- Grisham, John. The King of Torts. New York:
Doubleday, 2003. ISBN 0-385-50804-2.
- A mass market paperback edition is now
available.
- Lynn, Richard and Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and the Wealth
of Nations. Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002. ISBN 0-275-97510-X.
- Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, said
in April 2000 that intelligence “is one commodity equally distributed
among the world's people”. But is this actually the case? Numerous
studies of the IQ of the populations of various countries have been
performed from the 1930s to the present and with few exceptions, large
variations have been found in the mean IQs of countries—more than
two standard deviations between the extremes—while different studies
of the same population show remarkable consistency, and countries
with similar populations in the same region of the world tend to have
roughly the same mean IQ. Many social scientists believe that these
results are attributable to cultural bias in IQ tests, or argue that
IQ tests measure not intelligence, but rather proficiency in taking
IQ tests, which various educational systems and environments develop
to different degrees. The authors of this book accept the IQ test
results at face value and pose the question, “Whatever IQ measures, how
accurately does the average IQ of a country's population correlate with
its economic success, measured both by per capita income and rate of
growth over various historical periods?” From regression studies of 81
countries whose mean population IQ is known and 185 countries where IQ
is known or estimated based on neighbouring countries, they find that
IQ correlates with economic development better than any other single
factor advanced in prior studies. IQ, in conjunction with a market
economy and, to a lesser extent, democratic governance “explains”
(in the strict sense of the square of the correlation coefficient)
more than 50% of the variation in GDP per capita and other measures of
economic development (of course, IQ, economic freedom, and democracy
may not be independent variables). Now, correlation is not causation,
but the evidence that IQ stabilises early in childhood and remains
largely constant afterward allows one to rule out many potential kinds
of influence by economic development on IQ, strengthening the argument
for causation. If this is the case, the consequences for economic
assistance are profound. For example, providing adequate nutrition
during pregnancy and for children, which is known to substantially
increase IQ, may not only be the humanitarian thing to do but could
potentially promote economic progress more than traditional forms of
development assistance. Estimating IQ and economic development for
a large collection of disparate countries is a formidable challenge,
and this work contains more correction, normalisation, and adjustment
factors than a library full of physics research—close to half
the book is data tables and source documentation, and non-expert
readers cannot be certain that source data might not have been
selected which tend to confirm the hypothesis and others excluded.
But this is a hypothesis which can be falsified by further research,
which would seem well-warranted. Scientists and policy makers
must live in the real world and are ill advised to ignore aspects
of it which make them uncomfortable. (If these comments move you
to recommend Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, you
needn't—I've read it twice before I started keeping this list, and
found it well-argued. But you may also want to weigh the points raised
in J. Philippe Rushton's critique of Gould's
book.)
- Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here. New York:
Signet, [1935] 1993. ISBN 0-451-52582-5.
-
Just when you need it, this
classic goes out of print. Second-hand copies at
reasonable prices are available from the link above or through abebooks.com. I wonder to what
extent this novel might have motivated Heinlein to write For Us, The Living (February 2004) a few years later. There are
interesting parallels between Lewis's authoritarian dystopia and
the 1944–1950 dictatorial interregnum in Heinlein's novel. Further,
one of the utopian reformers Lewis mocks is Upton Sinclair, of whom
Heinlein was a committed follower at the time, devoting much of the
latter part of For Us, The Living to an exposition of
Sinclair's economic system.
- Sacks, David. Language Visible: Unraveling the
Mystery of the Alphabet. New York: Broadway Books,
2003. ISBN 0-7679-1172-5.
- Whaddya gonna do? The hardcover is out of print and the paperback isn't scheduled for publication
until August 2004. The U.K. hardback edition, simply titled The Alphabet, is currently
available.
- Stöhlker, Klaus J. Adieu la Suisse—Good
Morning Switzerland. Le Mont-sur-Lausanne: Éditions LEP,
2003. ISBN 2-606-01086-8.
- This is a French translation of the original German edition, which has
the same French-and-English title. The French edition
can be found in almost any bookshop in la Suisse
romande, but I know of no online source.
- McGivern, Ed. Fast and Fancy Revolver
Shooting. Clinton, NJ: New Win Publishing, [1938]
1975. ISBN 0-8329-0557-7.
- This is a facsimile of the 1938 first
edition, published to commemorate the centenary of the
author's birth in 1874. Earlier facsimile editions
of this classic were published in 1945, 1957, and 1965;
copies of these as well as the first edition may be found at abebooks.com, but most are
substantially more expensive than new copies of the 1975 reprint.
Imagine trying to publish a book today which includes advice
(pp. 461–462) on shooting targets off an assistant's
head!
- Jenkins, Dennis R. and Tony R. Landis. Hypersonic: The Story of the North
American X-15. North Branch, MN: Specialty Press,
2003. ISBN 1-58007-068-X.
- Specialty Press have drastically raised the bar
in aviation history publishing. This volume, like the B-36
(August 2003) and XB-70A (September 2003) books mentioned previously
here, combines coffee-table book production values, comprehensive
historical coverage, and abundant technical details. Virtually
absent are the typographical errors, mis-captioned photographs, and
poorly reproduced colour photos which too often mar well-intended
aviation books from other publishers. In their research, the
authors located many more historical photographs than they could
include in this book (which has more than 550). The companion X-15 Photo Scrapbook includes 400
additional significant photos, many never before published.
- Dyson, Freeman J. Origins of Life.
2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999. ISBN 0-521-62668-4.
- The years which followed Freeman
Dyson's 1985 Tarner lectures, published in the first edition of Origins
of Life that year, saw tremendous progress in molecular
biology, including the determination of the complete nucleotide
sequences of organisms ranging from E. coli to
H. sapiens, and a variety of evidence indicating the
importance of Archaea and the deep, hot biosphere to theories
of the origin of life. In this extensively revised second edition,
Dyson incorporates subsequent work relevant to his double-origin
(metabolism first, replication later) hypothesis. It's perhaps
indicative of how difficult the problem of the origin of life is
that none of the multitude of experiments done in the almost 20 years
since Dyson's original lectures has substantially confirmed or denied
his theory nor answered any of the explicit questions he posed as
challenges to experimenters.