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READINGS IN LANGUAGE
This new section features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language. The selections could be anywhere from light and humorous to serious and scholarly, and they range widely from the reading, writing, listening, and speaking disciplines to the teaching and learning of English.
Book on camouflage, mimicry wins $81,000 award on color theme
A book written by UK-based writer, journalist and editor Peter Forbes, Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (Yale University Press, 283 pages), won the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing. Forbes, who primarily writes about the relationship between art and science, received the prize of 50,000 British pounds ($81,000) last March 22 from England’s University of Warwick.
The theme of the Warwick Prize for this year is color, and the winning work for a particular theme is chosen for representing an intellectual, scientific and/or imaginative advance written with energy and clarity in the English language. Books in any genre and from any country on a specific theme are considered in the Warwick Prize selections, which are undertaken every two years.
Forbes’s Dazzled and Deceived is both natural science and cultural history. It explains how nature has perfected the art of deception through mimicry and camouflage, enabling animals big and small to protect themselves, to attract and repel, to bluff and warn, to forage, and to hide. It then links mimicry and camouflage to art, literature, military tactics and medical cures, and shows how these defense mechanisms in nature are intricately involved in the perennial dispute between evolution and creationism.
The chair of the Warwick Prize judging panel, Michael Rosen, a broadcaster, children's novelist, poet, and author of 140 books, explains why Forbes won the prize: “Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage was singled out for a number of reasons. It’s a book about scientific concepts; it’s a book about art and it’s actually an exciting read because Forbes does what all good storytellers do – he reveals and conceals in equal measure. It is also a book of massive surprises. How does he bring the surrealists into this? I was delighted to revisit my old friends the melanin moths who were the standby of A-Level and first year university teaching about evolution. At one moment I thought the whole story was going down the pan. Would my education be in ruins? But no, Forbes pulled the moths from the fire!”
Read the University of Warwick announcement about the 2011 Warwick Prize now!
Read a review by Steven Vogel of Dazzled and Deceived in The American Scientist now!
Read a review by Marek Kohn of Dazzled and Deceived in the Independent.UK now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Forbes is a writer, journalist and editor based in the United Kingdom who has a longstanding interest in the relationship between art and science. He has written columns and reviews on the relationship between art and science for several magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail, Scientific American, New Scientist, and World Medicine. Before becoming a freelance writer and editor, he was an editorial assistant at the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (1974-1979) and a natural history desk editor for Equinox publishers in Oxford (1979-84). He has been researching biological subjects for the last 10 years, an effort that culminated in his two books to date, The Gecko's Foot and Dazzled and Deceived.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “Giving Literature Virtual Life,” an article that came out in the March 21, 2011 issue of The New York Times, Patricia Cohen writes about the first generation of undergraduates at dozens of colleges in the United States who are taking humanities courses—including Shakespeare—that are deeply shaped by powerful digital tools and vast online archives. Cohen explains: “Many teachers and administrators are only beginning to figure out the contours of this emerging field of digital humanities, and how it should be taught. In the classroom, however, digitally savvy undergraduates are not just ready to adapt to the tools but also to explore how new media may alter the very process of reading, interpretation and analysis.”
Read Patricia Cohen’s “Giving Literature Virtual Life” in The New York Times now!
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