Series: Non-fiction

All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life by Jon Willis

All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life (2016), by Jon Willis, is structured around a simple proposition: if you had four billion dollars to spend (Willis explains why that number late in the book) to seek out non-terrestrial life, where would it make the most sense to spend it? Willis gives his readers a head start by narrowing their choices at the outset to five “plausible scenarios:”

The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone

I’ve been on a bit of a dinosaur run lately. Not because I suddenly grew interested in the great creatures; that interest began at around age two or three and hasn’t waned a bit. No, it’s just simply that for whatever reason, a good number of new books have been released recently, including this review’s subject, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles (2016) by David Hone

As the title implies, Hone is working within a tightly constrained focus here rather than dealing with dinosaurs in general.

Articulating Dinosaurs by Brian Noble

I have to confess that Articulating Dinosaurs (2016) by Brian Noble wasn’t quite what I’d expected, though that was certainly more my fault for not reading the description closely and in its entirety. Basically, any author/publisher has me at “dinosaurs,” so everything after that is just so much superfluous verbiage. So yes, I can’t say I was at all fully prepared for the academic/critical theory nature of the work, though it didn’t take too many early references to Lacan or Foucault before I figured out my misperception and readjusted my expectations.