The Avid Reader Show

For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation? Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun. Jonathan Silvertown is an evolutionary biologist who has published widely on plant population biology. He is the author of eight books, including Dinner with Darwin: Food, Drink, and Evolution and, most recently, The Comedy of Error: Why Evolution Made Us Laugh. Formerly Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, and Chair of Technology-Enhanced Science Education in Biological Sciences, he is now, following retirement, an Honorary Professor in the Institute. Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://wellingtonsquarebooks.indiecommerce.com

Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones Discover the true story of the four women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help shape and curate the image of The Rolling Stones—perfect for fans of Girls Like Us. The Rolling Stones have long been considered one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time. At the forefront of the British Invasion and heading up the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the Stones' innovative music and iconic performances defined a generation, and fifty years later, they're still performing to sold-out stadiums around the globe. Yet, as the saying goes, behind every great man is a greater woman, and behind these larger-than-life rockstars were four incredible women whose stories have yet to be fully unpacked . . . until now. In Parachute Women, Elizabeth Winder introduces us to the four women who inspired, styled, wrote for, remixed, and ultimately helped create the legend of the Rolling Stones. Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, and Anita Pallenberg put the glimmer in the Glimmer Twins and taught a group of strait-laced boys to be bad. They opened the doors to subterranean art and alternative lifestyles, turned them on to Russian literature, occult practices, and LSD. They connected them to cutting edge directors and writers, won them roles in art house films that renewed their appeal. They often acted as unpaid stylists, providing provocative looks from their personal wardrobes. They remixed tracks for chart-topping albums, and sometimes even wrote the actual songs. More hip to the times than the rockers themselves, they consciously (and unconsciously) kept the band current—and confident—with that mythic lasting power they still have today. Lush in detail and insight, and long overdue, Parachute Women is a group portrait of the four audacious women who transformed the Stones into international stars, but who were themselves marginalized by the male-dominated rock world of the late '60s and early '70s. Written in the tradition of Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us, it's a story of lust and rivalries, friendships and betrayals, hope and degradation, and the birth of rock and roll.   Elizabeth Winder is the author of Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy,and Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Antioch Review, American Letters, and other publications. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, and earned an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781580059589

The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacy In 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an understanding of the purpose, and defense of the integrity, of science. What (if any) limits should we place on our expectations for what science can tell us about physical reality? Our protagonists slowly disappeared from the vanguard of physics, as its centre of gravity shifted from a war-ravaged Continental Europe to a bold, pragmatic, post-war America. What Einstein and Bohr had considered to be matters of the utmost importance were now set aside. Their debate was regarded either as settled in Bohr's favour or as superfluous to real physics. But the debate was not resolved. The problems of interpretation and meaning persisted, at least in the minds of a few stubborn physicists, such as David Bohm and John Bell, who refused to stop asking awkward questions. The Bohr-Einstein debate was rejoined, now with a new set of protagonists, on a small scale at first. Through their efforts, the debate was revealed to be about physics after all. Their questions did indeed have answers that could be found in a laboratory. As quantum entanglement became a real physical phenomenon, whole new disciplines were established, such as quantum computing, teleportation, and cryptography. The efforts of the experimentalists were rewarded with shares in the 2022 Nobel prize in physics. As Quantum Drama reveals, science owes a large debt to those who kept the discussions going against the apathy and indifference of most physicists before definitive experimental inquiries became possible. Although experiment moved the Bohr-Einstein debate to a new level and drew many into foundational research, it has by no means removed or resolved the fundamental question. There will be no Nobel prize for an answer. That will not shut off discussion. Our Drama will continue beyond our telling of it and is unlikely to reach its final scene before science ceases or the world ends. Jim Baggott, Freelance science writer, John L. Heilbron, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California, Berkeley Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. Trained as a scientist in the Universities of Oxford and Stanford, and a former lecturer at the University of Reading, he has written popular books on science, philosophy, and history. His books include Quantum Reality (2020), Quantum Space (2018), Mass (2017), for which he won the 2020 Premio Cosmos prize, Higgs (2012), and The Quantum Story (2011). His books have been translated into a dozen different languages, and he has won awards both for his scientific research and his science writing. John L. Heilbron is Professor of History and Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. After training in physics, he studied history of science under T. S. Kuhn in the 1960s, when Kuhn was writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He is the recipient of several prizes and honorary degrees from multiple universities. His books include The Incomparable Monsignor (2022), Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction (2020), Galileo (2012), and Love, Literature, and the Quantum Atom (with Finn Aaserund, 2013), on Bohr's 1913 trilogy of scientific papers. Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780192846105

Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed around a lengthy and detailed nonfiction account that is layered with the voices of approximately 100 palliative medicine practitioners, legal scholars, bioethicists, social workers, nurses, neurologists, psychiatrists, and other authorities from North America and Europe. This book explores how and when one might prepare to foreshorten life after being diagnosed with a dementing illness, while not ignoring the reality that for most people such actions are unthinkable and unacceptable. Dan Winter was one of the exceptions, and after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he resolved to hasten his death. He struggled over what method to employ and the timing of when to act. Winter's End is intended to catalyze conversations between clinicians, people affected by dementias, and the general public. It is a spellbinding and provocative book about a taboo subject that is increasingly germane to all aging societies that value patient autonomy. Lewis Cohen, MD is a professor emeritus of Psychiatry and a Palliative Medicine researcher, who has received numerous literary and academic honours. He is a Guggenheim fellow and was a Rockefeller Bellagio scholar and a Bogliasco Foundation resident. He is a recipient of the Thomas and Eleanor Hackett Memorial Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and his research has been funded by NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As a medical student, Dr. Cohen studied under Anna Freud, who interested him in end-of-life issues. Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9780197748640

When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen travels the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America to find the chocolate makers, activists, and indigenous leaders who are bucking the system that long ago abandoned wild and heirloom cacao in favor of high-yield, low-flavor varietals preferred by Big Chocolate. What he found was a cacao renaissance. As his guides pulled the last vestiges of ancient cacao back from the edge of extinction, they'd forged an alternative system in the process-one that is bringing prosperity back to local economies, returning fertility to the land, and protecting it from the rampages of cattle farming. All the while, a new generation of bean-to-bar chocolate makers are racing to get their hands on these rare varietals and produce extraordinary chocolate displaying a diversity of flavors no one had thought possible. Full of vivid characters, vibrant landscapes, and surprising history, Wild Chocolate promises to be as rich, complex, and addictive as good chocolate itself. Rowan Jacobsen is the author of eight books, including the James Beard Award-winning A Geography of Oysters and 2021's Truffle Hound. He has written for the New York Times, Harper's, Outside, Food & Wine, Forbes, Mother Jones, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Vice, and others, and he appears regularly in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best Food Writing. He has been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, a McGraw Center fellow, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. The creator and host of the 2022 podcast series "Wild Chocolate," he lives in Vermont. Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781639733576