety of articles in here, and you can probably find one to suit your personal tastes. You'll find physics, marine biology, medicine, ornithology, geology, entomology, and much more in this volume, and all of it well-written and interesting. The article that particularly affected me was Atul Gawanade's essay "Letting Go", mostly because it covered something that I've personally had to deal with recently.

ETA: Since all of the essays in this volume were previously published in other sources, I dug up the link for "Letting Go", which the New Yorker published in August 2010. Here it is.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any collection of works by multiple authors, you're not going to love all of the articles included in this book, but nevertheless there are enough good ones that it's worth reading. Maybe it was just me warming up to it, but it seemed like they got better as it went along. My advice? If you get bored with any one article, just skip ahead to the next one. Some of my favorites were "Could Time End?" (George Musser), "Letting Go" (Atul Gawande), and "Taking a Fall" (Dan Kowppel). Despite my three-star rating, I'm looking forward to reading the 2012 edition - I think I rated it a little low because I made myself finish the articles that I just wasn't that into.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A grab bag of stories by different writers on a wide variety of science and nature topics.
There are some that I find disturbing, the ones that deal with the threats to endangered species (e.g. songbirds from unrestricted hunting in Europe and other species from habitat destruction.) Of the rest some were a lot more interesting to me than others - based on my interests, course, so any other reader would no doubt find a different mix of 'wow' and 'okay, so?'
The other find, for me, is that Mary Roach is as good in this role as an editor as she is when in the science author's position. If I see anything else she's edited, I'll read it on the strength of her past work.

[Rift Vegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection of articles and definitely the best book in this series that I've read so far! Some articles were fascinating (The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name, about female pairs of nesting albatrosses), some just left me shaking my head (Waste MGMT, about all the space junk orbiting the earth), some left me shaking in anger (The Killer in the Pool, about Tilikum the captive orca), and some were just "What The Heck??!" (The Chemist's War, about the US gov poisoning industrial alcohol during Prohibition). Excellent reading, all the way through!

[Odi Akhyarsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always love reading scientific/technology/nature writing, especially ones written in not too scientific style -- quite a paradoxical though :) --. This book is rich of that type of writing. The book took me to the amazing stories about the illegal kidney trading in India, Stephen Hawking's theory of everything, persons that are unable to recognize friend's/family's faces, about garbages in our satellite orbit, etc.

No doubt, I will find and read the 2012,2013, and 2014, ... editions.

[Kate Atonic · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up because I adore Mary Roach’s writing style. She’s wry and funny, informative without being pedantic, and breaks complicated ideas down so that they’re easy to understand and remember. It’s no surprise that the only sections I highlighted were from her forward. I found several of these essays to be too depressing to finish, others written far beyond my understanding of the subject. I was expecting light introductions that would pique my interest for further study.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to have to start reading this anthology. I took my time with it, because each article/essay was deeply fascinating, disturbing, or despairing. I learned so much from them. Ms. Roach chose a great selection of works for this book, and while some of the chapters made me feel sad and helpless, nonetheless I'm glad I learned a little more about our beautiful, fragile world.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great articles in this collection. I especially liked "The Killer in the Pool" by Tim Zimmermann which chronicled the rise of orca whale captures for human entertainment and the life of the notorious Tilikum who was involved with three human deaths. I also enjoyed "Face Blind" by Oliver Sacks about the facial recognition disorder called prosopagnosia.

[Elizabeth A · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have dipped in and out of this essay collection for the past couple of months. Some are excellent, and some merely good, but I found all of them fascinating and/or informative. The essays in this book have given me much to think about, and has sparked some lively dinner table conversations in our house.

[Marisav · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Best American… series are some of my favorite to pick up at the library book sale. They’re often there, usually only a couple of books, and they’re reliably interesting. I tend to go for the Science and Nature ones in particular. And this one was edited by Mary Roach, which seemed as good a reason as any to pick it over others.

This one was excellent, as always, with several essays that have stood out and had me thinking about them long after. Burkhard Bilger’s “Natures Spoils”, about the strange underground world of trading in raw milk and extolling the virtue of eating ‘high meat’ was bizarre and fascinating. “The Chemist’s War”, by Deborah Blum, taught me a piece of history I hadn’t previously known about, wherein the federal government systematically tried to poison people during prohibition to stop them from drinking alcohol. And Atul Gawande, common in many essay collections, has an amazing essay, “Letting Go,” that had me crying in the corner of a diner while I was reading it.

