Light Elements

by Judith Stone

Book Overview

An award-winning columnist for Discover magazine takes a light look at hard science. If science had been this funny in school, maybe you would have listened. Part stand-up comic, part gonzo... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345366085
• ISBN13: 9780345366085
• Release Date: April 1991
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Learning should always be this fun

Named after her award-winning column in Discover magazine, Light Elements is a collection of essays that appeared there and a few originals, on topics roughly categorized as either Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, or General. Stone's style is like crossing Dave Barry, Stephen Jay Gould, and a generic magazine interviewer--and what a party that menage a trois would have been! She has a tendancy to go for the pun, but her word choice while doing so ranges so far across the field, and the informational content between the puns is so high, that you find yourself grinning rather than wincing. The topics are an incredible mixture of commercial science (a microwaveable hot fudge sundae?) to research speculation (the physiological aspects of humor). Just a list of topics is fun: ozone-destroying cattle, mummification of dead pets, thorny security fences (bushes, not bush league), velcro, dental psychology, why people wince at the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, the culture of country music bars (and I bet you thought there wasn't any), jumping and reeking roaches, the cheese detective and nouveaux punctuation. Don Norman, who I've been raving about recently, even pops up as part of an essay entitled "Voodoo Ergonomics." As a blurb on the cover says, "If science had been this funny in school, maybe you would have listened." Maybe you will now.

Hilarious & Informative

A collection of "Light Elements" columns from Discover magazine, these are as informative as they are amusing. Puns, popular culture references and considerable irreverance are Stone's tools-of-the-trade, and as the cover states, "If science had been this funny in school, maybe you would have listened."