J. Craig Venter Biologist and entrepreneur
I have two favourites that I would like to highly recommend. The first is Packing for Mars by Mary Roach (W. W. Norton). This book provides a significant new look at the biology of human space-flight in an entertaining and very readable format. A must-read for anyone who has thought, as I have, about humans in space. The second is Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape (Free Press). Harris effectively takes morality out of ownership by religions and gives it a strict scientific basis. While I intuitively know that morality is independent of religion, Harris puts the case forward in a very compelling way.
Dara O’Briain Comedian
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My pick is Massive by Ian Sample (Virgin Books). When all the others around the pool on my holiday were gripped by The Girl with a Dragon for a Face, this was my holiday page-turner: a clear and engrossing description of the physics of the Higgs boson (with surrounding weirdness), combined with a breathless account of the leap-frogging race for its discovery.
Even for someone who finds historical biography the least interesting part of most science books, it balances the physics and the personalities perfectly. There’s always next year for The Girl whose Orchid is on Fire. Apparently, that’s quite good too.
Roger Highfield Editor of New Scientist
I was taken with The Music Instinct by Philip Ball (Bodley Head), a book that explores the brain mechanisms we use to organise sound. We are predisposed to make the world a musical place. The big question is whether this mental circuitry is designed to handle music, or if tunes are just “auditory cheesecake”, as Steven Pinker puts it – sounds that accidentally generate pleasure through neural systems that evolved to respond to other stimuli.
Ball has no easy answer, but this is more than compensated for by the way he enriches our appreciation of this universal feature of human culture.
Owen Flanagan Philosopher, neurobiologist and editor
Oliver Sacks’s The Mind’s Eye (Knopf) is another masterpiece of phenomenological description by our most gifted and humane chronicler of neurological disorders. This collection of essays introduces us to a variety of cases in which there are major visual disturbances, some congenital, others the result of strokes and lesions – including the author’s own recent fight with ocular melanoma.
I love this book because Sacks effortlessly blends his teaching of neurology with the most sensitive descriptions of the ways in which our individual brains yield the most extraordinary variety of human experience.
V. S. Ramachandran Neurologist and author
My favourite book is The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff (W. W. Norton). It is a refreshingly original book on the heyday of (mostly) Victorian natural history, anatomy and palaeontology.
Clive Anderson TV and radio personality, comedian
This year I was chairman of the judges of the Wellcome Trust prize for books with a medical theme. We awarded the prize to Rebecca Skloot’s excellent The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown). But also on our shortlist was Angel of Death by Gareth Williams (Palgrave Macmillan) which deserves a mention. Williams recounts the history of smallpox in a breezy, accessible style. And what a history it is. Responsible for the death of millions, smallpox was eventually eradicated by the efforts of human science. (Sorry to spoil the ending.) Before its demise, the disease played its part in assisting the colonisation of the rest of the world by European powers by wiping out the native populations.
The English scientist Edward Jenner is of course a hero of this tale, though as Williams relates, his efforts were by no means appreciated by all of his medical contemporaries. Other great characters emerge, such as Lady Mary Montague who, before Jenner’s breakthrough, introduced ideas similar to vaccination.
Graham Farmelo Physicist and author
Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury) is a rare thing: a wholly original, beautifully written book about mathematics that does its subject justice but is so widely accessible that it will please everyone, regardless of their numeracy.
The Royal Society should keep its science book prize going for at least another year so that this fine volume can win it.
Jennifer Ouellette Author and blogger
The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum (Penguin) serves up a delectable concoction of poisons, history and murderous mayhem in jazz-age New York City. At the centre is chief medical examiner Charles Norris, who bucked a corrupt local government to establish the modern field of forensic chemistry. This is true crime with a scientific twist, and so well told that it’s nearly impossible to put down.
Steven Rose Neuroscientist and author
Raymond Tallis’s Michelangelo’s Finger (Atlantic) explores what it means to be human through a quirky meditation on an often overlooked and uniquely human capacity – pointing to indicate direction or emphasise argument. There’s a serious point (yes, pun intended) behind Tallis’s ruminations.
Deborah Blum Journalist and author
My choice is (drum roll) The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (Little, Brown & Company). It is a lovely book – smart, funny, engaging and occasionally poetic. And in the midst of all that it reminds readers that everything, including ourselves, is woven from an intricate chemical tapestry. In a culture that throws around the phrase “chemical-free” as if it had meaning, this is an elegant rebuttal to that idea.
Rebecca Goldstein Philosopher and novelist
Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie by Laura Redniss (Harper Collins) is an utterly original work that interweaves scientific scholarship, poetic love story and stirring artwork. It’s a luminous demonstration of the ways in which science and art can enhance one another.
Mary Roach Columnist and author
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown) is turning out to have an immortal life of its own. So many American universities have adopted it as their freshman year common book that Skloot had to set up a second book tour just to visit the campuses. Small wonder: few science books so successfully blend narrative form and science.
In this case it’s the story of a sharecropper’s daughter, Henrietta Lacks, whose virulent cervical tumour – unbeknownst to her children – became the first successful, commercially viable cell culture. Skloot’s stunning work turns biology and ethics into a compelling, thought-provoking reading experience for young minds and old hands alike.
Sean Carroll Scientist and author
Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (Spiegel & Grau) is an excellent blend of colourful explanations, true-life storytelling, and momentously important science. All told with a wonderful sense of humour.