Everyday Practice of Science

[...] an absolute gem. As a welcome antidote to the wiz-bang, techno-babble world of TV forensic dramas, Frederick Grinnell offers a real-life look at the scientific process. Laboratory News [Grinnell] does a lot of serious thinking aloud about big themes in science: discovery and credibility and integrity and (perhaps all the more pointedly because he is an academic biologist who works in Dallas, Texas, among the biblical fundamentalists) the nature of faith. Out of the perfectly self-effacing prose, very good things emerge, including a sense of the writer as a warm, fair-minded and thoughtful human being with a finely tuned sense of propriety. He chooses beautiful and apposite quotations from Francis Collins, Albert Einstein and the painter Joan Miro in half a page, and punctiliously includes the references. Tim Radford, guardian.co.uk