Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us

  • S. Lochlann Jain
University of California Press (2013)

Patients with cancer generate so much revenue for the US health-care industry that a cure would be an economic risk. Thus argues anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain, who deems cancer “a constitutive aspect of American social life, economics, and science” — so bizarrely entwined that chemical companies churn out both cancer drugs and carcinogenic herbicides. In this trenchant mix of science history, memoir and cultural analysis, Jain is thoughtful and often darkly humorous on everything from cancer statistics to treatments, trials and issues around sexuality. Brilliant and disturbing.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

  • Lee Billings
Current (2013)

Unsurprisingly for an infant science, the quest for other Earths is sometimes fractious. Science writer Lee Billings deftly captures both behind-the-scenes ructions and landmark discoveries in his tour of this multidisciplinary field, its history and its players. The seamlessly interwoven narrative is strong on big personalities, from astronomer Frank Drake, a pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) whose work is now overshadowed by glamorous finds in exoplanetary science, to astrophysicist Sara Seager, a scintillating star in that very field.

High Moon Over the Amazon: My Quest to Understand the Monkeys of the Night

  • Patricia Chapple Wright
Lantern (2013)

One-time “hippie housewife” Patricia Chapple Wright became a trailblazing primatologist by dint of determination and sheer curiosity. As related in this engaging memoir, her scientific odyssey began in a New York pet shop in the 1960s. After purchasing an owl monkey (Aotus lemurinus griseimembra), she travelled to Peru to locate a mate for it — and recognized her métier. Decades on, now a world authority on lemurs, she has set up the Ranomafama National Park and an adjacent research site, Centre ValBio, in Madagascar.

The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

  • James Fallon
Current (2013)

In 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was checking the brain scans of psychopathic murderers and 'normal' controls, including himself. Noting that his scan closely resembled those of the murderers, the happy, successful Fallon had to know why. He shares his journey, mining genetics, epigenetics and neuroscience, and perusing his childhood (including a brief spell of obsessive–compulsive disorder), family tree and behavioural eccentricities. His surprising final diagnosis could broaden the way we see normality.

Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer

  • Timothy Brook
Bloomsbury (2013)

The Selden map of China and its environs, an anonymous cartographic puzzle unearthed in the Bodleian Library in 2009, is the pivot for this cultural history. Timothy Brook illuminates the map's odd features and backstory. Along with the lives of those tangled in its history (such as Michael Shen, the Chinese Jesuit who translated the map's script in the late 1600s), Brook reveals how the amazingly accurate chart hints at the first stirrings of globalization.