The Questioning Librarian

It's a rare gift to be able to accessibly present real science to the public. It's even rarer to find someone who does so with an enthusiasm and humor that Mary Roach brings to the table. I picked up a copy of Packing for Mars  on a whim. I'd never heard of the author before, but the premise sounded interesting. Humans evolved to survive the conditions on Earth; what happens, then, when we go into space, a place without air, food, water, or anything else we need? This thought fascinated Roach so much that she spent two years finding out, traveling and interviewing and researching all possible aspects of it. This isn't the glory you see on television, she writes. Far more interesting than the glamour shots of the moon landing are the mundanities that make it all possible. To illustrate her point, she begins with the flag planting ceremony from the moon landing. Months of preparation went into ensuring that a flag would go with the Apollo astronauts; since there is n...

I've always been interested in history, but in high school I found American history to be incredibly boring. It was often presented as a black and white affair, completely scrubbed of any nuance. It was only after discovering the true complexity of our history that I began to find it fascinating, and there are few who portray this complexity as well as historian Joseph Ellis. This meant that his newest book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , was an immediate must-read. Ellis, the author of numerous other books on U.S. history, takes on the story of how we came to have our Constitution. This development was far from inevitable, he asserts, and would have been an unlikely outcome after the Revolutionary War had it not been for the efforts of four individuals. Washington, future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Monroe all worked both publicly and behind the scenes to ensure that the Constitution came into being.  Bo...

Old reels of microfilmed newspapers (image from the Manchester Library of New Hampshire) Last year, as the terrorist group Daesh expanded the territory under their control, they made a great show of destroying artifacts and sites of historic value in their wake. They were only the latest in a long line of similarly fundamentalist groups that took pride in working to erase our history--the Taliban notoriously demolished ancient statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, and Malian rebels torched hundreds of manuscripts before they abandoned Timbuktu, to name just two examples. But you don't have to burn books or pick up a hammer to destroy history. While it is not spectacular enough to attract headlines, benign neglect has destroyed enough of the historical record to warrant notice as well, thanks in part to the underfunding of libraries and historical societies. It doesn't generate the same outpouring of outrage and emotion that the deliberate destruction of our past doe...