Countdown: A History of Space Flight

  • T. A. Heppenheimer
Wiley, £13.99, $17.95

“⃛ The history of spaceflight is unfinished. So too is Heppenheimer's book; the publisher left the last page blank, inadvertently one assumes. Authors sue for such incompetence, but in this case it might be a fitting conclusion to this useful but necessarily inconclusive study”. Alex Roland, Nature 392, 143–145 (1998)

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication

  • Stephen Budiansky
Yale University Press, $14.95

“Budiansky's thesis is that human relationships with other species are not so much the ‘exploitation’ they are often made out to be, but arise from quite natural coevolutionary processes like those between other pairs of species ⃛ Perhaps the strength of the book is that it raises issues and makes points and then doesn't tell one what conclusions to draw.” Marian Stamp Dawkins, Nature 356, 487 (1992)

Science, Jews & Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History

  • David A. Hollinger
Princeton University Press, $14.95, £12.50

Re-enchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler

  • Anne Harrington
Princeton University Press, $19.95, £11.95