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The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science | 
| Author: Natalie Angier
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  73 reviews
Sales Rank: 7828
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0547053460
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780547053462
ASIN: 0547053460
Publication Date: April 3, 2008
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Product Description
In this exuberant book, the best-selling author Natalie Angier distills the scientific canon to the absolute essentials, delivering an entertaining and inspiring one-stop science education. Angier interviewed a host of scientists, posing the simple question "What do you wish everyone knew about your field?" The Canon provides their answers, taking readers on a joyride through the fascinating fundamentals of the incredible world around us and revealing how they are relevant to us every day. Angier proves a rabble-rousing, wisecracking, deeply committed tour guide in her irresistible exploration of the scientific process and the basic concepts of physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, cellular and molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. Even science-phobes will find her passion infectious as she strives "to make the invisible visible, the distant neighborly, the ineffable affable."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 68 more reviews...
 This canon needs another en August 5, 2008
Natalie Angier was mad as heck and wanted some science to go wring a neck. That of her sister, who saw no need, for muse-seeums now that her children were ready for new sceneums. So she wrote and she wrote and came up with a book that should have captured the basics of science in a new look. Alas Natalie spent a lot of time writing about subjects obscure in order to educate the masses toujours.
Too clever by half, she got most of it right, but her writing got in the way- 'twas too trite. Bombeckian prose over and over again, makes for wrinkled nose, over and over again. And over and over again. And again. Every page, sometimes ten.
Not a total waste of time, some good basic science, but at the end of the day, a writing style of annoyance. Add to it some comments that are way too PC, and you have a half a book, not a great one, you see.
Frippery city August 4, 2008
Think of chocolate cake dipped in honey, sprinkled with powdered sugar and then drizzled with maple syrup. Blech!
Apparently, Angier has noted that the world of nonfiction has had to make due without its own version of E. Annie Proulx, and decided to fill that gap herself. (This is not a compliment.)
But I hate to be hard on her, because she is performing a real service, and obviously is quite bright and more than willing to dive into a tough subject and work until she understands it. But if her stated goal is to make the basics of science more accessible to people, why make us read in dread of the next strained metaphor or lame pun? It's hideously distracting.
(For the record, you can't really address a compendium of basic science without mentioning J. Willard Gibbs, America's greatest and most obscure science titan.)
 not amused July 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Too cute by far" is a better title for a review, but I see it's already taken. If you like Ms Angier's articles in the NY Times, as I usually do, you will be disappointed in this book. If the tone in those articles is as grating as in this book, maybe I didn't notice because they are so much shorter. After 50 pages I was ready to pull my hair out with all the flippant asides.
The Canon July 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't waste your time or your money. I throw very few books in the garbage, but this one had to go in.
The errors are too much June 23, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
It's amazing that in a book which contains an entire chapter on Thinking Scientifically, Ms. Angiers commits one of the ultimate sins in science writing: the dissemination of information without bothering to check if it is actually correct. The discipline of referencing every "fact" presented in science writing (something this book fails to do) is important because, aside from allowing the reader to discover the evidence that a particular "fact" is based on, it forces the author to make sure that what they are presenting is actually CORRECT. The number of errors in the later chapters of this book (chapters 5-9) are far too many for a book aimed at non-scientists.
Some of the errors are minor and show only a slight misunderstanding on the author's part, but her explanation of why planets don't twinkle (they do twinkle, by the way) is wince inducing. And I'm sure it would be a surprise to many botanists that plants, in general, don't respire during the day time. This is the sort of laziness that I would expect from a tired middle school student writing a science report late at night the day before it's due, not what I would expect from a prize winning science writer in a book that had actually been EDITED.
I'll let others harp on the unhelpful language throughout the later chapters and the cheerleading mess of her chapter on evolution but would rather leave potential readers with this: Do not take anything you read in "The Canon" for granted until you confirm it in a trusted second source. This should go for anything you read but goes doubly so for this book.
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