Category: dewey decimal project
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Dewey Decimal Project: 635.934 ORL The Orchid Thief
I knew this book first from the movie Adaptation and when I finally saw Susan Orlean in person and she didn’t look especially like Meryl Streep, I was somewhat disappointed. And the lack of resemblance between book and movie (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the funhouse mirror resemblance between book and movie) goes beyond the appearance…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 621.3092 COO The Truth About Tesla: The Myth of the Lone Genius in the History of Innovation
Continuing through technology, we reach engineering. Spotting a book about Tesla, everyone’s favorite wizard of science, I decided I’d see what Cooper has to say, especially given his provocative title. Cooper is a lawyer and this reads in a lot of ways like a legal brief. Cooper writes the life of Tesla with an agenda, to…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 616.994 MUK The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
The 610s are one of those sections of the library where there are a huge number of books, which is understandable as this is the medicine section and I have to imagine that self-diagnosing illnesses and/or researching treatments for illnesses, real and imagined, is a big use for the library. I’d heard good things about The…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 607.3474 CRE The electrifying fall of Rainbow City : Spectacle and assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair
The 600s are technology which managed to yield The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City courtesy of the Buffalo Pan American Exhibition’s exhibition of technology alongside the various cultural displays and sideshow acts. This book is a sort of unofficial sequel to The Devil in the White City. As in that book, there is the intersection of a…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 599.884 WAA Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
I first learned f bonobos about the time that this book was originally published. I remember reading an article about these not-chimpanzees in the Chicago Tribune. I found it fascinating that the two ape species closest in relation to humans have bifurcated into “R-rated” species with one specializing in violence (chimpanzees) and the other sex (bonobos).…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 583.22 MOO Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit
When I was younger, my father took the family to Paw Paw Woods in the southwest suburbs of Chicago in search of pawpaws. We found a paw paw tree, but it had no fruit. I don’t know whether we had come at the wrong time of year or if the fruit had already been collected…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 573.3 SPE Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery
The 570s are general biology which includes evolution which includes the Piltdown man hoax. Since it was mentioned in passing in <cite>The Last Human</cite> and I knew very little about it, when I spotted this book on the shelves, I decided it would be my next read. It should be a great book: a fake skull…
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569.9 SAR The last human : a guide to twenty-two species of extinct humans
The 560s are paleontology. I could have gone with the “sexy” choice and read a book about dinosaurs, but I remembered hearing about this book on Science Friday and decided it was worth taking a look at. On the surface the concept is appealing: vignettes speculating on life of some now-extinct species of humans and…
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550 KRE The Basics of Earth Science
When I was in high school, earth science was the class that was taken by the kids who didn’t really want to learn science., much like the stereotypical intro to geology in college which gets dubbed “Rocks for Jocks.” As someone who was a science nerd in his youth, I of course, didn’t take earth science…