have gone out between we some books on the science linked to the new coronavirus, the infection it causes and the response of our immune system.
But other books on science subjects have also come at a bad time for the book trade: bookstores were closed, many book launch sessions were cancelled, the Lisbon and Porto Book Fairs were postponed.
A number of publishers, booksellers and readers are fortunately resisting this state of affairs. The works listed below, all recent, are in alphabetical order of the author's surname:
- Daniel M. Davis, The Amazing Immune System, Discover the Power of Your Body's Natural Defenses, Reading Ideas. The author, physicist and professor of Immunology at Manchester University, explains in this book, published in 2018, now published in Portuguese with reference to new times (there is a current note by the author), the complex system that protects our organism against an invader.
The author presents, with great pedagogical art, the most recent discoveries in his area, where news abounds thanks to intense research.
- Ann Druyan, Cosmos, Possible Worlds, Gradual. This book is worth reading because, 40 years after Carl Sagan's Cosmos, it is a new work in the same style that preserves the spirit of the first.
Or it wasn't written by the person who knew Sagan best, his wife.
Science has progressed, the world has evolved, but Sagan's message remains valid because it is timeless: "We owe our obligation to survive not only to ourselves, but to the vast and ancient Cosmos from which we sprang."
By reading Druyan's well-illustrated book, as before reading Sagan's book (the two TV series scripts), we understand better our place in the Universe.
- June Goodfield An Imagined World. A History of Scientific Discovery, Gradual. I recommend reading or rereading this book, which has now been reprinted in tribute to Maria de Sousa, the Portuguese scientist who was a victim of Covid-19.
She is Ana Brito, the Portuguese scientist whose work the author has followed for five years. About the Portuguese edition: it is a pity that it did not include the author's new preface, with a letter from the scientist to the author and to the reader, in the 1992 reissue of the University of Michigan Press.
The urgency of the posthumous tribute is perceived, but new readers would have been able to better understand the reasons for the long durability of a book that had excellent appreciation, including that of the British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960. Today an imagined world it's a great classic!
- Adam Kucharski, The Laws of Contagion. How viral outbreaks arise and disappear, Porto Editora. The author, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, investigated the Ebola and Zica pandemics.
In this work, translated in record time, as it came out in the UK a few months ago, it talks about viral transmission, not only from a biological perspective, but also from the perspective of computers.
In fact, until recently, our most common connection to viruses was in the computer world.
And today we are confronted all over the planet with a harmful microorganism and this book already talks about Covid-19. It is a work of dissemination, full of examples and avoiding technical terminology.
- Daniel Quammen, Contagion. A story of viruses that are changing the world, lens. In this work, whose original is from 2012, the author, an award-winning American science writer, deals, in a very lively writing, with the process that transmits viruses from animals such as bats to humans (a process known as zoonosis).
In particular, it speaks of the passage of HIV from chimpanzees to humans. The foreword is by the Portuguese virologist Pedro Simas and right after is an article by Quammen that appeared in the New York Times at the end of last January, when the current pandemic was still in its infancy. There are more than 600 pages that are read not only with profit, but also with pleasure.
Happy reading!
Author Carlos Fiolhais is Professor of Physics University of Coimbra
© 2020 – Science in the Regional Press / Ciência Viva
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