The Seashell on the Mountaintop
A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth

This book was beautiful and reminded me a bit of Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. Swerve followed Poggio Bracciolini on his quest to recover ancient books. Eventually, he found the only surviving writing of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things and preserved it so that all future generations could know th......more

I picked up this book by Alan Cutler while browsing through the popular science section in a local bookstore, drawn to it mainly because of its nice cover! It turned out to be quite a gem, unlike anything I have ever read. It’s a short biography on the life of Nicolaus Steno, a 17th century anatomis......more

The Seashell on the Mountaintop is a biography of Nicolaus Steno (pronounced STAY-no) a Danish anatomy scholar who lived between 1638-1686 and was an early contributor to the field of geology. Although Steno’s discoveries seem rather obvious today, they can be better appreciated if you have a basic......more

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned int......more