The New Scientist's CultureLab blog asked a whole slew of editors and contributors to name a notable 2009 book. It's quite an extensive list.
- Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham
- Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate by Diego Gambetta
- The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
- Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
- Confabulation: Views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy edited by William Hirstein
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
- Reading in the Brain: The science and evolution of a human invention by Stanislas Dehaene
- Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity by James Hansen
- The Strangest Man: The hidden life of Paul Dirac, quantum genius by Graham Farmelo
- The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani
- Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner
- Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics by Fulvio Melia
- Not A Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human by Jeremy Taylor
- An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world by Frances Larson
- Plastic Fantastic: How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world by Eugenie Samuel Reich
- Outliers: The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman
- Naming Nature: The clash between instinct and science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon
- Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon by Buzz Aldrin
- Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by K.C. Cole
- What on Earth Evolved?: 100 species that changed the world by Christopher Lloyd
- Logicomix: An epic search for truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
- An Orchard Invisible: A natural history of seeds by Jonathan Silvertown
- The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I've cobbled together this list from three lists from The Independent: Nature & Environment, Biography and History.
The Running Sky: A bird-watching life by Tim Dee
Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo by Michael McCarthy
Edible Seashore: river cottage handbook no. 5 by John Wright
Logicomix: an epic…
For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just extracted the science-related books. From science publications, I've included most or all…
A big list of 35 titles in various categories: Astronomy, Biography, Biology, Climatology, Environmental Science, Evolution, Geology, Health Sciences, History of Science, Mathematics, Natural History, Neurology, Oceanography, Paleontology, Physics, Psychology, Science, Technology, Zoology.
This…
One of the most interesting lists every year is The Globe and Mail's Globe 100, and this year is no exception. There's relevant stuff all over the spectrum, from biography to history to graphic novels to popular science to the environment.
In the print version, the categories are pretty basic:…