Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People

  • Steven Vogel
Penguin, £8.99

“Vogel's book has been written to be enjoyed. ⃛ It is full of ideas and well-explained principles that will bring new understanding of everyday things both to non-scientists and scientists alike”. R. McNeill Alexander, Nature 392, 881 (1998).

The Number Sense: How The Mind Creates Mathematics

  • Stanislas Dehaene
Penguin, £8.99

“Our ability to use numbers is as much a fundamental aspect of what makes us human as is our ability to use language. This book provides an excellent introduction to how this ability is organized in our mathematical brain.” Brian Butterworth, Nature 391, 856 (1998).

Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change

  • Richard V. Fisher,
  • Grant Heiken &
  • Jeffrey B. Hulen
Princeton University Press, $19.95, £14.95

Twins And What They Tell Us About Who We Are

  • Lawrence Wright
Wiley, £14.95

“As a measured analysis of a complex and controversial field, it is not very good⃛ The book is essentially a collection of the sometimes divergent views of the field's main players about the significance of genes.” John Galloway, Nature 392, 34–35 (1998).

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time

  • Michael Shermer &
  • Stephen Jay Gould
W. H. Freeman, £10.95, $14.95

“Shermer refuses to engage deeply with why beliefs are held. ⃛ In the Middle Ages it took the rack and the thumbscrew to make people confess that their father drank babies' blood. Now, a couple of sessions in an air-conditioned psychotherapist's office seems to suffice. What needs explaining is how we have become such wimps.” John C. Marshall, Nature 389, 29 (1997).

Rethinking Visual Anthropology

Edited by:
  • Marcus Banks &
  • Howard Morphy
Yale University Press, $18, £12.95

Space and The American Imagination

  • Howard E. McCurdy
Smithsonian Institution Press, $17.95, £10.95

“McCurdy, an acknowledged authority on the US space programme ⃛ tells a richly detailed and persuasively balanced story that explains the paradox of manned spaceflight.” Alex Roland, Nature 392, 143–145 (1998).