The Best American Science Writing 2004

By Dava Sobel

2004

First Published

3.84

Average Rating

288

Number of Pages

8H47M

Audio Length

Jennifer Kahn's "Stripped for Parts" was selected as the lead story of this year's Best American Science Writing because, as Dava Sobel, best-selling author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, reveals, "it begins with one of the most arresting openings I have ever read." In "Columbia's Last Flight," William Langewiesche recounts the February 1, 2003, space shuttle tragedy, along with the investigation into the nationwide complacency that brought the ship down. K. C. Cole's "Fun with Physics" is a profile of astrophysicist Janet Conrad that blends her personal life with professional activity. In "Desperate Measures," the doctor and writer Atul Gawande profiles the surgeon Francis Daniels Moore, whose experiments in the 1940s and '50s pushed medicine harder and farther than almost anyone had contemplated. Also included is a poem by the legendary John Updike, "Mars as Bright as Venus." The collection ends with Diane Ackerman's "ebullient" essay "We Are All a Part of Nature." Together these twenty-three articles on a wide range of today's most current topics in science—from biology, physics, biotechnology, and astronomy, to anthropology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and cognition‚ represent the full spectrum of scientific writing from America's most prominent science authors, proving once again that "good science writing is evidently plentiful" ( Scientific American ).

Avg Rating

3.84

Number of Ratings

106

5 STARS

22%

4 STARS

48%

3 STARS

25%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Dava Sobel

Author · 10 books

Dava Sobel is an accomplished writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. A 1964 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Ms. Sobel attended Antioch College and the City College of New York before receiving her bachelor of arts degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1969. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from the University of Bath, in England, and Middlebury College, Vermont, both awarded in 2002. In her four decades as a science journalist she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and co-authored five books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake. Her most well known work is Longitude. The asteroid 30935 Davasobel is named for her.