Many of the essays here, though, are about the destruction we have wrought and are continuing to wreak on the Earth. As is to be expected—there’s almost nothing else to talk about if you’re on the topic of nature. This one isn’t quite as full of such topics as the collection edited by Elizabeth Kolbert, but it still includes an essay on the tradition of eating migrating song birds in the Mediterranean that has all but wiped out several bird populations, the jumping Asian carp overwhelming midwestern lakes, and the destructive nature of fracking. And an essay on space debris that, while not as directly related to ecology, is still a symptom of the same problem as the others—a belief that one well, one person shooting song birds, one dumping of space debris, can’t have that much of an impact, ignoring that this decision is being made over and over and over again by a huge number of people.

I have never wholly subscribed to Kant’s categorical imperative, that one can only act according to the maxim that that action would become a universal law to be done by all, it seems increasingly clear that, in environmental issues this does need to be the rule. It’s the only way to govern the tragedy of the commons problem. Because whatever negative actions one takes, or actions done thinking it can be allowed because it is only one person, will be done so often that they may as well be universal laws.

The recent special report by the International Panel on Climate Change has highlighted again that we are in the midst of the most dangerous crisis humanity as a whole has yet faced, with unknown consequences if we cannot rapidly decrease or emissions starting immediately. And this can only be done by everyone taking action, and everyone recognizing that the universality of our actions is killing us.

This is obvious by perusing the news, but reading several environmental essays in a row drives it home. The common thread in all of them is each of us ignoring that our actions have consequences and that we are never just one. Hopefully we’ll realize that before it’s too late.

Cross-posted at www.acallidryas.wordpress.com

[Naama · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may not be a timeless classic , but it’s still very timely . Our scientific understanding of the topics described may have deepened and varied slightly in the past several years but it hadn’t changed entirely . For example , we’re still struggling with space debris and have only managed to see a first logistical satellite launched in recent months.
I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed this book. The scientific endeavors in it were told as stories , full of pathos and intrigue. I lost myself in discovering our world, or at least contemplating it. Of course , just like in any good story, there were narratives here too - as Stephen Hawking himself wrote in one of the articles - our view is limited by the filter of our brain & vantage point. So, I think it’s important to read the book with a grain of humility, along with much awe and wonder . I can’t wait to read more book in this series !

[Sherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since this is a collection of scientific articles, each by different authors and because the articles are varied in their subject matter, some were more interesting than others. I think I would have like the book better in physical form rather than in digital format so that I could better see the breadth of the document. Scientific matter is difficult to read in digital format for me. All that said, I would definitely seek out the other years' books as I learned a great deal and was "forced" to read about topics I might not choose if left to my own devices. I feel my universe has been broadened by the articles in this book.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the wide range of topics but a bit much to read straight through. And definitely not light uplifting journalism.

Waste MGNT by Evan Schwartz was the most startling to me. Our night skies are becoming so full of debris and ever increasing satellite traffic that I wasn't aware of. Five possible collisions a day back in 2010. Written well before SpaceX launched the Starlink satellite constellation that will number in the thousands. The concern of orbiting space junk and air traffic control of satellites is just another out of sight issue for the world to face - all of our own creation.

[Sylvia Snowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always been a fan of Mary Roach's work--she is a truly accessible science journalist. This collection of stories reflects her commitment to readable, entertaining, but rigorous reporting of science. Only a couple of the stories I skipped--there have been books in this series where at least half the stories were overly technical, boring, and long--but nearly every story here was excellent. Science was never sacrificed, but neither was entertainment value. The story of the tedium of drug screening for cancer treatments was gripping, in the hands of Malcolm Gladwell. And that was only one of the great stories here.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection has a pretty good variety of topics and I enjoyed most of these articles/essays except the space ones because frankly, I could not care less about space. Or about how some people are obsessed with the idea of whether time will end or not... definitely not my thing. What I got most out of reading this collection was that many of the more relevant issues such as fracking, oil spills, and animal-human interactions are STILL HUGE PROBLEMS and are even larger problems than they were in 2011.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Roach picked an excellent collection of articles. At first I was worried about how outdated they'd be, but of course science builds on what we've learned in the past, so this is still useful - and many of the case studies (like bird hunting in Malta) were things I'd never heard of before! Plus, it prompted me to do some research into what's happening now for a lot of the topics covered, which is valuable in its own way. I recommend reading this if you're interested in science and nature writing at all.