The reluctant Mr Darwin : an intimate portrait of Charles Darwin and the making of his theory of evolution
W.W. Norton, 2006
Call number : QH31.D2.Q1 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection

Charles Darwin took 20 years to write his theory of natural selection: he produced On the Origin of Species only on learning that he was about to be scooped. Was he a chronic procrastinator? Or was he afraid of the reaction of his peers, who had scorned earlier books on the “transmutation” of species? A bit of both came into play, but as acclaimed science journalist Quammen (Song of the Dodo) shows, during those two decades, Darwin was busy conducting scientific research that would bolster his observations of the finches and mockingbirds of the Galapagos Islands. He raised pigeons and theorized that domestic varieties could be traced back to a species of wild dove. He floated asparagus seeds in saltwater to explain how plants moved from one continent to another. Quammen commences his portrait with Darwin’s homecoming from his five-year trip on the Beagle and then focuses on how he gained enough confidence and evidence to publish a book that would displace humankind from its privileged position as a special creation. This often slyly witty book stands out among the flood of books being published for Darwin’s bicentenary.Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Review from Publishers Weekly.

Man who knew too much : Alan Turing and the invention of the computer
Leavitt, David.
W.W. Norton, 2006
Call number : QA29.T8L439 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

A “skillful and literate” (”New York Times Book Review”) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating “treatment” that may have led to his suicide.
With a novelist’s sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity–his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor–and elegantly explains his work and its implications. Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. and summary from Publisher.

Remarkable mathematicians : from Euler to von Neumann
James, I. M. (Ioan Mackenzie)
Mathematical Association of America, 2002
Call number : QA28.J27 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

Ioan James introduces and profiles sixty mathematicians from the era when mathematics was freed from its classical origins to develop into its modern form. The subjects, all born between 1700 and 1910, come from a wide range of countries, and all made important contributions to mathematics, through their ideas, their teaching, and their influence. James emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their mathematical achievements. The book is organized chronologically into ten chapters, each of which contains biographical sketches of six mathematicians. The men and women James has chosen to portray are representative of the history of mathematics, such that their stories, when read in sequence, convey in human terms something of the way in which mathematics developed.
Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. and summary from Publisher.

Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Call number : ML3830.S121 Library 2

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Here, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and Oliver Sacks tells us why Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales
Oliver Sacks
Simon & Schuster, 1998
Call number : RC351.S121 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

Uncle Tungsten : memoirs of a chemical boyhood
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001
Call number : RC339.52.S23S121 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection

Long before Oliver Sacks became a neurologist and one of our finest science writers, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals — and also by chemical reactions, the louder and smellier the better. His curiosity was encouraged and abetted by brilliantly quirky relatives: Auntie Len, who taught him that the beauty of numbers can be found in the spiral face of a sunflower; Uncle Dave, who invited the boy to his light-bulb factory; and two older brothers who entertained him by making ammonium dichromate “volcanoes.” But Sacks’s childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was evacuated from London and sent to live in a boarding school that rivaled Dickens’s grimmest creations. He was sustained through those difficult years by his passion for learning and for finding patterns in the world around him. Overflowing with humor, sadness, sensuous recollection, and the almost physical rapture of discovery, Uncle Tungsten re-creates the wonder of science as it is first experienced and chronicles the birth of an extraordinary and original mind. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

An anthropologist on Mars : seven paradoxical tales
Oliver Sacks
Vintage Books, 1996
Call number : RC351.S121A Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

The author profiles seven neurological patients, including a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome and an artist whose color sense is destroyed in an accident but finds new creative power in black and white. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

The man who loved China : the fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008
Call number : Q143.N44W759 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science

This volume narrates the story of Joseph Needham (1900-1995), a British biochemist whose affair with a Chinese student visiting Cambridge U. led to a lifelong fascination with China and a strong appreciation for the contributions of the Chinese civilization to science and technology. The narrative describes Needham’s travels across China during World War II and his writing of the 17 volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

Avoid boring people and other lessons from a life in science
James D. Watson
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Call Number : QH3.W34W338 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

James Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize for revealing the structure of DNA, shares the less revolutionary secrets he has found to getting along and getting ahead in a competitive world. Watson offers pointers to beginning scientists about choosing the projects that will shape their careers, the supreme importance of collegiality, and dealing with competitors within the same institution. Later he addresses the role and needs of science at large universities.Summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

Spark : the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain
John J. Ratey, with Eric Hagerman

Little, Brown, 2008
Call Number : QP301.R233 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

The latest research shows that for your brain to function at its peak, your body needs to move. In Spark, John J. Ratey, MD, demonstrates exactly how and why physical activity is crucial to the way you think and feel. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.

The ten most beautiful experiments
George Johnson
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008
Call number : Q182.3.J67 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection

Some of the experiments Johnson describes have a sense of whimsy, like Galileo measuring the speed of balls rolling down a ramp to the regular beat of a song, or Isaac Newton cutting holes in window shades and scrambling around with a prism to break light into its component colors. Other experiments such as William Harvey’s use of vivisected animals to demonstrate the circulation of blood, and the truncated frogs Luigi Galvani used in his study of the nervous system remind us of changing attitudes toward animal research. Joule’s effort to show that heat and work are related ways of converting energy into motion, Michelson’s work to measure the speed of light, Millikan’s sensitive apparatus for measuring the charge of an electron: these experiments toppled contemporary dogma with their logic and clear design as much as with their results. With these 10 entertaining histories, Johnson reminds us of a time when all research was hands-on and the most earthshaking science came from… a single mind confronting the unknown. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.