Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Science & Technology

In 2005 Kate Jackson ventured into the remote swamp forests of the northern Congo to collect reptiles and amphibians. Her camping equipment was rudimentary, her knowledge of Congolese customs even more so. She knew how to string a net and set a pitfall trap, but she never imagined the physical and cultural difficulties that awaited her.

Culled from the mud-spattered pages of her journals, Mean and Lowly Things reads like a fast-paced adventure story. It is Jackson's unvarnished account of her research on the front lines of the global biodiversity crisis--coping with...

Rocknocker: A Geologist's Memoir reviews the life of George Devries Klein, an immigrant who made it through the American System as a geologist. It chronicles his life from early childhood, graduate school, working as an oil company researcher, university professor, science administrator, and as a geological consultant. The book includes the highs and lows of George's life. Each chapter also summarizes key lessons learned making the book even more useful to young scientists as a career guide. Isolated incidents relevant to the book, but shortened, are included as postscripts...

For most of his fellow Kentuckians, the accomplishments of Thomas Hunt Morgan have been overshadowed by the Civil War exploits of his uncle, the Confederate raider. Thomas Hunt Morgan: Pioneer of Genetics shows that feats performed on the frontiers of science can be as exciting as battlefield heroics, and that the "other Morgan" was as colorful a man as the general.

Thomas Hunt Morgan's most noted work, done between 1910 and 1920 at Columbia University, revealed many of the secrets if genetics. Studying hundreds of generations of the fruit fly Drosophilia melanogaster,...

Roland McMillan Harper (1878-1966) had perhaps "the greatest store of field experience of any living botanist of the Southeast," according to Bassett Maguire, the renowned plant scientist of the New York Botanical Garden. However, Harper's scientific contributions, including his pioneering work on the ecological importance of wetlands and fire, were buried for decades in the enormous collection of photographs and documents he left. In addition, Harper's reputation as a scientist has often been obscured by his reputation as an eccentric. With this book, Elizabeth Findley Shores provides the...

William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger. But William had read about windmills, and he dreamed of building one that would bring to his small village a set of luxuries that only 2 percent of Malawians could enjoy: electricity and running water. His neighbors called him misala--crazy--but William refused to let go of his dreams. With a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks; some scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves; and an armory of curiosity and determination, he...

Black tides of spilled oil pollute the world's coasts with depressing regularity, giving scientists ample opportunity to observe their environmental impacts and learn how to clean up and restore the affected shorelines. Miles O. Hayes has been a leader in this work for over twenty years. In this highly readable autobiography, he describes his evolution as a scientist, his work in coastal oil spill contingency planning and clean up, and his personal philosophy of one's relationship with nature.

A skilled raconteur, Hayes tells engrossing stories of responding to most of the recent,...

What sort of person was the young naturalist who developed an evolutionary idea so logical, so dangerous, that it has dominated biological science for a century and a half? How did the quiet and shy Charles Darwin produce his theory of natural selection when many before him had started down the same path but failed? This book is the first to inquire into the range of influences and ideas, the mentors and rivals, and the formal and informal education that shaped Charles Darwin and prepared him for his remarkable career of scientific achievement.

Keith Thomson concentrates on Darwin's...