Waterstones, Science Museum

Waterstones, Science Museum – Brian Clegg

Our editor gives a portrait of an unusual book store.

Most of the time when you go into a book shop, the popular science section is a disappointment. Our local branch of the stationers W. H. Smiths (admittedly not known as a great bookshop) has a whole bookcase dedicated to misery fiction, and only a handful of popular science books. Others are restricted to a single shelf.

Although the Popular Science site is a great source of information, we can’t review every book, nor can we give the experience of browsing through the real things. Sometimes you just want to get your hands on some books – there’s nothing like it.

I’m pleased to say that Londoners have an alternative to science bookshop misery. Just nip along to South Kensington and slip into the Science Museum – there you will find a Waterstones that (apart from a couple of bookcases of generic children’s books) is dedicated to science and popular science. It’s your actual popular science Alladin’s cave.Manager Kirstin and her staff can help with ordering in anything that’s not on the shelves – or just general helpful enquiries. They have regular signings by popular science authors (look out for Signed Copy stickers on stock), and the museum is free to get in, so they’re easy to access.

The shop is open from 10am to 6pm every day of the year except 24th, 25th and 27th December (I’m not sure why, but if you have a desperate need for a science book on Boxing Day, you can get one. A chance to use those book tokens that Santa left.)

You can contact them on 020 7942 4481 or enquiries@sciencemuseum.waterstones.com, or just pop along to Exhibition Road (they’re down the end of the long underground passageway from South Kensington tube). Inside the museum, follow round to the right and they’re tucked away against the left wall, just before the space section.

Oh, and there’s a pretty good museum to look at, thrown in at no extra charge.

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...

Search This Blog