NATALIE ANGIER writes about biology for the New York Times, where she has won a Pulitzer Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award, and other honors. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly, Natural Obsessions, and Woman, named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, People, National Public Radio, Village Voice, and Publishers Weekly, among others. A New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist, Woman is "a text so necessary and abundant and true that all efforts of its kind, for decades before and after it, will be measured by it" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Angier lives with her husband and daughter outside of Washington, D.C.

Introduction Sisyphus Sings with a Ying When the second of her two children turned thirteen, my sister decided that it finally was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo. These were kiddie places, she told me. Her children now had more mature tastes. They liked refined forms of entertainment - art museums, the theater, ballet. Isn't that something? My sister's children's bodies were lengthening, and so were their attention spans. They could sit for hours at a performance of Macbeth without so much as checking the seat bottom for fossilized wads of gum. No more of this mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton's laws in motion, or something like that; who bothers to read the explanatory placards anyway? And, oops, hmm, hey, Mom, this thing seems to have stopped working! No more aping the gorillas or arguing over the structural basis of a polar bear's white coat or wondering about the weird goatee of drool gathering on the dromedary's chin. Sigh. How winged are the slippers of time, how immutably forward point their dainty steel-tipped toe boxes. And how common is this middle-class rite of passage into adulthood: from mangabeys to Modigliani, T. rex to Oedipus Rex. The differential acoustics tell the story. Zoos and museums of science and natural history are loud and bouncy and notably enriched with the upper registers of the audio scale. Theaters and art museums murmur in a courteous baritone, and if your cell phone should bleat out a little Beethoven chime during a performance, and especially should you be so barbaric as to answer it, other members of the audience have been instructed to garrote you with a rolled-up Playbill. Science appreciation is for the young, the restless, the Ritalined. It's the holding-pattern fun you have while your gonads are busy ripening, and the day that an exhibit of Matisse vs. Picasso in Paris exerts greater pull than an Omnimax movie about spiders is the debutante's ball for your brain. Here I am! Come and get me! And don't forget your Proust! Naturally enough, I used the occasion of my sister's revelation about lapsing memberships to scold her. Whaddya talking about, giving up on science just because your kids have pubesced? Are you saying that's it for learning about nature? They know everything they need to know about the universe, the cell, the atom, electromagnetism, geodes, trilobites, chromosomes, and Foucault pendulums, which even Stephen Jay Gould once told me he had trouble understanding? How about those shrewdly coquettish optical illusions that will let you see either a vase or two faces in profile, but never, ever two faces and a vase, no matter how hard you concentrate or relax or dart your eyes or squint like Humphrey Bogart or command your perceptual field to stop being so archaically serial and instead learn to multitask? Are your kids really ready to leave these great cosmic challenges and mysteries behind? I demanded. Are you? My voice hit a shrill note, as it does when I'm being self-righteous, and my sister is used to this and replied with her usual shrug of common sense. The membership is expensive, she said, her kids study plenty of science in school, and one of them has talked of becoming a marine biologist. As for her own needs, my sister said, there's always PBS. Why was I taking this so personally? Because I'm awake, I muttered. Give me a chance, and I'll take the jet stream personally. My bristletail notwithstanding, I couldn't fault my sister for deciding to sever one of the few connections she had to the domain

"Natalie Angier provides a masterful, authoritative synthesis of the state of knowledge across the entire scientific landscape." --Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of Five Minds for the Future and Frames of Mind

"Natalie Angier takes us on a whirligig tour of the scientific canon. She draws on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and her own work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times to create an entertaining guide to scientific literacy. The Canon is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time - from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming."--BOOK JACKET.