In July, Ralph Cicerone takes up the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. Reading right now? Brian Greene鈥檚 The Fabric of the Cosmos (Knopf, 2004) is 鈥�90 per cent finished鈥�, and Peter Raven and George Johnson鈥檚 Biology (third edition, McGraw Hill, 1992) is 鈥�10 per cent鈥� done.
Other recent science reads include Einstein Defiant by Edmund Blair Bolles (Joseph Henry, 2004), Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant (Simon & Schuster, 2002), Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2003), An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf, 1995), and William Cronon鈥檚 natural and economic history of the US Midwest and Chicago, Nature鈥檚 Metropolis (W. W. Norton, 1991).
For fun? Jim Collins鈥檚 chronicle of Cape Cod (amateur) baseball, The Last Best League: One summer, one season, one dream (Da Capo, 2004). And he鈥檚 recently finished four Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason mysteries 鈥� titles from 1938, 1941, 1948 and 1951.
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