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BOOKS can stretch generosity beyond its breaking point. You set out to buy a
book for someone and end up coveting it. It seems absurd to buy two copies of
the same book—expensive, too.

But there is a cure: buy paperbacks. A pair cost roughly the same as a
hardback, so you can afford to treat yourself and a friend. So what’s on offer
for November? One for bonfire night is Stephen Pyne’s Fire (British
Museum Press, £15.99), the compelling story of how fire has shaped human
history. Pyne is a bit of a specialist—his other books are Vestal
Fire, World Fire, Fire in America and Burning Bush. Thank goodness
he gave himself a break with The Ice.

Pyne writes about a physical phenomenon that has given birth to a rich
metaphorical language. But biologist Richard Lewontin begins his elegant set of
essays in The Triple Helix (Harvard University Press, £10.50)
with a warning about the dangers of metaphor. The physicist’s “particle” isn’t a
solid, no more than a gene is really a blueprint. He suggests biologists
consider instead what they know of real life. As his subtitle Gene, organism
and environment suggests, he wants to break down artificial borders between
the elements of biology.

Now consider a seriously quirky book from publishers Carcanet: a journal and
poetry workbook by an astronomer who died recently. Rebecca Elson researched
dark matter, had access to the first Hubble data while at Princeton, and was
also a published poet. A Responsibility to Awe (£6.95) shows all
these aspects of her life, with a bit of autobiography, notes about her work
half-crystallised into poetry, and the poems themselves.