ABOUT THE BOOK In Your Inner Fish, Shubin attempts to explore the intersections of evolutionary biology and modern human anatomy. On his faculty page on the University of Chicago website, Neil Shubin writes: The philosophy that underlies all of my empirical work is derived from the conviction that progress in the study of evolutionary biology results from linking research across diverse temporal, phylogenetic, and structural scales. Writing in a friendly, accessible way, Shubin explains the various historical records that are encoded in the human body, from the structures of our eyes to the sequencing of our genes. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK The book begins with Shubins first encounters with his own inner fish. He tells us about his expeditions to the far north in Canada, to Ellesmere Island, where he and his team of paleontologists and fossil finders scoured the rocks to try and find a transitional fossil from the time that the first animals were venturing onto land. The discovery of Tiktaalik Roseae is inarguably a transitional species, an intermediate between fish and the first land-walking tetrapods. In this and in other species, scientists have been able to trace the twisting path of our own anatomys evolution. In Tiktaalik, we are able to see the beginning of our limbs, from the muscles in our shoulders and chest to the bones of our wrists. Shubin traces our connections to animals past and present. Each chapter is devoted to a different part of the body: our hands, facial nerves, teeth inner ear, eyes, brain, olfactory sense. He gives us personal anecdotes as well. He describes his career, from how he first learned to find fossils, to his teams accidental uncovering of a tritheledont fossil, to the long search that led to finding Tiktaalik. CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish + About the Book + About the Author + Overall Summary + Chapter-by-Chapter Summary & Analysis + ...and much more Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish
Quicklets: Your Reading Sidekick! ABOUT THE BOOK When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tennuel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, its a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurable and some excruciating to remember. The Nasty Bits, Anthony Bourdains fifth book, is a collection of essays written in the years after publishing his breakout book, the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, and is aptly subtitled Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. Though the book is not enough to gain a sense of Bourdain as a person or a chef, the collection of rants, essays, travelogues, and short fiction could be considered a digestif to his other books, or an amuse-bouche for new readers. Bourdain is famous (maybe infamous) for his profane and gleefully anarchic writing, for smudging the clean and pristine pages of food writing with smears of grease, cigarette ash, and spilled vodka. This is perhaps best evidenced by the three names on the dedication page: Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee, of the Ramones. Punk beats thrum through his books, along with a heady and unapologetic hunger; the book has a yearning to see and eat and drink and smoke, more and more. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. You can follow her adventures on Twitter, @nicolecipri. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Bourdain is acerbic, occasionally self-righteous, and furiously down-to-earth. He doesnt aim to shock, but rather, to shake his readers out of their comfort zones. He wants them to get down in the dirt with him, or in the steambath of a crowded kitchen; he wants to pry open peoples eyes, ears, and mouths, and force-feed them everything they didnt know they were missing. These essays were written in the years that followed Bourdains sudden rise to stardom (and infamy). There is anger and indignation, and there is homesickness and weariness. In the end, theres a fierce joy, and an acknowledgement of just how damn lucky he is. If theres a story arc to be had in the pages of The Nasty Bits, its about learning to be humble, no easy feat for anyone in the restaurant business, which Bourdain has often characterized as ruthless, absurd, and full and sadistic misfits. Bourdain is a stubborn asshole, and never tries to pretend otherwise. He admits to posturing and sticking his foot in his mouth, remarking in one of his own commentaries, what a twat I was when I wrote this. In his preface, Bourdain describes a phenomenon thats familiar to anyone who has spent significant time traveling: the more you travel, the less you know. The boundaries of your own knowledge and experience seem more apparent than ever, and you start to glimpse the stunning breadth of your own ignorance. Its both frustrating and addictive, Bourdain writes. Which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there is and how little time you have to see it. Buy a copy to keep reading! CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits + About the Book + About the Author + An Overall Summary + Preface + ...and much more
ABOUT THE BOOK In his introduction to A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson describes a childhood experience common to many of us: a brief infatuation with science, with all its potential and possibility. For Bryson, it was inspired by a textbook’s cut-away illustration of the interior strata of the Earth, with the molten core at the center. For myself, it was a children’s biography of Jacques Cousteau. Excited by the nearly endless prospects of science, the questions that could finally satisfy a child’s curiosity, we both reached for more books, and found our budding passions firmly squashed by an impenetrable wall of unfathomable writing. As Bryson writes in his introduction, “there seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting.” Bryson wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything as an antidote to the dry-as-dust science tomes that weigh down students’ backpacks. It is a layman’s love song to science, to its strange history and stranger characters. Published in 2003, it has been become a popular addition to the popular science genre. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. You can follow her adventures on Twitter, @nicolecipri. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Drama abounded in the 19th century. After the discovery of the first dinosaur fossil in 1784, and with subsequent uncovering of massive bones that belonged to other extinct species, there was an uncomfortable public debate concerning extinctions. Why, after all, would an omniscient God create species of animals only to casually wipe them out? Throughout history, the sciences have routinely butted heads with the Church, a trend that continues today. From geology and paleontology, Bryson moves to chemistry. With its origins in the enigmatic studies of alchemy, chemistry evolved along its own strange path. Bryson tells one exemplifying story, in which an amateur alchemist became convinced the he could distill gold from human urine. “The similarity of color,” Bryson explains, “seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.” In an attempt to prove his hypothesis, the man collected fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept in his cellar. After a few months, the man noted, the substance in the buckets began to glow or explode into flames when exposed to air. He had failed in distilling gold from urine, but he had succeeded in creating phosphorous. Buy a copy to keep reading!
