Five best books on scientific fraud

Eugenie Samuel Reich is a former editor at New Scientist. She has written for Nature, New Scientist, and The Boston Globe, and is known for her hard hitting reports on irregular science. Several of her reports have resulted in institutional investigations.

Her new book is Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World.

She named a five best list of books about scientific fraud for the Wall Street Journal. One book on her list:

Voodoo Science
by Robert L. Park
Oxford, 2000

The thesis of “Voodoo Science” is that instances of science fraud arise from ignorance. Whether it’s the dream of free energy or the fear of cancer caused by overhead powerlines, the public’s ­uninformed obsessions often attract false scientific claims. A physicist at the University of Maryland and ­former director of the Washington Office of the American Physical ­Society, Robert L. Park is known for candor in the discussion of bad ­science. He is devastating, for ­instance, on the subject of the “cold fusion” debacle in 1989, when ­chemists Stanley Pons and Martin ­Fleischmann of the University of Utah falsely claimed to have replicated the reactions that power the sun by using a tabletop apparatus that applied electric voltage to heavy water. This eminently readable work leaves the reader with a deep appreciation of how pseudoscientists often tailor their fictions to the public ­imagination.

Read about all five books on Reich's list.

Writers Read: Eugenie Samuel Reich.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 rascals in literature

Director Spike Jonze and the Where the Wild Things Are film team came up with their top 10 rascals in literature.

David Barnett does not approve of several of the rascals to make the list, but liked some of the choices:

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn rightly earns his place – on the run with a slave in 19th-century Mississippi, dressing as a girl, and faking his own death certainly earn him his rascal stripes. And Pippi Longstocking deserves to be included for her baiting and exposing of adult pomposity – oh, and for lifting that horse above her head. Similarly, one can't argue with Bre'r Rabbit's inclusion, thanks to his anti-authoritarian stance.

Read more about Barnett's take on the list.

Check out the list of the top 10 rascals in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 novels that predicted the future

At the Guardian, Andrew Crumey listed the top ten novels that predicted the future.

One book on the list:

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Real-life re-animation experiments were all the rage and gave Shelley the idea for her novel, but as creator of the original "Frankenstein science" she became unwitting godmother of everything from heart transplants to GM foods.

Read about all ten titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's chart: books on art and artists

In 2006 Derwent May, a writer and reviewer for the London Times, named a "critic's chart" of top books of exchanges of letters.

One book on his list:

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
Robert Hughes

A persuasive critic on a roller-coaster ride through Modernism, linked to a memorable television series.

Read about the other books to make the chart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 artworks in novels

Ian MacKenzie's debut novel, City of Strangers, is published in paperback this month by Penguin.

At the Guardian, he named his top 10 artworks in novels.

One book on the list:

The Use of Reason by Colm Tóibín (from Mothers and Sons)

Another Rembrandt in peril. Tóibín's protagonist, a calm and calculating thief of high-end goods, strays out of his depth when he purloins some works of art, including a Portrait of an Old Woman by the Dutch master. He is fluent in the handling of jewels or money, but fumbles a plan to fence the paintings to some enigmatic Dutch customers, and finds himself weighted down with a priceless but unsalable item. The brilliance of the story lies in the reader's agony as he tracks the fate of the painting, which nears an unimaginable point of no return. In the finale, Tóibín makes us shake at the dark future that awaits an irreplaceable artwork, and in the process forces us to consider what we value, and why.

Read about all ten items on MacKenzie's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten best film adaptations

David Nicholls' TV credits include the third series of Cold Feet, Rescue Me, and I Saw You, as well as adapting works for the screen, including Simpatico, Starter for Ten (from his own novel) as well as Tess of the D’Urbervilles for the BBC. His latest novel is One Day.

For the (London) Independent, he named his favorite film adaptations.

One item on the list:

The Big Sleep/The Long Goodbye

Two examples of how similar source material can be given remarkably different adaptations. The Huston* movie (adapted by Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman) is classic Hollywood; witty, elegant, dark, sexy. Altman's is classic New Hollywood; cynical, rambling, mumbling, sunlit. Interestingly, the great Leigh Brackett worked on both movies.

