a longer list!

Interesting to compare McEwan's list (previous post) with the "top 100 science books of the century" compiled for American Scientist - not to be confused with Scientific American for their Nov-Dec 1999 issue. It was published with a series of commentaries by scientific luminaries and aithors on which book had influenced them. You can read the whole thing here.

American Scientist, incidentally, has much the best science book review coverage of any magazine I know - wide-ranging, authoritative, well written, and always available on the web. Now that New Scientist in the UK has more or less given up on books, it is one of the few places where significant science books which fail to catch the attention of literary editors get the attention they deserve.

The list covers technical books and biographiers as well as what we now call pop science, and is not one any sane person could set out to read through. But it is packed with interesting things.