Quicklets: Your Reading Sidekick! ABOUT THE BOOK When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tennuel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, its a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurable and some excruciating to remember. The Nasty Bits, Anthony Bourdains fifth book, is a collection of essays written in the years after publishing his breakout book, the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, and is aptly subtitled Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. Though the book is not enough to gain a sense of Bourdain as a person or a chef, the collection of rants, essays, travelogues, and short fiction could be considered a digestif to his other books, or an amuse-bouche for new readers. Bourdain is famous (maybe infamous) for his profane and gleefully anarchic writing, for smudging the clean and pristine pages of food writing with smears of grease, cigarette ash, and spilled vodka. This is perhaps best evidenced by the three names on the dedication page: Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee, of the Ramones. Punk beats thrum through his books, along with a heady and unapologetic hunger; the book has a yearning to see and eat and drink and smoke, more and more. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. You can follow her adventures on Twitter, @nicolecipri. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Bourdain is acerbic, occasionally self-righteous, and furiously down-to-earth. He doesnt aim to shock, but rather, to shake his readers out of their comfort zones. He wants them to get down in the dirt with him, or in the steambath of a crowded kitchen; he wants to pry open peoples eyes, ears, and mouths, and force-feed them everything they didnt know they were missing. These essays were written in the years that followed Bourdains sudden rise to stardom (and infamy). There is anger and indignation, and there is homesickness and weariness. In the end, theres a fierce joy, and an acknowledgement of just how damn lucky he is. If theres a story arc to be had in the pages of The Nasty Bits, its about learning to be humble, no easy feat for anyone in the restaurant business, which Bourdain has often characterized as ruthless, absurd, and full and sadistic misfits. Bourdain is a stubborn asshole, and never tries to pretend otherwise. He admits to posturing and sticking his foot in his mouth, remarking in one of his own commentaries, what a twat I was when I wrote this. In his preface, Bourdain describes a phenomenon thats familiar to anyone who has spent significant time traveling: the more you travel, the less you know. The boundaries of your own knowledge and experience seem more apparent than ever, and you start to glimpse the stunning breadth of your own ignorance. Its both frustrating and addictive, Bourdain writes. Which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there is and how little time you have to see it. Buy a copy to keep reading! CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Anthony Bourdain’s The Nasty Bits + About the Book + About the Author + An Overall Summary + Preface + ...and much more
ABOUT THE BOOK In Your Inner Fish, Shubin attempts to explore the intersections of evolutionary biology and modern human anatomy. On his faculty page on the University of Chicago website, Neil Shubin writes: The philosophy that underlies all of my empirical work is derived from the conviction that progress in the study of evolutionary biology results from linking research across diverse temporal, phylogenetic, and structural scales. Writing in a friendly, accessible way, Shubin explains the various historical records that are encoded in the human body, from the structures of our eyes to the sequencing of our genes. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK The book begins with Shubins first encounters with his own inner fish. He tells us about his expeditions to the far north in Canada, to Ellesmere Island, where he and his team of paleontologists and fossil finders scoured the rocks to try and find a transitional fossil from the time that the first animals were venturing onto land. The discovery of Tiktaalik Roseae is inarguably a transitional species, an intermediate between fish and the first land-walking tetrapods. In this and in other species, scientists have been able to trace the twisting path of our own anatomys evolution. In Tiktaalik, we are able to see the beginning of our limbs, from the muscles in our shoulders and chest to the bones of our wrists. Shubin traces our connections to animals past and present. Each chapter is devoted to a different part of the body: our hands, facial nerves, teeth inner ear, eyes, brain, olfactory sense. He gives us personal anecdotes as well. He describes his career, from how he first learned to find fossils, to his teams accidental uncovering of a tritheledont fossil, to the long search that led to finding Tiktaalik. CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish + About the Book + About the Author + Overall Summary + Chapter-by-Chapter Summary & Analysis + ...and much more Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish
ABOUT THE BOOK In his introduction to A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson describes a childhood experience common to many of us: a brief infatuation with science, with all its potential and possibility. For Bryson, it was inspired by a textbook’s cut-away illustration of the interior strata of the Earth, with the molten core at the center. For myself, it was a children’s biography of Jacques Cousteau. Excited by the nearly endless prospects of science, the questions that could finally satisfy a child’s curiosity, we both reached for more books, and found our budding passions firmly squashed by an impenetrable wall of unfathomable writing. As Bryson writes in his introduction, “there seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting.” Bryson wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything as an antidote to the dry-as-dust science tomes that weigh down students’ backpacks. It is a layman’s love song to science, to its strange history and stranger characters. Published in 2003, it has been become a popular addition to the popular science genre. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Cipri is a restless wanderer and passionate writer. A graduate of the Evergreen State School in Olympia, WA, Nicole has since written about such varied topics as modern urban farming, the role of glitterbombing as political theater, and the economic impacts of natural disasters. You can follow her adventures on Twitter, @nicolecipri. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Drama abounded in the 19th century. After the discovery of the first dinosaur fossil in 1784, and with subsequent uncovering of massive bones that belonged to other extinct species, there was an uncomfortable public debate concerning extinctions. Why, after all, would an omniscient God create species of animals only to casually wipe them out? Throughout history, the sciences have routinely butted heads with the Church, a trend that continues today. From geology and paleontology, Bryson moves to chemistry. With its origins in the enigmatic studies of alchemy, chemistry evolved along its own strange path. Bryson tells one exemplifying story, in which an amateur alchemist became convinced the he could distill gold from human urine. “The similarity of color,” Bryson explains, “seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.” In an attempt to prove his hypothesis, the man collected fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept in his cellar. After a few months, the man noted, the substance in the buckets began to glow or explode into flames when exposed to air. He had failed in distilling gold from urine, but he had succeeded in creating phosphorous. Buy a copy to keep reading!
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