Read about the other adaptations to make the grade.

[*Marshal Zeringue notes: The Big Sleep was directed by Howard Hawks, not John Huston.]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best balloon flights

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best balloon flights in fiction.

One title on the list:

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

The best-known ballooning sequence in British fiction. Joe Rose is having a picnic in the Chilterns with his girlfriend and watching a hot-air balloon being prepared for an ascent. Suddenly it lifts free of its moorings with only a small boy in the basket. Joe and four others try to hold on to the balloon as it begins to lift. One of them holds on too long.

Read about all ten balloon flights on Mullan's list.

Enduring Love also appears on Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of unrequited love in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about the immigrant life

Lynn Freed, author of the newly released novel The Servants’ Quarters, named "her favorite books evoking the immigrant life" for the Wall Street Journal.

One book on the list:

Lost in Translation
by Eva Hoffman
Dutton, 1989

Eva Hoffman divides her splendid memoir into three parts: Paradise (the Krakow of her childhood: “the wonder is what you can make a paradise out of ... a lumpen apartment ... squeezed into three rudimentary rooms with four other people”); Exile (Vancouver, to which her family emigrated when she was 13: “no solid wood here, no ­accretion either of age or dust”); and The New World (America: “Much of the time I’m in a rage. Immigrant rage, I call it”). Hers is a story suffused by nostalgia and rage. But also by meditations on culture and language and identity. And then one day, while teaching T.S. Eliot to American college students, she finds herself, at last, actually able to feel within the ­English language. She has arrived.

Read about all five books on Freed's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best books on the recent financial crash

Tim Bennett, a deputy editor at MoneyWeek, named five of the best books on the latest financial crash.

One title on the list:

False Economy by Alan Beattie

Beattie, says The Economist, uses "extraordinary stories of economic triumph and disaster" to distill lessons from history to show what many readers may already suspect: most economic successes and failures take us by surprise. The book is laced with case studies (such as why Peru, not California, dominates the US asparagus market), but is short on answers, making it a "fascinating", yet "maddening" read, says the FT.

Read about the other four books on Bennett's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 relationship novels

William Sutcliffe is the author of New Boy, Are You Experienced?, The Love Hexagon, and Whatever Makes You Happy.

Back in November 2000 he named his top 10 relationship novels for the Guardian. One title on the list:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

No marriage can have faced a sterner examination than that of the Angstroms. Rabbit, Run seems like a stunning dissection of everything that can possibly go wrong in a marriage, until you read the rest of the tetralogy and discover that things can get worse, decade by decade. No one else so brilliantly reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Read about all ten books on the list.

Rabbit, Run figures among Julian Barnes' best books to travel with.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books that will change the way you look at robots

io9 editor Annalee Newitz compiled a list of "Thirteen Books That Will Change The Way You Look At Robots."

One title on the list:

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Though this classic cyberpunk novel is mostly about humans and their augmentations, one of the most interesting characters to emerge from it is the AI Neuromancer. Unlike the childish HARLIE or the crazy robots in Asimov, Neuromancer is not constrained by human rules. He has the ability to run downloaded human personalities in RAM, so that they are capable of evolving within his own consciousness. Neuromancer is a kind of mage, capable of resurrecting the dead and motivated by issues that humans don't really understand. He's being pursued by his sibling AI Wintermute, who wants to merge with him. Eventually the two do merge, and disappear into outer space seeking more of their kind.

Read about all 13 books on Newitz's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best breakages in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best breakages in literature.

One title on the list:

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's expatriate Russian prof prizes above all a lovely aquamarine bowl, a gift from his son. He places it in the sink after a party and hears a terrible sound of breaking glass. Moaning, he dips his hand into the foam and cuts himself – but on a broken goblet. The bowl is intact ; fate is not cruel after all.

Read about all ten works on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue