Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State. Jonathan Laurence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). Pp. 606. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780691172125

The Theory of Ecological Communities. Monographs in Population Biology 57, Mark Vellend, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA (2016). 248 pp., $49.95, ISBN: 9780691164847 (Hardback), 9781400883790 (eBook)

A productive concept, or “theory” in ecological jargon, trikes just the right balance between abstract universality nd specific applicability. Too abstract, and ecologists will gnore it as too aloof; too specific, and it will not cross ub-disciplinary boundaries and fade away. Darwin’s Thery of Natural Selection fits this bill, as does MacArthur Wilson’s Island Biogeography. Will Vellend’s Theo...

See life at the extremes Extreme Life of the Sea: Stephen R. Palumbi and Anthony R. Palumbi (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 2014) ISBN-10: 0691149569

Extreme Life of the Sea is a wonderful book, written in an engaging style by world-renowned marine biologist Stephen Palumbi and his science writer/novelist son, Anthony Palumbi. Between the two of them, they have managed to write a book that presents information in a way that a layman without a marine science background will enjoy, but with enough science to make it a useful text for marine bi...

Searching for ourselves Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self Robert V. Levine (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 2016) ISBN: 978-0-691167-916

and we know other couples who pursue careers in different areas of science, or where one half makes the money which softens the rigours of academic life for the other. JA: Any partnership, whether it’s purely scientifi c or personal as well, depends on appreciating and respecting the particular strengths and quirks of the other half. I think that Ol and I have been fortunate in complementing ea...

Billions and billions of bad tomorrows The Worst of Times: Paul B. Wignall, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 2015) ISBN: 9780691142098

Had Scarlett O’Hara faced life in the aftermath of the Capitanian mass extinction, 260 million years ago, rather than the chaos of life in a war-stricken land, a better tomorrow sure would have been a long time in coming. In The Worst of Times, Paul Wignall marshals the most recent paleontological and geological evidence to argue that life on earth faced its roughest patch yet during a vast eig...

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. By Gregory Clark. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 420. $29.95, cloth