The Best American Science Writing 2000

Assembled by a famous name--along with a series editor who usually manages the initial sifting--annual Best American anthologies have become a useful way for busy aficionados to keep up with a year's developments in (among other areas) spiritual writing, erotica, literary essays, movie writing, poetry, and sports writing. This volume adds science writing to that list. Gleick (Faster) and series editor Jesse Cohen have put together a stellar collection of accessible scientific papers, science-related personal essays and journalistic prose about evolutionary biology, medicine, paleoanthropology, particle physics and more. A cluster of work focuses on neurology, thought and mind. Douglas Hofstadter shows why he considers ""Analogy as the Core of Cognition""; Floyd Skloot sharply and movingly describes how he has coped with his own cerebral damage, which (for example) causes him to ask in a music store for ""sombrero reporters,"" not ""soprano recorders."" Oliver Sacks pops up with an uncharacteristic memoir of his ""Uncle Tungsten,"" who introduced him to the natural sciences. Physicist Francis Halzen covers the ongoing hunt for neutrinos, carried on most recently at the South Pole. And the volume opens with Atul Gawande's memorable report on medical errors, which provoked much discussion when it appeared in the New Yorker. The anthology makes a good read (and, perhaps, an even better gift). But Gleick and colleagues do draw heavily on the few most prominent venues. The New Yorker, the New York Times and its Sunday magazine, Salon.com, Harper's and the New York Review of Books account for nine of 19 entries; Science, The Sciences, Scientific American and Natural History for half of the rest. People who've kept up with popular science writing during 1999 will have read half of this book already; they should give it to their busy friends and colleagues. (Sept.)