Annal:1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology

Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vacine

Jane S. Smith

• 1990 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
• Score: 10.4

 

Sonoran Desert Summer

John Alcock

• 1990 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
• Score: 6.4

“Alcock captures the wonder and the science behind the lives of wood-boring beetles, zebra-tailed lizards, round-tailed ground squirrels, elk owls and saguaro caccti, among other species, during both the desert summers: sizzling, cloudless dry days of May and June, and the intermittent thunderstorms and downpours of the late summer monsoon season.” —High Country News

Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization

Christopher Manes

• 1990 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
• Score: 6.4

Radical environmental groups throughout the world, militantly committed to defending the ecology, are growing in size and influence. In this country, activists engage in ecological civil disobedience and “ecotage”—the sabotaging of equipment to prevent ecological damage—in the struggle to preserve wilderness lands. These ecoteurs have gone beyond traditional conservation concerns to a new philosophy—Deep Ecology, or biocentrism—that calls into question not only the wisdom, but the legitimacy of humanity’s domination of nature.

In Green Rage, Christopher Manes has written a brilliant defense of radical environmentalism, challenging the ethics of modern industrial society and asserting the right of the natural world to blossom, evolve, and exist for its own sake.

The Control of Nature

John McPhee

• 1990 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
• Score: 6.4

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: “Strive on—the control of Nature is won, not given.” In the morning sunlight, that central phrase—”the control of nature”—seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) “any struggle against natural forces—heroic or venal, rash or well advised—when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods.” His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya—the largest river swamp in North America—and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered…

Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge

Robert Scott Root-Bernstein

• 1990 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
• Score: 6.4