News Archive

Once again, we've brought together a couple of pop science book lovers – welcome back to John Dupuis and welcome also to first-time rec'er Joanne Manaster – and had a conversation about what we loved reading this year. Not all of the books below were released in 2017, but nearly all of them have been released in the last couple of years, and all of them are sure to delight science nerds young and old.

Below is a list of the science books discussed during the panel. Enjoy!

Joanne Manaster

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
• Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science by Dave Levitan
• Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
• The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids – and the Kids We Have by Bonnie Rochman
• The Family Gene: A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance into a Hopeful Future by Joselin Linder
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Sunlight series, by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm
  • Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring The Earth To Life
  • Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas
  • Buried Sunlight: How Fossil Fuels Have Changed the Earth
  • Rivers of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water Around the Earth
• Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean
• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky
• Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe by Theodore Gray
• Cat Zero by Jennifer Rohn
• She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer
• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen

Not metioned, but also recommended:

• Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna
• The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
• The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear
• Cells Are the New Cure: The Cutting-Edge Medical Breakthroughs That Are Transforming Our Health by MD Robin Smith and‎ Max Gomez
• Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Richard Harris
• Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future by Rob Dunn
• How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

John Dupuis

• Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
• The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Thomas M. Nichols
• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
• Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology by Ellen Ullman
• The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love by Oscar Fernandez
• And Then You're Dead: What Really Happens If You Get Swallowed by a Whale, Are Shot from a Cannon, or Go Barreling over Niagara by Cody Cassidy and Paul Doherty
• Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere by Elise Gravel
• Secret Coders series, written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Mike Holmes
  • Secret Coders
  • Secret Coders: Paths & Portals
  • Secret Coders: Secrets & Sequences
  • Secret Coders: Robots & Repeats
• Science Wide Open series, written by Mary Wissinger; illustrations by Danielle Pioli; Edited by John Coveyou
  • Women in Biology, Book 1
  • Women in Chemistry, Book 2
  • Women in Physics, Book 3
• The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
• The Carbon Code: How You Can Become a Climate Change Hero by Brett Favaro
• Wasted Talent series by Angela Melick
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
• The Back Of The Turtle by Thomas King

Not metioned, but also recommended:

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
• World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
• Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin
• The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley by Brad Stone
• Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter
• Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov
• A Brief History of Mathematical Thought by Luke Heaton
• A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
• Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953 by Simon Ings
• Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science by Dave Levitan
• The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Thomas Nichols
• Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot
• No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein
• Why Democracies Need Science by Harry Collins and Robert Evans
• The Comic Book Story of Beer: The World's Favorite Beverage from 7000 BC to Today's Craft Brewing Revolution written by Jonathan Hennessey,‎ Mike Smith, and‎ Aaron McConnell; illustrated by Aaron McConnell

Rachelle Saunders

• The Cure for Catastrophe: How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters by Robert Muir-Wood
• Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
• Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death by Brenna Hassett
• The Death and Life of the Single-Family House: Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City by Nathanael Lauster