All this month at Takshzila Starting 23rd July, 2012!!!
Collect your copies!!!
On the bookshelf :
A Short History of Nearly Everything -
Bill Bryson
For people over 30 years of age, science has changed a great deal since they were in school. New scientific theories, developments and discoveries abound that adults may be interested in learning about. However, how would one go about learning these things in an easy, simple way? Author Bill Bryson readily admits that he found science textbooks boring as a child, and his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is the successful result of his effort to produce a concise, readable, entertaining summary of current scientific thinking, for adults.
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
The book covers a broad range of topics, comprising Sagan’s reflections on anthropological, cosmological, biological, historical, and astronomical matters from antiquity to contemporary times. Sagan reiterates his position on extraterrestrial life—that the magnitude of the universe permits the existence of thousands of alien civilizations, but no credible evidence exists to demonstrate that such life has ever visited earth.
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster.
The Tell-Tale Brain – V.S. Ramachandran
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human is a 2010 nonfiction book by V. S. Ramachandran that explores, from a neurological viewpoint, various aspects of human perception and how they relate to appreciation of art, the development of language, and how perception and the way it’s processed make humans more like other animals, in particular hominids, or unique among species. For this, Ramachandran investigates cases of patients where certain systems in the brain of an otherwise normal individual have been disrupted including among others: autism, synesthesia, phantom limbs, Cotard delusion, and Expressive aphasia.