Edward Dolnick is the former chief science writer for The Boston Globe and is the author of, among others, The Rush and The Clockwork Universe.Dolnick's latest book is The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From.
From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for your new book?Learn more about the book and author at Edward Dolnick's website.
A: It is a curious one. I had written a previous book, The Clockwork Universe, about planets and stars and such. It dawned on me that people figured out those questions before they figured out life on earth.
This should be easy, but it came 200 years later! How come the hard questions were the easy ones and the easy questions were the hard ones? How come Newton was before Darwin?
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: It was lots of research, and to my surprise, mostly unfamiliar territory, not just to me but to general readers. There was a lot in textbooks on embryology, but it had seldom been told as a story. The research was odd, esoteric, in bits and pieces. I was probably on some watch list for sex manuals from the...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Forger's Spell.
The Page 99 Test: The Clockwork Universe.
The Page 99 Test: The Rush.
The Page 99 Test: The Seeds of Life.
--Marshal Zeringue