Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2006

Physics Top

This is the first publication to describe the evolution of fluid dynamics as a major field in modern science and engineering. It contains a description of the interaction between applied research and application, taking as its example the history of fluid mechanics in the 20th century. The focus lies on the work of Ludwig Prandtl, founder of the aerodynamic research center (AVA) in Göttingen, whose ideas and publications have influenced modern aerodynamics and fluid mechanics in many fields. While suitable for others, this book is intended for natural scientists and engineers as well as historians of science and technology.

Sometime this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all other natural factors. Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Niño ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Along with a riveting history of climate change, Tim Flannery offers specific suggestions for action for both lawmakers and individuals, from investing in renewable power sources like wind, solar, and geothermal energy, to offering an action plan with steps each and every one of us can take right now to reduce deadly CO2 emissions by as much as 70 percent.

An textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate atmospheric science and meteorology students. Although this book addresses a technically and mathematically demanding subject, the writing style is designed to be engaging and accessible for students requiring a basic foundation in atmospheric physics.

On New Year's Eve, 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake. Journalist Maraniss now brings the great baseball player back to life. Anyone who saw Clemente play will never forget him--he was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. But Clemente was that rare athlete who rose above sports to become a symbol of larger themes. Born in rural Puerto Rico, at a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans playing organized ball in the United States, Clemente went on to become the greatest Latino player in the major leagues, a ballplayer of determination, grace, and dignity who paved the way and set the highest standard for waves of Latino players who followed in later generations.--From Simon & Schuster description.

Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling–bouts that symbolized and galvanized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war. David Margolick takes us into the careers of both men. We see Louis in his boyhood and amateur days in Detroit and Chicago, and the blossoming of his boxing genius. We see him, already a near-mythical figure, taking New York by storm in the 1930s, fighting before record crowds, the savior of a sport that had fallen into decline and a long sought after symbol of redemption for black America after the scandalous reign of Jack Johnson two decades earlier. And we witness how with talent, a gentle personality, and shrewd management, Louis managed to trump the brutal racism directed at him and came to dominate what had been primarily a white man’s sport, becoming a hero of unprecedented power and influence in black America. Schmeling, we learn, was a kind of chameleon, a cultural icon in Weimar Germany who seamlessly, disconcertingly, maintained his privileged status after the Nazi takeover. He pulled off a remarkable feat, relying on a Jewish manager and a Jewish promoter in New York while being extolled at home as a model of “racial superiority.” Margolick meticulously examines all the complex ties that developed between Schmeling and the Nazis, shattering the myth that they frowned upon him before he upset Louis in 1936–he was a ten-to-one underdog–and ostracized him after losing to Louis two years later. We see the extraordinary buildup to the 1938 rematch–the worsening international tensions seemingly raising the stakes–in which Louis would need only 124 seconds to defeat Schmeling, while radio allowed the whole world to listen. Margolick vividly captures the outpouring of emotion that the two fighters aroused–in the white South, in the black and Jewish communities in the United States, in Germany, everywhere–and he makes clear the cultural and social divisions the two men came to represent as the threat posed by the Nazis became increasingly clear, and as America began to feel the effects of a nascent civil rights movement. Schmeling’s postwar success in business and Louis’s sad decline add a poignant coda. A book at once about sports and about a pivotal moment in twentieth-century history, Beyond Glory pulses with energy from first to last.

The story of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and his teammates purportedly conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds has lingered in our collective consciousness for more than eighty years. With baseball so closely linked to American values and ideals, the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 disenchanted baseball fans, changed the way Americans felt about the national pastime, and fostered changes in the game.

Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered by journalists, historians, novelists, filmmakers, and baseball fans. Offering insights into what different cultural narratives reveal about their creators and the eras in which they were produced, Saying It's So is a complex study of cultural values, memory, and the ways people make meaning.

Addressing the relationship between cultural narratives and social reality, Nathan considers the media's coverage of scandal -- from front-page attention to scathing commentaries and cartoons -- when the story broke in 1920 and in the following years. He also examines how oral tradition reiterated the scandal before new narratives began to appear at midcentury.

In a series of astute reflections on Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural, Eliot Asinof's popular history Eight Men Out, and the work of the historians David Voigt and Harold Seymour, Nathan sheds light on the ways cultural and historical meaning is produced. Also considered are representations of the scandal in popular fiction and film during the Reagan era, the popular tourist destination and baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa, created for the filmField of Dreams, Ken Burns's television documentary Baseball, and the country's reactions to the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike.

How the Olympics rose from the ashes of bankruptcy to become the world's most powerful brand