The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2011

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"A Mariner original."
The organ dealer / Yudhijit Bhattacharjee -- Nature's spoils / Burkhard Bilger -- The chemist's war / Deborah Blum -- Fertility rites / Jon Cohen -- The brain that changed everything / Luke Dittrich -- Emptying the skies / Jonathan Franzen -- Fish out of water / Ian Frazier -- Lies, damned lies, and medical science / David H. Freedman -- Letting go / Atul Gawande -- The treatment / Malcolm Gladwell -- Cosmic blueprint of life / Andrew Grant -- The (elusive) theory of everything / Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow -- Spectral light / Amy Irvine -- The spill seekers / Rowan Jacobsen -- New dog in town / Christopher Ketcham -- Taking a fall / Dan Koeppel -- The first church of robotics / Jaron Lanier -- The love that dare not squawk its name / Jon Mooallem -- Could time end? / George Musser -- Sign here if you exist / Jill Sisson Quinn -- Face-blind / Oliver Sacks -- Waste MGMT / Evan I. Schwartz -- The whole fracking enchilada / Sandra Steingraber -- The new king of the sea / Abigail Tucker -- The killer in the pool / Tim Zimmermann.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Exceptional! submitted by sdunav on July 2, 2012, 4:37pm I loved most of the articles in here, and the two I didn't really like were well-done (but about astro-chemistry and physics ). The writing is powerful, the topics are all timely and important, and several are mind-altering and very funny - this collection is superb, as the title implies.

My favorites: Nature's Spoils (about fermentation food activists), homosexual albatrosses, jellyfish are taking over!, killer whales in captivity (and the trainer deaths), people who fall from airplanes and survive, Asian carp in Illinois, the government's experiment in poisoning drinkers during Prohibition, and medical statistics and lies. Atul Gawande's article on hospice care and end of life decisions is probably the best piece in the book, and one that anyone with older parents or spouses should read.