Series: Non-fiction

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party (2024), by Edward Dolnick, is an engaging and entertaining look at how the discovery of dinosaur bones in the 1800s and the subsequent explanations of their origins overturned the Victorian view of the world in a host of ways, leading to our more modern conceptions of things such as evolution, time, and our place in the universe.

Dolnick begins in 1802 with a young boy in Massachusetts discovering a set of footprints that would late turn out to be a dinosaur trackway and ends with the famous 1853 New Year’s Eve party held inside a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitah Stanmore 

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitah Stanmore, is a deeply researched exploration of a particular sort of magic in the medieval/early modern era. Full of illustrative anecdotes mostly from primary sources (particularly court cases), Stanmore does an excellent job in showing how “Our focus on witches and the sensationalism of witch trials makes us forget that there was a whole host of magical practitioners … not every person who practiced magic was a witch.” The specific cases are often fascinating,

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos, by Lisa Kaltenegger is at times a fascinating book, is at times an inspiring book, is often an informative book, but also, unfortunately, is often a frustrating book. Or at least it was for me. It’s a worthy read, but one that feels like it could have been much more.

Kaltenegger is director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell University and as such is one of the best candidates for writing a book on exoplanets (those planets outside our own solar system),

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle

Our Moon (2024), by Rebecca Boyle, is an engrossing tour of our relationship with our closest celestial neighbor, full of the usual (and less familiar) facts, while delving into science, history, and culture as Boyle, as she says, explains “How the moon was made, how the Moon made us, and how we made the Moon in our image.”

Boyle starts off not on the Moon but on Earth three-quarters of a century ago with a 39-year-old marine waiting to begin the Allies’ attack on Tarawa Atoll,

The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes by Paul Halpern

The Allure of the Multiverse by Paul Halpern delves into the scientific history of the theory that seems to have taken over pop culture. Admittedly difficult at time thanks to the relatively esoteric nature of some of the theories such as string theory or M-brane theory, and also perhaps a bit mistitled, it remains a mostly clear exploration of 20th and 21st century physics.

The book opens with what might come as a surprise to some readers who have steeped in the multiverse concept via film,

Robots and the People Who Love Them by Eve Herold

Robots and the People Who Love Them, by Eve Herold, is a solid look at the potential impact of social robots on our lives, though more timely research and a more focused structure would have improved the book.

Herold’s focus here is not on “robots”, but on social robots, those that we will interact with regularly and often closely. Think robots in the fields of elder care, education, child care, and companion robots (both the platonic sort and the sexbot sort).

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon sets herself an ambitious task as evidenced by the sub-title — How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution — and I’m happy to report she’s more than up to the job, turning out out a work that impresses across the board: in information and organization, in scholarship and research, in voice and wit,