As the date on which this brief essay will be published marks the three-hundred-and-fourth anniversary of the Rev. Gilbert White’s birth in 1720 at the very same location as the parish he so lovingly chronicled, it seems only appropriate to bring you news of the most recently published edition of his natural history classic epistolary book “The Natural History of Selborne.”
B.B.’s novel “The Little Grey Men,” originally published in 1942, as it was the recipient of the Carnegie Medal that same year and was later adapted into a television series in 1975, is most likely to be his most popularly known amongst his many books. It recounts the story – as directly received from one with personal knowledge of it, as he tells it – of the last four gnomes in England who live inside an old oak tree beside Folly Brook in Warwickshire.
The New Books Network History of Science podcast channel recently released an interview by Dr. Morteza Hajizadeh of Prof. Al Coppola about his 2016 book “The Theater of Experiment; Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
When it comes to books that not only upset the metaphorical apple cart but felled the entire orchard of toleration on the part of those able to wield raw and unmitigated power at a truly global level, few can be said to have accomplished this more so than Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems,” of which a fresh translation by Mark Davie and William R. Shea will be published by Oxford University Press in February of this very year as an addition to their superb Oxford World’s Classics series.