The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
by Alison Gopnik. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that far from being irrational and limited in their ability to think, babies are smarter, more imaginative and more conscious than adults. Along the way, she examines such fascinating topics as why children pretend, how they discover the truth, the origins of love and morality, and how early life shapes later life. Understanding how children think can help adults become better parents—another subject Gopnik explores.

Vesuvius: A Biography
by Alwyn Scarth. Princeton University Press, 2009
Writer Alwyn Scarth traces the violent history of Mount Vesuvius—from its destruction of Pompeii in A.D. 79 to its most recent eruption in 1944. What might the future hold for this, the most dangerous volcano in all of Europe? Scarth discusses the warning signs of an eruption and considers current contingency plans for the 600,000 people who live in the 236-square-kilometer area around the summit of this ferocious force of nature. 

EXCERPT
Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science
by Carol Kaesuk Yoon. W. W. Norton, 2009
Biologist and journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores humanity’s long-standing obsession with naming living things. Here she describes how the modest barnacle—which 16th-century scholars believed came from plants known as “Barnakle Trees” and themselves concealed miniature geese called barnacle geese—tricked even 18th-century father of systematic classification Carl Linnaeus.

“Picture a barnacle. You probably envision something hard, white, salt-encrusted, sharp, and stuck onto something else, like a boat bottom. And though they seem more rocklike than lifelike at first glance, at second glance they may begin to remind you of a limpet perhaps, or a mussel, or some other sea creature with a formidable hard outer shell, softer more vulnerable parts tucked inside, and zero mobility. The barnacle, most people would say, belongs with what are clearly its like kind, the clams, snails and so on; that is, it would appear to be a mollusk. And this is exactly how Linnaeus ordered it.

“… It was the group he called ‘The Worms.’ So the barnacles fell in, at the master’s hand, as they would likely have at any one of ours, with the mollusks. And there barnacles remained, more or less, for another half century or so.

“Not that anyone was terribly worried about them. Compared with trumpeting elephants or towering oak trees, barnacles were just kind of hard for naturalists to get worked up about. If there were a living creature whose understanding would shake the very foundations of the ordering of life, the barnacle seems the least likely candidate. But there was much more to those tiny shuttered creatures than anyone suspected.

ALSO NOTABLE
Nonfiction
Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and  the Battle for the Theory of Evolution
by Iain McCalman. W. W. Norton, 2009

Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human
by Jeremy Taylor. Oxford University Press, 2009

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
by W. Brian Arthur. Free Press, 2009

Smithsonian Atlas of Space Exploration
by Roger D. Launius and Andrew K. Johnston. Bunker Hill Publishing, 2009

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