Annal:2005 Aventis Prize for General Science Book
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Aventis Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Aventis Prize for General Science Book
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Science/Technology books
- Science/Technology authors.
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
- 2005 Aventis-General winner
- Score: 10.55
Are there any “laws of nature” that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo’s mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today’s society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the “scientific”…
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life
- 2005 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.55
The Ancestor’s Tale is a pilgrimage back through time; a journey on which we meet up with fellow pilgrims along the route as we and they converge on our common ancestors. Chimpanzees join us at about 6 million years in the past, gorillas at 7 million years, orangutans at 14 million years, as we stride on together, a growing band.
The journey provides the setting for a collection of some 40 tales. Each explores an aspect of evolutionary biology through the stories of characters met along the way or glimpsed from afar—the Elephant Bird’s Tale, the…
Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past
Douwe Draaisma, Arnold Pomerans, Erica Pomerans
- 2005 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Is it true, as the novelist Cees Nooteboom once wrote, that memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases? Where do the long, lazy summers of our childhood go? Why, as we grow older, does time seem to condense, speed up and elude us, while in old age, significant events from our distant past can seem as vivid and real as what happened yesterday?
Douwe Draaisma, author of the internationally acclaimed Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge, 2001), explores the nature of autobiographical memory. Applying a unique blend of scholarship, poetic sensibility, and…
Matters of Substance: Drugs—And Why Everyone's a User
- 2005 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Drugs can be injected, snorted, smoked or swallowed. They can heighten excitement or numb emotion. They are sold by multi-national corporations and on street corners. They can cure and kill.
Matters of Substance is a fascinating global tour of drugs and our ambivalent relationship with them. From alcohol to amphetamines, cannabis to crack cocaine, heroin to valium, Griffith Edwards reveals the history, culture and language behind each type of drug—their physical and psychological effects, medical uses, trade routes, the involvement of big business and…
Earth: An Intimate History
- 2005 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.55
The face of the earth, crisscrossed by chains of mountains like the scars of old wounds, has changed and changed again over billions of years, and the testament of the remote past is all around us. In this book Richard Fortey teaches us how to read its character, laying out the dominions of the world before us. He shows how human culture and natural history–even the shape of cities–are rooted in this deep geological past.
In search of this past, Fortey takes us through the Alps, into Icelandic hot springs, down to the ocean floor, over the barren rocks of…
The Human Mind: And How to Make the Most of It
- 2005 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.55
New technological developments help us understand how the brain gives rise to the human mind. We can now see the extraordinary complexity of the brain’s circuits, watch which regions use energy and which nerve cells generate electricity as we fall in love, tell a lie or dream of a lottery win. And inside the 100 billion cells of this rubbery network is something remarkable: you.
In this entertaining and accessible book, Robert Winston takes us deep into the workings of the human mind, revealing how our senses, emotions and personality are the result of a…
