Our science book club, Black Holes, Beakers, & Books, will have its final Fall 2010 discussion on December 19th, from 3:30-4:30 pm in the Director’s Conference Room at CLP — Main. We will discuss Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Drive explores the latest science about what motivates human behavior, and how this science is being implemented by individuals and organizations. Pink, who is a New York Times bestselling author, will join us to discuss his book via teleconference, so be sure to bring a lot of good questions for him!
The book club will take a break in January, and return with a new three-book series in February 2011. The theme will be Best Science Books of 2010. After a vote by the book club, the following three books were chosen:
Sunday, February 20th, 2011: Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality by Jonathan Weiner — Weiner’s excellent science writing on finch evolution won him a Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch. Now he has returned with another eloquent scientific tale, this time about the search for a cure to aging.
Sunday, March 20th, 2011: The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks — Oliver Sacks is well-known for his terrific books on abnormal psychology, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia. His latest explores the connection between vision and mind, focusing on six clinical tales of how vision impairment influences the way we perceive reality.
Sunday, April 17th, 2011: Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul — There are many environmental influences on children that parents obsess about: the schools they attend, how much television they watch, who they hang out with, etc. But new research suggests that the prenatal environment —including the mother’s nutrition, use of alcohol, and environmental toxins— may be the most important influence that determines our children’s lifelong health and happiness.
Each meeting will be from 3:30-4:30 pm in the Director’s Conference Room, and they are entirely free and open to the public, so please stop by!
—Wes
Eleventh Stack 