Exuberance: The Passion for Life
Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf, $24.95)
In prose that leaps from the page, Jamison probes the neurochemistry of exuberance, an emotion that bonds young animals together and that fueled the work of such folk as President Theodore Roosevelt, whose irrepressible love of nature led him to found many of America’s national parks.
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality
Brian Greene (Knopf, $28.95)
Is the universe a hologram? Can time flow backward? Do we exist in a multiverse of 11 different dimensions? And just what is string theory, anyway? Greene delves into and illuminates some of the most perplexing questions of contemporary cosmology in a reader-friendly chronicle of brilliant clarity.
Trevor Corson (HarperCollins, $24.95)
Pausing often to impart salacious details on lobster sex—females strip off their exoskeletons before they do it—Corson maps the changing fortunes of the lumbering crustacean, a creature that provides the livelihood of the hardy Maine fishermen he profiles and is a source of fascination to the scientists who study it.
The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram
Thomas Blass (Basic Books, $26)
By turns both moving and chilling, Blass’s biography profiles psychologist Stanley Milgram, who conducted the notorious 1960s obedience experiments in which compliant subjects inflicted what seemed to be electric shocks on a screaming victim (in fact an actor) on orders from an authority figure.
The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle
Eric Lax (Henry Holt, $25)
Alexander Fleming discovered the antibacterial qualities of what he called “mould juice,” but the paper he published in 1929 went unnoticed for nearly 10 years. Lax pays a long-overdue tribute to three scientists—Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley—who in 1940s Britain raced to create a usable drug from mold—penicillin—and produce it in quantities large enough to treat soldiers suffering from gangrene and other infected war wounds.
Dolores Hayden, with aerial photographs by Jim Wark (W. W. Norton, $24.95)
In their illustrated “devil’s dictionary” of land development gone amok, Hayden and Wark highlight such blights as the LULU (a locally unwanted land use, such as a nuclear waste dump), the TOAD (temporary, obsolete, abandoned, or derelict site), and the rampaging suburban Zoomburb.
Spice: The History of a Temptation
Jack Turner (Knopf, $26.95)
From one of the earliest known applications of a spice—a pair of peppercorns stuffed up the nose of Pharaoh Ramses II after his death in 1224 B.C.—through a frantic 15th- to 17th-century European “spice race” to control scarce supplies of nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, Turner relates the history of aromatic condiments that have also served as medicaments, aphrodisiacs, and embalming agents.
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive and Exploit Us, and What to Do About It
Marcia Angell (Random House, $24.95)
Former New England Journal of Medicine editor Angell lifts the rock she calls “big pharma” and peers beneath to find an ugly sight. This, she argues, is a $200 billion industry that pours more money into advertising than into R&D, licenses discoveries funded by the National Institutes of Health, and promotes drugs for lifestyle diseases such as erectile dysfunction over cures for malaria and AIDS.
Under Antarctic Ice: The Photographs of Norbert Wu
Text by Jim Mastro (University of California Press, $39.95)
Antarctica is a frigid environment, but it is anything but barren. Wu’s dramatic photographs reveal a world teeming with life beneath the ice, including gracefully swimming emperor penguins, volcano sponges big enough to swallow a diver, and a giant jellyfish with 30-foot-long tentacles that seems to be robed in a bulbous, frilly pink bridesmaid’s dress.
The Whale Book: Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenen in 1584
Edited by Florike Egmond and Peter Mason (Reaktion Books, $35)
This book is one of the year’s glorious oddities. Based on the writings and watercolors of 16th-century Dutch beachcomber and autodidact Adriaen Coenen, it reproduces, with lively commentary, what are probably the world’s oldest manuscripts on European whales and marine animals. Among the many curiosities depicted are a village built entirely from whale bones and a stupefied, beached fin whale straddled by 15 inquisitive monks.
