Is it Spring Break yet? As I’m writing this, the sun is shining and out the window, two swans glide along the Boardman River. They’re not the only ones gliding and diving: besides the ubiquitous mallards, there are mergansers, buffleheads, scoters, and ring-necks. What a nice day, you’re thinking … sounds like Spring Break. Nope. It’s March and the bay is frozen. The river’s the only open body of water around here and that’s why the crowd.

But I’m thinking about Spring Break; I’m thinking about sitting on the beach, legs stretched to the sun. My son is standing in the surf, fishing, and I’m reaching for a book… which one?



How about Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time (Chelsea Green, 978-1-933392-43-1, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset). This collection of thirty-six interviews is just long enough, just short enough, just provocative enough to warrant lots of in-between surf gazing.

“People think that the brain appeared suddenly,” says Rodolfo Llinás from the NYU School of Medicine. “This is not true. It took 650 million years to become what it is.”

Hmmm. 650 million years ago there was only one land mass and it was called Pangaea.

How about an interview with Daniel Dennett, director for the Center of cognitive Studies at Tufts. He talks about consciousness, soul, will, language, and ESP. And Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor (emeritus) and one of the greatest science writers of all time. He talks about extinctions by meteorites and the consequent diversification. The last major extinction happened 65 million years ago, and it takes about ten million years for the earth to recover. Between ten and twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was sa rich in species as it’s ever been. “Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.”

Topics range from the why vodka sometimes refuses to unfreeze, the definition of beauty, and the lack of a biological limit on the human lifespan. What could be more wonderful?

Well, magic, I guess.

In Mind, Life and Universe Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at U-C Sand Diego points out that right-handed people tend to hear high-pitched sounds on the right and low pitched sounds on the left. This is regardless of where those sounds are actually coming from. She calls it an acoustic illusion.

Almost magic, but not quite. There is an explanation.

Did anyone ever stop to ask why Orpheus’s lyre charmed stones and snakes, heaven and earth? If they did, was the answer simply because it’s music?


The Biblical account of the birth of magic, according to Astrology, Art, and Alchemy in Art by Matilde Battistini (translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, J. Paul Getty Museum, 978-0-89236-907-2) begins with the rebellion of the angels and their outcast from heaven.

These children of heaven, having fallen in love with mortal women, decided to reveal to their brides the secret for dominating the Earth. Thus were the magic arts born, the knowledge of the stars and therapeutic properties of minerals and plants that women received and passed on for millennia.

All right. That sounds like fun.

The rest of the book is just as enticingly written, and is fabulously illustrated with the works of everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Giotto to Riminaldi to Blake. The handy size – 5 ¼ x 7 ¾ -- will pack easily in a bag, and all ages and orthodoxies will find something to wonder about when the rain falls on your holiday parade.