Nominees for Red Cedar Book Award!

 This Red Cedar Book Awards have just announced their nominees for the 2020/2021 season. And on this list there are books by two people among the Sci/Why writers!

Boreal Forest by L.E. Carmichael is one of the nominees, and another nominee is Jude Isabella's book Bringing Back the Wolves: How a Predator Restored an Ecosystem. Both books are from Kids Can Press.

  

Red Cedar Book Awards are British Columbia's Young Readers' Choice Book Awards. Click on this link to see the entire list of nonfiction nominees. It's worth saying that ANY of these nonfiction books will make good reading, and most of them are very scientific indeed. You can also see the list of fiction nominees here at this link.

We're all winners! - The Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing

By Claire Eamer

On September 15, I attended a very nice dinner in a very, very nice heritage house in Toronto - and got a very, very, very nice surprise. My book, Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science, published by Annick Press, won the 2013 Lane Anderson Award for science writing for young readers.

The Lane Anderson Award is a relatively new award honouring the very best science writing in Canada, both in the adult and young reader categories. It was created and is supported by the Fitzhenry Family Foundation. The official website says, "Each award will be determined on the relevance of its content to the importance of science in today’s world, and the author’s ability to connect the topic to the interests of the general trade reader."

It's an honour - a huge honour. And there's money attached, which is unusual and extremely welcome in the world of book writing.

Now, I knew my book was on the three-book short list - that's why I was at the dinner - but my bets were on another of the shortlisted books. However, I was the only one of the three who could attend the ceremony. We all know or know of each other - that's the nature of kids' science writing in Canada - so we decided to put together a short, joint statement of appreciation, with a bit from each of us.

And here it is - from nominees Jude Isabella, Daniel Loxton, and me, Claire Eamer:

Science writers – and especially children’s science writers – carry collegiality to an extreme. All three of the finalists for the children’s book award would jointly like to thank you for this opportunity and for your recognition of the importance of good, accessible science information that fosters science literacy in both adults and children.

From Jude, who wanted to emphasize the contribution of her long-time Kids Can Press editor, Val Wyatt: “She’s been at it for over 30 years and to me this nomination is a testament to Val’s huge impact on science writing for kids in Canada. There’s just so many writers today that are writing and winning awards and everything that wouldn’t be where they are without Val. She’s just legendary.”

From Daniel: “I'm tremendously grateful not only to the Fitzhenry Family Foundation and the judges for this nomination, but to Kids Can Press and my editor Valerie Wyatt for making this book possible in the first place. To Val especially. It's simply not possible to overstate the importance of a good editor in the life of a writer, and Val is the best.”

From Claire: “In addition to the praise of editors, including my editors at Annick Press, I’d like to add my appreciation for the illustrators of these books – including the astonishing Sa Boothroyd, who illustrated Before the World Was Ready. They grab the attention of kids and keep them reading through what is often pretty complex information.”

And here are the three short-listed books:

Before the World Was Ready, Stories of Daring Genius in Science (Annick Press), by Claire Eamer

Chitchat: Celebrating the World's Languages (Kids Can Press), by Jude Isabella

Pterosaur Trouble (Kids Can Press), by Daniel Loxton

Sci/Why Bloggers and Friends Win National Awards

By Claire Eamer. Photos by Juanita Bawagan.

The Canadian Science Writers' Association (CSWA) handed out its top awards at its recent annual meeting in Toronto, and Sci/Why folk were front and centre.

Vancouver-based Sci/Why blogger Shar Levine and her writing partner, Leslie Johnstone, won the Association's Science in Society Youth Book Award for Dirty Science: 25 Experiments with Soil, published by Scholastic. You can peek inside the book here.

Shar Levine (l) and Leslie Johnstone receive their award from CSWA president Stephen Strauss.

Victoria freelance writer Jude Isabella won the coveted Science Journalism award for her story "The Secret Lives of Bears" published in British Columbia Magazine's Fall/Winter 2013 issue. Jude, former editor of YesMag, the late lamented Canadian children's science magazine, was part of the group that launched Sci/Why. You can read her prize-winning article here and you can even see the scientists at work in this short video.

Jude Isabella thanks the CSWA, while Association president Stephen Strauss looks on.

Fontenelle, the "first" popularizer of science

“First” is in quotes because who knows who really was the first person to translate a jargon-laced scientific theory into lay language? And I’m likely only talking Western Science, so I’m biased. My vote, however, goes to the French writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. He may not have written for kids, but with his wit, sense of fun, and vivid imagination, he could have.

Fontenelle’s book Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) was to the 17th century, what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was to the 20^th century — every one who could read had a copy. (Whether they read it — who has actually read A Brief History of Time cover-to-cover? — is another story.)

A slight 100 pages, Conversations takes place over six nights. A philosopher (meaning scientist) is staying at a chateau in the country, where he meets a Marquise. She is young, beautiful, and intelligent. Each night they meet to talk about the natural world. The philosopher opens the world to her eyes, and being curious and open-minded, she absorbs the most daring ideas of science to date. Every science journalist/writer/kids' science writer should read it. In his introduction, Fontenelle was upfront that the book was meant to entertain as well as educate. And he knew his audience. One of his main characters was a woman. Wait. An intelligent woman. Fontenelle understood that the key to his success as a writer was to engage his readers, and women were the ones who organized the salons and invited the intelligentsia, like him, to converse with the educated class about science. Fontenelle seized on that bit of market information — how many other writers were placing smart, beautiful women in mainstream roles?

Fontenelle (1657-1757) lived and wrote during the French enlightenment. Read “Conversations” and you’ll discover a writer far ahead of even that enlightened time period. When would humans build a flying machine to visit the Moon? Are there aliens? Exoplanets? Does Earth go around the Sun? Without his writings, the general reading public would not have had the exposure they did to progressive scientific ideas of the time, i.e. a heliocentric view of the solar system. Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica was published a year after Fontenelle’s book, and guaranteed (though it was seminal) hardly anyone could read and understand the book. It was Fontenelle who popularized the idea that other worlds could exist, inhabited by beings we could hardly imagine.

Today, Fontenelle would be clarifying the ideas about the multiverse, wormholes, the Higgs-Boson particle, and lamenting the demise of SETI. No, wait, he would be writing about more than physics — evolutionary biology and anthropology would definitely be on his radar.

At the time that Fontenelle wrote, educated Europeans had learned a lot about non-Europeans and comparative religion was becoming an active field of scholarship. Travellers, missionaries and colonial administrators were coming back to Europe to write about their adventures, the people, the cultures, and the religions they encountered. In 1661, for example, the Dutch scholar Gadetrius Carolinas, produced a 50-volume work on the many “heathen” religions. Fontenelle avidly read these accounts. In fact, at the same time as Fontenelle’s Of the Origin of Fables (another great read — short and to the point) was published in 1724 (although it was probably written in the 1690s), Francois Joseph Lafitau, a Jesuit Missionary, published The Customs of the American Savage Compared to the Custom of Earliest Times: The Canadian Iroquois and Myths of the Ancient Mediterranean Region.

To Fontenelle, humans may be a diverse lot, in varying stages of civilization, and their physicality partly based on environmental pressures, but the mentality of early humans was not fundamentally or qualitatively different from modern humans: “Clothes may change, but that does not mean that the shape of bodies does. Manners or the lack of them, science or ignorance, more or less of a certain naiveté, these are only man’s externals, and they all change, but the heart never changes, and all of man is contained in the heart.” — Jude Isabella, science writer, Fontenelle Fan