Emily Martin
Emily Martin, professor of anthropology at New York University and author of
The Woman in the Body (Beacon Press, 1987), has recently become
companion to a caique, a South American parrot. She鈥檚 now exploring the
remarkable intelligence and complex emotions of parrots in The Parrot Who
Owns Me by Joanna Burger (Villard, 2001).
She has also got stuck into philosopher Martha Nussbaum鈥檚 Upheavals of
Thought (Cambridge, 2001), a view of how the emotions are central to human
cognition and not鈥攁s they have historically been denigrated鈥攍ower on
the evolutionary scale than rational thought.
Martin says that these books intrigue her because they explore the
demarcation lines that have been used to define the most valuable aspects of
human rationality鈥攁nd all suggest that the lines actually fall in quite
different places than is commonly assumed.
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J. Richard Gott
鈥淚 can think of no better person to put all of astronomy into proper cosmic
perspective,鈥� says J. Richard Gott of Britain鈥檚 Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees.
The Princeton astrophysicist and author of Time Travel in Einstein鈥檚
Universe has just finished reading Rees鈥檚 latest book, Our Cosmic
Habitat (Princeton, reviewed 20 October 2001). The book looks at how the
familiar laws of physics may just be local by-laws in our branch of a vast
multiverse.
Gott is amazed to find the chapters not only readable and satisfying, but
also compact: the chapter 鈥淏lack holes and time machines鈥� hits all the key
points in just nine pages. 鈥淎 beautiful book from cover to cover,鈥� he says.