Book Reviews
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He's very educated! Dr. Collins received dual B.S. degrees from Virginia Tech in 1987 in Biology and Psychology. He earned an M.S. in Biopsychology in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Biopsychology at the University of Georgia in 1993.
He's lived and studied abroad: While in the doctoral program at the University of Georgia he received a fellowship to study at the Friedrich-Alexander Universitat Medical School in Erlangen Germany.
Other things he has done: Dr. Collins also conducted research in Animal Bioacoustics and Emotionality for the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research at the Armstrong Laboratory in San Antonio Texas. He has taught at the University of Georgia, Athens Tech, Washington and Lee University (Virginia), SUNY College at Geneseo, NY, and Ft. Valley State University. Dr. Collins is a professor of psychology at Middle Georgia College where he has taught since 1995.
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins is now out in a 30th anniversary edition. I read this book as part of a junior bioethics course at VA Tech. It singlehandedly changed the way that I think about genetics! The basic premise that organisms are vessels for their genes has made the author simultaneous celebrated and controversial. It is beautifully written and highly readable by non-scientists.
On Human Nature by E.O. Wilson
by E.O. Wilson, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. I read this book after reading Wilson’s Sociobiology in a “Social Behavior of Birds and Mammals” course as a VA Tech senior. I have loaned it out to a few especially inquisitive students over the years and, though it still has its dust jacket, it is beginning to look well-worn! This book both changed the way that I think about people and forever altered my understanding of the nature versus nurture argument. I still quote Wilson regularly in my classes.
(Wilson is at it again with his newly published The Social Conquest of the Earth, in which he argues that eusociality, or ‘true’ sociality, “was one of the major innovations in the history of life” and is as important as the evolution of wings or flowers!)
Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt, did NOT win the Pulitzer like his Angela's Ashes, but SHOULD have! I read McCourt's memoir of his 30 year teaching career in preparation for my teaching an "Exploring Teaching & Learning" course here at MGC. I think I read it in only a couple of days. (I couldn't put it down!) His storytelling is effortless to read. Funny, sad, and full of real insight into the world of education, this book had me alternating between laughing out loud and pausing for some serious contemplation the whole way through.