Best Science Books 2012: Library Journal

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.

Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.

All the previous 2012 lists are here.

This post includes the following: Library Journal Consumer Health, Memoir, Science & Technology.

• No Time To Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses by Piot, Peter
• Hallucinations by Sacks, Oliver
• The Undead: Organ Harvesting, The Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death by Teresi, Dick
• Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care by Makary, Marty
• The Science of Yoga: The Myths and the Rewards by Broad, William J. (text) & Bobby Clennell (illus.)
• The Scientists: A Family Romance by Roth, Marco
• Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization by Bejan, Adrian & J. Peder Zane
• The Song of the Ape: Understanding the Languages of Chimpanzees by Halloran, Andrew R.
• America’s Other Audubon by Kiser, Joy M.
• Eating Aliens: One Man’s Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Landers, Jackson
• The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds by Zickefoose, Julie

I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot ca or in the comments.

I am picking up most of my lists from Largehearted Boy.

For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t a science book is squishy at best, especially at the margins, but in the end I pick books that seem broadly about science and technology rather than something else completely. Lists of business, history or nature books are among the tricky ones.

And if you wish to support my humble list-making efforts, run on over to Amazon, take a look at Steve Jobs or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or maybe even something else from today's list.