The NASW bookstore sells books, music, video, software, and other merchandise via Amazon.com. Every purchase you make on Amazon can support NASW programs and services: Just go to https://www.nasw.org/amazon when you start your shopping. Books featured below were written by NASW members or reviewed in ScienceWriters magazine. Appearance here does not indicate endorsement.
In The Wildlife Confessional—Kick It in the Ice Hole and Other Stories, NASW member and wildlife biologist Matthew Bettelheim and the late writer/wildlife biologist Thomas Roberts offer a multi-authored collection of tales and reflections on encounters with birds, bears, and more in diverse locales. Funds from book sales will help support student scholarships, grants, and training opportunities.
Science writer John Galbraith Simmons and his wife Jocelyne Geneviève Barque provide the first English translation of a 900-page epistolary novel by French author Marquis de Sade, written while Sade was imprisoned in the 1580s. Aline and Valcour combines picaresque adventures, satire, and black humor to illuminate societal injustices that persist today, including exploitation of women.
The classical concept of Darwinian natural selection does not encompass the varieties of new structures and functions that arise when separate entities interact in useful ways, Gene Levinson asserts in Rethinking Evolution: The Revolution That’s Hiding in Plain Sight. His updated evolutionary theory, he says, reflects recent discoveries in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.
In What the Dog Knows, Cat Warren tells how she transformed her rambunctious German shepherd, Solo, recognized as having a “good nose,” into a cadaver dog. Warren gives young readers an introduction to the science of scent and the process of training dogs to follow a scent through a swamp, below ground, and even below the surface of a lake in this adaptation of her 2013 book on the same topic.
In City in a Forest, the first novel by Ginger Pinholster, longtime PIO for AAAS, two women strive to prevent a developer from building luxury condos on verdant but lead-contaminated land near their childhood homes. One of the women works as a PIO for an environmental non-profit, while the other, an artist, draws on personal and cultural history to produce her fanciful sculptures and masks.
Remember the 1982 Tylenol poisonings? Bill Grigg does. He was the FDA's news director then. That experience sparked his novel focusing on intentional food poisoning, A Perfectly Natural Murder. Its hapless hero is a PIO for an insurance company whose dinner party was co-opted by a colleague with a dark secret. The hero's father, a medical reporter, helps move the investigation along.
Physics governs the world we live in. It underlies everyday technology such as smartphones and medical imaging devices, and influences major societal concerns such as nuclear proliferation, energy use, and climate change. In Physics: A Very Short Introduction, Sidney Perkowitz offers lay readers a guide to what physics covers, how physicists carry out research, and why this research matters.
From Jules Verne’s novels in the 1860s to Disney’s “Man in Space” 1950s TV series that captivated Dwight Eisenhower among others, popular culture often presciently described space travel. In Destination Moon: The Remarkable and Improbable Voyage of Apollo 11, Richard Maurer focuses on six people plus co-workers who helped transform scifi into reality. Posters and photos round out the text.
Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space. Software engineer Margaret Hamilton’s programs proved crucial to the success of Apollo 11’s July 20, 1969 moon landing. In Heroes of the Space Age: Incredible Stories of the Famous and Forgotten Men and Women Who Took Humanity to the Stars, Rod Pyle describes the lives and motivations of these and other space pioneers.