Interview with Arik Kershenbaum, author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves
Arik Kershenbaum, author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves recommends some brilliant books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Arik's book:
Review from Book Depository:
We are unprepared for the greatest discovery of modern science. Scientists are confident that there is alien life across the universe yet we have not moved beyond our perception of 'aliens' as Hollywood stereotypes. The time has come to abandon our fixation on alien monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing.
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The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves
Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like. This is the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space.
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Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Surely this has to be The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins? I don't think there's another book about biology that has changed the way that we think about life quite as much as this one. It's the one I recommend all my students read before coming up to university. Apart from my own, of course...
Review From Book Depository
As influential today as when it was first published, The Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology
community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research. Forty years later, its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published.
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The Selfish Gene
This 40th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue from the author discussing the continuing relevance of these ideas in evolutionary biology today, as well as the original prefaces and foreword, and extracts from early reviews.
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Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I recently read Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed. It was surprisingly engrossing, and gave a perspective on the Russian Revolution that I hadn't really thought about before. Not a great book, but certainly worth reading.
Review from Book Depository:
Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A contemporary journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power.
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Ten Days that Shook the World
Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting.
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Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Watership Down, by Richard Adams. It is the essential animal story for children and adults. Beautifully researched and executed, it was through Watership Down that as a student I came to Ron Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit, and from there to my career in animal behaviour..
Review From Book Depository
Sandleford Warren is in danger. Hazel's younger brother Fiver is convinced that a great evil is about to befall the land, but no one will listen. And why would they when it is Spring and the grass is fat and succulent? So together Hazel and Fiver and a few other brave rabbits secretly leave behind the safety and strictures of the warren and hop tentatively out into a vast and strange world.
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Watership Down
Chased by their former friends, hunted by dogs and foxes, avoiding farms and other human threats, but making new friends, Hazel and his fellow rabbits dream of a new life in the emerald embrace of Watership Down . . .
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Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I always prefer paper, and I greatly prefer hardcover books, so I buy those if I possibly can. But I read a great deal on my phone. Just because I can do that at any time: while waiting for a bus, or in the line for a coffee.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
G. David, tucked away in the centre of Cambridge, is my one go-to bookshop if I have any free time. With rows of second-hand books, often from the private collections of Cambridge professors who've passed away, there are always interesting finds. And inside it's small and diverse, as a book shop should be.
Many thanks to Arik for recommending some brilliant books! Please don't forget to check out Arik's book The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Penguin Books Ltd (The Zoologist's Guide To The Galaxy, Ten Days That Shook The World, Watership Down), Oxford University Press (The Selfish Gene).
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