That’s the question Robert left on my review of Kraken:
Here’s a challenge for you, if you want it. Suppose you had $500 to spend on science books for a high school library, what would you buy? I’ve got a small budget, so I want to get the most bang of the buck
Which books I would recommend? Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to get some inoculation against quackery. Any of Richard Fortey’s books on evolution and geology, particularly Life and The Earth, but also Trilobite, Chad Orzel’s How to Teach Physics to Your Dog which is a popular science book on quantum physics, any of Ian Stewart’s or Martin Gardner’s books of mathematical puzzles, Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth just to show how cool Earth’s long prehistory has been, any of Richard Dawkin’s recent books in which he doesn’t bang on about religion.
Which books would you recommend?
Rich Puchalsky
January 19, 2012 at 10:27 pmI’d be boring and get standard freshman college-level textbooks, because the high school ones are probably too dumbed down. And the freshman textbooks can generally be gotten cheap, used, because students buy them for required courses and then sell them back. Anyways there’s probably one generic physics, chemistry, and biology one, and they’re good for looking up things in.