Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

This book is a must read for concerned public and private sector professionals. The study, part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's "Consensus Study Report" series, brings together perspectives on plastics in the ocean from and for multiple disciplines. As reported here, the US produces more waste in general--and more plastic waste in particular--than any other global entity. The various authors focus on the US, but a global perspective is included. The summary provides a comprehensive overview of the salient points used to generate four key recommendations. The findings and conclusions to support these recommendations are detailed in each succeeding chapter. The second and third chapters cover plastics as products and as waste, providing a source-to-sink overview of the global plastic cycle. The remaining four chapters focus mainly on the fate and transport of plastics in the ocean, the need for better monitoring of plastic waste in the ocean, and the current state of international strategies for managing plastics. The book is well illustrated and referenced. Numerous tables provide access to the data used to support the findings. The text is written in an easily accessible manner such that laypeople and students from grade eight and up would understand the salient points.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This is an excellent compendium about a celebrated event in 20th-century American history. The Scopes trial was the subject of an award-winning Broadway play. Inherit the Wind (1955), by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, was later adapted into a movie, with remakes appearing almost every decade until 1999. Coauthors Moore (Univ. of Minnesota) and Brooks (great-grandniece of John Thomas Scopes) undertake a comprehensive study of different aspects of the trial. They describe the key players in encyclopedic fashion. In addition, they offer an informative introduction and a chronology of relevant events, beginning with the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, detailing the events of the trial, and concluding with the planned 2025 centennial celebration to be held in Dayton, Tennessee, the site of the trial. The book discusses issues relevant today, such as control of school curricula, the conflict between fundamentalist religion and science, and the right to teach evolution and human origins in US public schools. The text draws on press coverage and archival materials, including Scopes's personal correspondence and previously unpublished family and other photographs. This work is a suitable reference for scholars studying social policy, political science, and the history of science.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers.