Annal:1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Science/Technology books
- Science/Technology authors.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
- 1995 Pulitzer–Nonfiction winner
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- Score: 20.45
On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin’s finches and come up with a new understanding of…
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.44
Most people believe that science arose as a natural end-product of our innate intelligence and curiosity, as an inevitable stage in human intellectual development. But physicist and educator Alan Cromer disputes this belief. Cromer argues that science is not the natural unfolding of human potential, but the invention of a particular culture, Greece, in a particular historical period. Indeed, far from being natural, scientific thinking goes so far against the grain of conventional human thought that if it hadn’t been discovered in Greece, it might not have been…
Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.44
The genetic age is upon us, yet most people have only a limited understanding of the wondrous chemical that encodes the formula for all living things. As DNA’s secrets are revealed, they must be rescued from the obscuring language of science, and now Signs of Life does just that. Borrowing from the humanities, Robert Pollack offers an entirely fresh perspective: DNA, he argues, should be seen as a great work of natural literature, a three-billion-year-old, continuously evolving text.
An award-winning scientist and teacher, Pollack displays both a…
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.44
Robert Sapolsky’s acclaimed Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers combines cutting-edge research with a healthy dose of good humor and practical advice to explain how prolonged stress causes or intensifies a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal’s body does, but we usually do not turn off the stress-response in the same way—through fighting, fleeing, or other quick actions. Over time, this chronic…
- 1994 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.44
“The pace of species extinction provoked by human rapacity may well now equal the rate of loss in the great mass extinction events that punctuate the history of life. We need a broad perspective on this most portentous of all ecological and evolutionary disasters-and who better than a paleontologist to provide it.” —Stephen Jay Gould
Paleontologist Peter Ward searches for the clues to catastrophic extinctions and documents signs that a third mass extinction has already begun on our planet. With contagious enthusiasm for fossil-hunting and love of the…
