Corporation 2020: Transforming Business for Tomorrow's World

  • Pavan Sukhdev
Island 320 pp. £18.99 (2012)
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Business isn't working — so say a rising number of pundits witnessing cyclical patterns of boom and bust. Green economist and former banker Pavan Sukhdev argues that the corporate model needs an overhaul if profits are to be generated in socially equitable, environmentally benign ways. In his nuanced analysis, corporations need to align their aims with society, becoming viable communities, institutes and financial, human and natural capital 'factories'. His plan for reform focuses on resource taxation, limited leverage, ethical advertising and disclosure of externalities such as pollution.

Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD

  • Matthew Smith
Reaktion Books 208 pp. £25 (2012)

Mild brain damage, sugar, evolutionary hangovers, genes — answers to the question 'What causes ADHD?' are mind-bogglingly diverse. But, argues Matthew Smith in the first medical history of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, we may need to accept that explanations will be pluralistic and relativistic. Smith addresses biological, social and psychological issues, from an eighteenth-century description of the fidgets to the first cases, the drugs and the diets. With powerful pharmaceuticals involved and US diagnoses running at 9% a year in 5- to 17-year-olds, this is a timely chronicle.

Measurement

  • Paul Lockhart
Harvard University Press 416 pp. £20 (2012)

This invitation to tackle mathematical questions is infused with the joys of the rarefied reality of maths. Paul Lockhart largely avoids complex formulae and the wilder shores of jargon, opting instead for simple geometric drawings, lucid instructions and honest warnings about the hurdles. Covering size, shape, space and time, Lockhart, a maths teacher, gets through scores of problems, from showing that a cone in a hemisphere occupies half the volume to determining the size of the largest circle that can sit at the bottom of a parabola. Elegant, amusing and challenging.

Tibet Wild: A Naturalist's Journeys on the Roof of the World

  • George B. Schaller
Island 412 pp. £18.99 (2012)

After 50 years of research on endangered species, field biologist George Schaller is still swimming against the tide of change in the wild. This highly personal compilation, part memoir and part research record, celebrates that “raw terrain where lakes are the colour of molten turquoise” — the Tibetan Plateau, particularly the northern plain of the Chang Tang. Woven into vivid accounts of tracking mammals such as snow leopards and chiru, or Tibetan antelope, are Schaller's tracings of the impacts of climate change and population growth on one of the last animal strongholds.

Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age

  • Dror Wahrman
Oxford University Press 352 pp. £22.95 (2012)

The technology-driven explosion in cheap print 300 years ago spawned the first information age. As historical sleuth Dror Wahrman relates, a little-known Dutchman commented covertly on the metamorphosis — in trompe l'oeil paintings. Edward Collier created 'snapshots' of letter racks stuffed with printed speeches and pamphlets — riddled with visual jokes and puzzles that were coded criticisms of the limitations of print and the politics of the day.