The Library Journal has just selected its best science books of 2006. Science’s Big Picture—Best Sci-Tech Books 2006 – 3/1/2007 – Library Journal

“Of the 34 books selected as the best of 2006, three—Amir Aczel’s The Artist and the Mathematician, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, and Chet Raymo’s Walking Zero—draw both sobering and inspiring lessons for today from science’s long history. And what’s in store for the future of science? As Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers compellingly detail, global warming remains one of our most pressing concerns. At the same time, new theories in the physical and natural sciences, explored respectively by Charles Seife’s Decoding the Universe and John Whitfield’s In the Beat of a Heart, have great potential.”

Congratulations to John Whitfield, who was a subeditor and then a news reporter for Nature before writing his book on the search for an underlying order in the biological world. David Robinson, reviewing the book in Nature, wrote:

“Whitfield does a fine job of describing the logic behind the theory and its antecedents. He unpacks its key assumptions and describes what the fractal plumbing system responsible for quarter-power scaling would look like. No armchair pundit, Whitfield interviewed the theory’s authors and their colleagues, censused trees in Costa Rican forests with Enquist’s team of students and postdocs, and spent a few less arduous hours having his own metabolism measured in London. His first-hand experiences at the subject’s coalface are vividly readable. Whitfield’s later chapters consider how metabolism relates to biodiversity and biogeography, and how it might dovetail with genetics. They also dwell on how these grand ideas might apply, or not, to the largest part of the tree of life: microbes. Overall, Whitfield’s book provides the best available introduction to West, Brown and Enquist’s big idea.”