Four Fields

  • Tim Dee
Jonathan Cape (2013)

In this vivid 'field study', radio producer and nature writer Tim Dee explores four plots of land, in England, Ukraine, the United States and Zambia. To Dee, these are grassy arenas where nature and humanity clash and merge. He is a fiercely focused witness to that drama, whether monitoring grasshoppers in the irradiated zone around Chernobyl, or on a Cambridgeshire fen listening to cuckoos calling, “deepening the place, summoning the curve of the Earth”. With a lyricism richly and strangely his own, Dee maps a topography that has as much to do with the mind as with Earth.

The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs

  • Joanna Moncrieff
Palgrave Macmillan (2013)

Psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff delivers a meticulous, balanced history of antipsychotic drugs. In the mid-twentieth century, early forms such as chlorpromazine were created to tackle the biological roots of severe mental illness. But as she shows, new-generation 'atypicals' are marketed to treat conditions such as depression, and US spending on antipsychotics reached almost US$17 billion in 2010. Moncrieff sees some antipsychotics as having a place in treating schizophrenia, but argues that questions about efficacy and side effects such as obesity suggest they should be handled with care.

Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine

  • Thomas H. Lee
Harvard University Press (2013)

A pioneering 1971 study on myocardial infarction revealed that a heart attack is a process rather than a sudden karate chop, and hence eminently treatable. Eugene Braunwald's finding has helped to cut US heart-attack death rates from more than 30% to less than 10%. The story of the cardiologist's life and work, set against a background of rapid change in medicine, is told engagingly by medic Thomas Lee. Braunwald has lived several lives since his 1938 escape from Nazi-controlled Austria, from glory years at the US National Institutes of Health to his active ninth decade.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing

  • Ewan Clayton
Atlantic (2013)

Calligrapher Ewan Clayton examines one of the earliest forms of communications technology: writing, from its inked and incised beginnings some 5,000 years ago to its digitized present. Clayton, who advised Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center in California on the use of documents, is erudite on everything from Herculaneum's ancient election 'posters' to contemporary German graffiti. Here too are Isaac Newton's first notebook, the geometry of pen nibs, 'muscular penmanship' in the nineteenth-century United States — and a palpable relish for the dance of words on a page.

The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild

  • Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Little, Brown (2013)

From coyotes in lifts to woodpecker holes in the Discovery space shuttle, odd encounters at the nature–human interface abound in this 'bestiary'. But naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt has a serious agenda, arguing that an appreciation of the displaced beasts re-entering our porous cities is crucial to human well-being. As she recounts the precarious existence of an opossum or the “cognitive toolbox” of a crow, Haupt urges a new sensitivity towards urban wildlife. The taxa are US-centric; the message is universal.