Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Skip to content

Category: Books

Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching

This is a monumental production, in many respects. The copious book of 562 pages is organized in only ten chapters. Accordingly, these are hefty. This, together with the style, whose characteristic is not levity, loaded as it is with both long words and many quotations, makes for a reading a bit difficult at times. However, this is more than compensated by the author’s admirable mastery of his material.The author, who has already several science historical books under his belt, teaches at Göttingen.

A Bird’s-Eye View – The New Chemistry

The New Chemistry. Nina Hall, ed. xi + 493 pp. Cambridge University Press

As a teenager, I was given a copy of John C. Slater’s Modern Physics. It would be hard to overstate its influence—it made a scientist out of me. It belonged to a class of very special books that are authoritative despite being popularizations, that are encyclopedic but also report the state of the science, that are conceptually rigorous but are light on equations and avoid jargon. Such books nurture a sense of vocation in budding scientists and are thus invaluable. The New Chemistry, which aspires to showcase the best of contemporary chemistry, may belong on the sparsely populated shelf of books in this class.

Casseroles & Eprouvettes

By Hervé This

The subject of this meandering and rather appealingly eccentric if always well researched and reasonably well written book is quite fascinating: the actual science of cooking and of taste. What the author argues in the most general of terms across a variety of essays on a range of different gustatory and gastronomic subjects is that science, and specifically chemistry and biology, can be used to explain various aspects of the human sense of taste, along with various culinary behaviors and traditions, and methods of food production.
    Unfortunately, a much too abbreviated and lightweight introduction stands before the first of the extremely interesting case studies that comprise this book,  two of the most compelling of which are “Le Bouillon,” or a history of the art of bouillon making matted against a backdrop of what science now shows us is the optimal way of producing same, or “How Salt Modifies Taste” (the presence of salt enhances our ability to taste sugar, and reduces our sensitivity to tastes that are bitter).

Is There Life After Partington

Stephanie Reich, Christian Thomsen, Janine Maultzsch, Carbon Nanotubes. Basic Concepts and Physical Properties, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3-527-40386-8, ix + 214 pp.
Günter Schmid, ed., Nanoparticles. From Theory to Application, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3_527-30507-6, x + 434 pp.
C. N. R. Rao, Achim Müller, Anthony Cheetham, eds., The Chemistry of Nanomaterials. Synthesis, Properties and Applications, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2 vols., 2004, ISBN 3-527-30686-2, xv + 740 pp.
Michael Köhler, Wolfgang Fritzsche, Nanotechnology. An Introduction to Nanostructuring Techniques, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004, ISBN 3-527-30750-8, 272 pp.

Action and Reaction. The Life and Adventures of a Couple

by Jean Starobinski, translated by Sophie Hawkes
2003, New York, NY, Zone Books, 468 pp., £22.50, ISBN 1 890951 20 X

To focus on semantics, for well chosen terms, provides one with a red thread to follow across intellectual history. This book traces the evolutionary history of two closely related words, ‘action’ and ‘reaction’. It was quite a few years in the making: the text originated in a presidential address to the Modern Language Association (Modern Language Review, 1975, 70, xxi–xxxi), and in his preface, Starobinski recollects how his research on the action/reaction pair started life in meetings of the History of Ideas Club during his three years at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

 

Citrus

Editorial Reviews
Review
New Scientist :
“Did you know there are a billion citrus trees under cultivation, or that grapefruit juice may potentiate the effects of Viagra? Citrus mines over two millennia of history to explore the spread of these fruits out of Asia, their commercialisation in the United States, and [their] enduring symbolism the world over.”—New Scientist

Sunday Times (UK) :
“Stimulating. . . . Laszlo, a retired French chemist, takes us on a journey from the orangeries of Versailles, via the limes of the Royal Navy to the citriculture of modern Florida. It was only in the 1920s, he tells us, that orange juice became ‘an integral part of the American breakfast’, after the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Laszlo shows that the citrus fruit ‘is a treasure trove of chemicals that are highly useful to humankind’—which also happens to taste wonderful.”—Sunday Times (UK)

Salt | Grain of Life Review By Toronto Globe and Mail

Toronto Globe and Mail Saturday,     January 26, 2002
Salt’s savoury story
Reviewed By Zsuzsi Gartner
Salt: A World History
By Mark Kurlansky
Knopf Canada, 496 pages, $34.95
Salt: Grain of Life
By Pierre Laszlo
Translated by Mary Beth Mader
Columbia University Press,
194 pages, $35.50

Somewhere high above New York’s Rockefeller Plaza in an AOL
Time Warner boardroom, the movie of the century (never mind that
the century is still a toddler and not yet toilet-trained) is being
discussed. Someone in a nubbly prosciutto-toned linen Nehru jacket
who just flew in from L.A. is talking epic, is talking spin-offs, is
talking tie-ins, is talking action figures, is talking point-of-purchase,
is talking about the ching-ching-ching of a hundred thousand cash registers singing. “Okay, so we have
Sinbad meets The Last Emperor meets The Ten Commandments meets Gladiator meets The Scarlet
Pimpernel meets Gone With the Wind meets Gandhi meets Giant meets The China Syndrome and Erin
Brockovitch with heavy dashes of Babette’s Feast and Emeril Live!”

The author of the property in question, sitting hitherto unnoticed on a
chair by the window, slides to the floor. “Get the smelling salts!”
someone yells—because they once heard this in a movie and
because, well, some salt in the proceedings at this juncture seems
appropriate.

Citrus review by Natural History

Citrus: A History,

by Pierre Laszlo (The University of Chicago Press, 2007; $25.00)

Can one describe a work of nonfiction as being happy? Well, this one is. Pierre Laszlo, a retired chemistry professor turned science writer, has approached the lore of citrus fruit with the élan of a master chef (the man is French, after all), mixing history, economics, biology, and chemistry to produce a book that will bring a smile to readers of every taste. Until reading Citrus, in fact, I had not realized just how many tastes the title implied: lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit, of course, but also citron, tangerine, kumquat, calamondin, and the self-descriptive Ugli, not to mention such variants as bergamot, mandarin, Valencia, ortanique, and Honey Murcott. Laszlo’s literary method is to present them as characters in an unfolding story. He begins with the domestication of the citron in Persia and the early history of citrus horticulture, then moves to the establishment and growth of the citrus industry in Florida, California, and Brazil, and finally, after many diversions and digressions, arrives at a final section that explores the place of citrus in literature, art, religion, and the culture of cuisine.