Science in the Neighborhood: Discover how STEM professionals keep Sacramento clean, dry, and moving plus secrets of how everyday things work

For residents of Northern California, particularly of Sacramento but even more so for the curious reader, Amy Rogers’s Science in the Neighborhood is a wonderful read. It is writing about fascinating scientific facts of things we encounter daily. Rogers is a scientist as well as writer and journalist, and she excels in all. Her writing and explanations are not full of heavy scientific language—she talks to us in common, everyday language with an easy, clear style no one should have difficulty following. She divides her book into chapters, each on similar subjects, and divides each chapter into brief, easily-read subjects. In the subtitle of her book, she refers to STEM professionals, but this reviewer failed to find what the acronym stands for. But not to worry—it’s not important. She starts off with something most of us were always curious about—how traffic engineers regulate traffic lights (mostly automatically but also manually during rush hour), then onto flooding (the most severe threat in Sacramento), and, along the same line, on weekly garbage collection (and where it disappears to), the Delta breeze, and so on. This is a fascinating read.