Honor roll:Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology. They are ranked by honors received.
You may also enjoy these honor rolls:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology authors
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Science/Technology books
- Science/Technology authors
- Works 1–10 of 93
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
- 1997 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- 1998 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- 1997 NBCC–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 22.47
In this book, Steven Pinker explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? How do “Magic-Eye” 3-D stereograms work? Why do we feel that a run of heads makes the coin more likely to land tails? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do men challenge each other to duels and murder their ex-wives? Why are children bratty?…
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
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…
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
Though we share 98 percent of our genes with the chimpanzee, our species evolved into something quite extraordinary. Jared Diamond explores the fascinating question of what in less than 2 percent of our genes has enabled us to found civilizations and religions, develop intricate languages, create art, learn science—and acquire the capacity to destroy all our achievements overnight. The Third Chimpanzee is a tour de force, an iconoclastic, entertaining, sometimes alarming look at the unique and marvelous creature that is the human animal.
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- 1993 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 18.43
Richard Feynman’s life encompassed the most important discoveries and changes in science in this century. As a boy he tinkered with radios and as a scientist he looked at all things from an unusual and unique perspective. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, was an eccentric and hard-driven perfectionist—a genius indeed. Feynman’s career touched on every area of modern science: from the Manhattan Project to quantum mechanics, to the Space Shuttle Commission. Beyond the importance of the physicist, we learn of a man whose emotional demons made him all the…
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
In Search of Memory relates the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplines—behaviorist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology—converged into a powerful new science of mind. Through its profound insights into thought, perception, action, recollection, and mental illness, this new science is revolutionizing our understanding of learning and memory while simultaneously showing great promise for more effective healing.
The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change
Scientists and natives wrestle with our changing climate in the land where it has hit first—and hardest.
A traditional Eskimo whale-hunting party races to shore near Barrow, Alaska—their comrades trapped on a floe drifting out to sea—as ice that should be solid this time of year gives way. Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, sleeping in tents, surviving on frozen chocolate, and measuring the snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the effects of albedo, the snow’s reflective ability to cool the earth beneath it.
Climate change…
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
In March 1953, Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, announced the departure of his obstructive colleague Rosalind Franklin to rival Cavendish Laboratory scientist Francis Crick. But it was too late. Franklin’s unpublished data and crucial photograph of DNA had already been seen by her competitors at the Cambridge University lab. With the aid of these, plus their own knowledge, Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the molecule that genes are composed of—DNA, the secret of life. Five years later, at the age of thirty-seven, after more brilliant…
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter, which Sobel has translated into English for the first time, Galileo’s Daughter is a book of great originality and power, a biography unlike any ever written on Galileo. Sobel, the author of the bestseller Longitude, brings Galileo to life as never before-boldly compelled to explain the truths he discovered, human in his frailties and faith, devoted to family, especially to his eldest daughter.
The voices of Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, echo…
Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, a soul, a consciousness, an “I” arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?
I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the “strange loop”—a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one called “I.” The “I” is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
How can a mysterious abstraction be real—or is our “I” merely a convenient fiction? Does an “I” exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?
These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since Gödel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter’s many readers have been waiting for.
Before The Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima
On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that “radioactivity seems to be an atomic property.” A mere 47 years later, “Little Boy”exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the intervening half century, during which an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world revealed how to destroy it, and an open, international, scientific adventure transmuted overnight into a wartime sprint for the bomb.
Weaving together history, science, and biography, Diana Preston chronicles a human…
- Works 1–10 of 93
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
