The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming

  • Hans-Werner Sinn
MIT Press 288 pp. $29.95 (2012)

Frustrated by "counterproductive" climate policies, economist Hans-Werner Sinn proposes a radical alternative. Policy-makers, he notes, have ignored the oil sheikhs and coal barons who supply the fossil-fuel market. Yet it is they who call the shots, as shown by the 'green paradox' — announcements of future reductions in carbon consumption that drive carbon-resource controllers to bump up production. Sinn's antidote to the ideology that plagues policy-making is a "Super-Kyoto" system: unified countries, coordinated caps and trade, and taxation designed to curb the 'extraction habit'.

The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

  • Shimon Edelman
Basic Books 256 pp. $25.99 (2012)

The mind, says cognitive psychologist Shimon Edelman, is a literal "meat computer". Our experience of the world is a series of computations carried out by neural wetware. But where does that leave philosophical conundrums such as joy? Taking passages by luminaries including Homer, William Shakespeare and Jorge Luis Borges as touchstones, Edelman powers along on his "quest for an algorithmic understanding of happiness", revealing that it is this computational journey itself that constitutes the good life.

How Not to Be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back

  • Gilbert Waldbauer
University of California Press 240 pp. $27.95 (2012)

Insects and their predators use a vast, often bizarre array of strategies to eat or to avoid being eaten. Entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer tours tactics on both sides, from sticky lures to kamikaze speed. His fascinating cast ranges from goatsuckers (birds in the order Caprimulgiformes) that can catch massive moths in their bristled gapes, to the brilliantly hued lubber grasshopper (Romalea guttata), which, when threatened, both vomits a noxious substance and hisses as stinking froth erupts from its thorax.

Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840

Edited by:
  • Amy R. W. Meyers &
  • Lisa L. Ford
Yale University Press 432 pp. $65 (2012)

When writer Thomas Paine saw Philadelphia in 1774, he noted that nearly every citizen had "some scientific interest or business" — a state that persisted to the mid-nineteenth century. The city boasted artist-naturalists such as John James Audubon, and the study of nature filtered through all strata of society. These 14 illustrated essays, edited by art historians Amy Meyers and Lisa Ford, trace a century of influential scientific endeavour, from botanic gardens and cabinets of curiosity to pioneering colour-plate techniques.

Vegetables: A Biography

Evelyne Bloch-Dano (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.) University of Chicago Press 128 pp. $20 (2012)

Next time you chop a carrot, spare a thought for the centuries of breeding, farming technology and trade that brought it to your kitchen. In brief 'biographies' of 11 vegetables, from pumpkins and artichokes to chard, writer Evelyne Bloch-Dano serves up a feast of associated genetics, agriculture, history and culture. From the role of chillies in world trade to the strange link between peas and the court of Versailles in France, there is much to savour.