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The Best American Science Writing 2001 edited by Timothy Ferris,
HarperCollins, $27.50, ISBN 0066211646

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2001 edited by Edward O. Wilson,
Houghton Mifflin, $13.00, ISBN 0618153594

YES, you can tell them apart. But you can also bet the two publishers cursed
last year when they discovered the other was also launching an annual anthology
to bring together some of the best science writing published in American
newspapers and magazines. They even follow the same drill, employing a regular
editor to do the heavy work of skimming and Xeroxing, and a big-name volume
editor to make the final selection and offer a classy introduction.

And the results, in the second of each series, are broadly similar. A mix of
scientists and journalists, a range of subjects leaning strongly toward the life
sciences and medicine, and a bias toward weighty organs like The
New Yorker, The Sciences and Harper’s Magazine. Oh, and a
lot of pretty good writing.

Only real enthusiasts will want both books, so which to buy? Ferris’s team
fields Natalie Angier, Ernst Mayr, Steven Gould, Tracey Kidder, Alan Lightman
and Freeman Dyson. Wilson has Jane Goodall, Oliver Morton, David Quammen and
Edward Hoagland. Both books contain Stephen Hall’s reflections on stem cell
research and Richard Preston’s New Yorker profile of genome king Craig
Venter.

The main difference is that Wilson includes more nature writing. There is no
room here for a history of US nature writing and how it feeds into modern
science writing, but take my word that it does. The current crop of nature
writers, though, scarcely rival the great stylists of the past. The meditations
on living wonders here somehow seem more ephemeral than the harder science
writing that makes up the bulk of Ferris’s selections.

On the other hand, Wilson offers a meatier introduction, and includes Bill
Joy’s necessary and still debated essay from Wired on the perils of
fashioning self-reproducing technologies.

Oh well, whichever you choose—Ferris or Wilson, Gould or
Goodall—you’ll find American science writing is a flourishing art. Isn’t
it about time someone produced even just one collection of the best of British
science writing?