Annal:2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2000. 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 Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
- 2000 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- Score: 10.5
This penetrating study of medicine in our times addresses one of its most baffling paradoxes as it explores the widening gulf between achievement and advancement. For while the medical accomplishments of the postwar years stand at the front ranks of human endeavor, advances in medicine have recently slowed to a near halt. In the three decades after the war, medicine won the wars against polio and diphtheria. It developed treatments to control the progress of Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, and schizophrenia. It made realities of open-heart surgery, organ…
E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
- 2000 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.5
“This is not a physics book. It is a history of where the equation [E=mc2] came from and how it has changed the world. After a short chapter on the equation’s birth, Bodanis presents its five symbolic ancestors in sequence, each with its own chapter and each with rich human stories of achievement and failure, encouragement and duplicity, love and rivalry, politics and revenge. Readers meet not only famous scientists at their best and worst but also such famous and infamous characters as Voltaire and Marat…Bodanis includes detailed, lively and…
Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
- 2000 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.5
An acclaimed science writer’s insightful and revelatory biography of young Einstein—teenager in love, draft dodger, bohemian, poet, and scientist—drawing upon many unpublished letters and years of research
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the world stood on the verge of upheaval as all the familiar political, cultural, and scientific truths were challenged by new discoveries and philosophies. It was a period when young Albert Einstein was in love—with physics and the secret order of the universe; with his brilliant, tormented first wife,…
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
- 2000 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.5
The human genome, the complete set of genes housed in twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, is nothing less than an autobiography of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been edited, abridged, altered and added to as it has been handed down, generation to generation, over more than three billion years. With the first draft of the human genome due to be published in 2000, we, this lucky generation, are the first beings who are able to read this extraordinary book and to gain hitherto…
A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud
- 2000 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.5
The mysterious Isle of Rum is one of the Inner Hebrides situated off the west coast of Scotland. Rugged and mountainous, its brooding beauty and natural diversity attracted an eminent British botanist, John Heslop Harrison of Newcastle University, who claimed to have discovered several species of rare plants there that had never been observed within five hundred miles of the island. These discoveries helped him make his mark as one of Britain’s outstanding scientists. But in A Rum Affair, Karl Sabbagh begins to question those discoveries, after stumbling…
