The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine

  • Nathaniel Comfort
Yale University Press 336 pp. £25 (2012)

In this provocative look at genetic medicine in the United States, medical historian Nathaniel Comfort argues that eugenics casts a long shadow over the field. He has researched records spanning a century, following the ever-evolving group of geneticists, eugenicists, psychologists, medics, public-health workers, zoologists and statisticians intent on using heredity to improve human life. Today's hybridized discipline, he says, is noble in intent but rife with social and ethical questions centred on the 'illusion of perfectibility'.

Discord: The Story of Noise

  • Mike Goldsmith
Oxford University Press 336 pp. £16.99 (2012)

You might pay to hear a jazz saxophonist let rip in a club, but go crazy if they practised next door. Sound in the wrong place is noise, points out science writer and former head of acoustics at the UK National Physical Laboratory Mike Goldsmith in this chronicle of cacophony and our attempts to control it. Starting with the nature of sound and its birth in the infant Universe, he runs through prehistoric noise, the beginnings of acoustical science in the Renaissance, the machine-led din of the Industrial Revolution, the clamorous twentieth century and today's aural pollution from wind farms, underwater sonar and more.

Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care

  • Martin Makary
Bloomsbury 256 pp. £19.99 (2012)

Surgeon and health-policy specialist Martin Makary reveals US hospitals as battlegrounds between competence and chaos. Serious blunders — such as surgical tools being left in body cavities — are so common that a 2010 study reported that one-quarter of patients are harmed by medical mistakes. Among Makary's mind-bending observations is how two doctors approached the removal of benign colonic polyps. One neatly excised the growth; the other removed half the colon. A powerful plea for openness in US health care.

Why Geography Matters, More Than Ever

  • Harm de Blij
Oxford University Press 320 pp. £10.99 (2012)

Where geopolitics is concerned, Harm de Blij says, it's easy to hit a plus ça change moment. This revised edition of his influential 2007 book includes the rapid shifts and upheavals of the past five years, from the Arab Spring to the European Union's economic wobbles. But de Blij's original premise — that the geographical illiteracy prevalent in the United States seriously impedes coherent policy — is more relevant than ever. With power comes responsibility, and Americans, he says, have an obligation to develop the geographer's perspective on culture, politics, economics and the environment.

On the Edge: Mapping North America's Coasts

  • Roger M. McCoy
Oxford University Press 256 pp. £18.99 (2012)

Some 500 years ago, the edges of North America were as mysterious to Europe's explorers as the Moon. Geographer Roger McCoy recounts their voyages and cartographic efforts, starting with John Cabot and Martin Frobisher, and ending with Otto Sverdrup and Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the early twentieth century. The tales of derring-do, brushes with death and brutal behaviour towards native Americans are interspersed with clear explanations of how, over time, this multitude of mariners redrew the New World map.