Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World Without Darwin

  • Peter J. Bowler
Univ. Chicago Press 336 pp. $30 (2013)

Is there anything to add on Darwin and his work? In his 'counterfactual' history, Peter Bowler manages it neatly, wondering what might have happened had Darwin not published his theory of evolution by natural selection. Bowler argues that at the time, only Darwin had the originality and largeness of vision to craft his big idea, but its very boldness polarized thinking. The theory, Bowler surmises, would have emerged sans Darwin, but later — which, ironically, might have eased the broad acceptance of evolution.

Butterfly People: An American Encounter With the Beauty of the World

  • William R. Leach
Pantheon 416 pp. $32.50 (2013)

Butterflies in their thousands blanketed summer fields in nineteenth-century America. These 'flying jewels' drew a generation of amateur natural historians from the cultural chrysalis. Here, historian William Leach celebrates several — including Herman Strecker and Samuel Scudder — who created a home-grown field. Fed by Linnaeus, Darwin and crowd-sourced photographs and specimens, this scientific search for beauty collided early on, however, with the country's commercial drive.

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks With the Sanitation Workers of New York City

  • Robin Nagle
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 304 pp. $28 (2013)

Daily in New York city, around 9,000 people clear away 11,000 tonnes of household waste. In her 10-year, sometime-firsthand study of 'san man' crews, cultural anthropologist Robin Nagle shines a light on their invisible lives. She reveals them as agents of urban reform and public health; traces the history of sanitation in the city, starting with eighteenth-century reformer Cadwallader Colden's yellow-fever control; and evokes the physical and psychological toll of this dangerous, filthy, necessary work.

Robot Futures

  • Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
The MIT Press 160 pp. $24.95 (2013)

This glimpse into the future of robotics hums with enthusiasm. In his work, roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh has created a raft of objects and capabilities, from robot three-dimensional visioning systems to a highly propulsive pogo stick. Here, prefacing each chapter with an imagined scenario, he forecasts how bots will invade commerce, the home and the human body. The possibilities — such as therapeutic, injectable robot colonies — are often provocative, but tempered by astute insights into the ethical and social implications of a roboticized world.

Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World

  • Todd McLeish
Univ. Washington Press 216 pp. $26.95 (2013)

The tusked, deep-diving, upside-down-swimming narwhal is a cetaceous enigma. Questions hang over its feeding habits, strange dental arrangements, population and migration. In this portrait of the species, Todd McLeish mixes research, observations from High Arctic trips and engaging detours into iceberg ecology and more. While the debates rage on — over the tusk as a sensory organ, for instance — many agree that the animal's adaptive capacity may not keep pace with the shrinkage of sea ice.