Edmund Blair Bolles
Edmund Blair Bolles is an American humanist and science writer. His work often explores the intersection of science and culture, including books on geology, physics, memory, language and perception.
Early life and education
Bolles grew up in Washington, D.C., Paris, and Toledo, Ohio. He earned a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He served two years in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching science, mathematics and agriculture, and has lived in Washington State, Los Angeles and New York. He is also listed by the Peace Corps among its notable volunteers in Arts & Literature.Career
Bolles has worked for decades as a freelance writer with a special interest in the meeting point between science and human imagination. His books have addressed subjects ranging from the discovery of the Ice Age to the intellectual debates surrounding quantum theory, and from memory and perception to language development and adoption.Reception
Einstein Defiant received positive trade reviews; Publishers Weekly called it "highly recommended for science buffs as well as readers of biography and cultural history", and Library Journal described it as "colorful, readable, and well explains Einstein’s reservations about quantum mechanics".Selected works
Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum RevolutionThe Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice AgeGalileo’s Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing A Second Way of KnowingRemembering and Forgetting: Inquiries into the Nature of MemorySo Much to Say: How to Help Your Child Learn to TalkBabel’s Dawn: A Natural History of the Origins of Speech Who Owns America?The Penguin Adoption HandbookAdoption Handbook The Beauty of AmericaFodor’s Animal Parks of AfricaMajor works So Much to Say : on early language; argues children speak because they have "something to say"—private thoughts/emotions to report.Remembering and Forgetting : opens with "Remembering is an act of imagination"; distinguishes computer storage from human remembering as sensory re-creation.A Second Way of Knowing : on perception as grasping meaning from the senses; contrasts animal/human, sensory-based knowing with symbolic computation.