The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience

  • Kathleen Tierney
Stanford University Press (2014) 9780804772631 | ISBN: 978-0-8047-7263-1

The origins of disaster lie in “the ordinary everyday workings of society”, avers sociologist Kathleen Tierney in this brilliant treatise. Drawing on a trove of timely case studies, Tierney analyses how factors such as speculative finance and rampant development allow natural and economic blips to tip more easily into catastrophe. Resilience, she argues, is rooted in sustainable ecological and social development. It is transformative risk reduction, not bailouts, that will help humanity to weather coming upheavals.

Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

  • Paul Dolan
Hudson Street (2014) 9781594632433 | ISBN: 978-1-5946-3243-3

The science of happiness has been with us since at least the 1940s, when Abraham Maslow's ideas opened up a psychology based on feeding the potential for positivity rather than simply treating symptoms. To this now-crowded table, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan brings a feast of US and European research, and some significant insights. Dolan argues that happiness depends on where we focus our attention, and on how well we balance purpose and pleasure. His action-oriented outline for achieving that equilibrium draws in part on work with eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Great Minds: Reflections of 111 Top Scientists

Balazs Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai and Istvan Hargittai. Oxford University Press (2014)

9780199336173

Over two decades, chemists Balazs, Magdolna and Istvan Hargittai interviewed hundreds of prominent scientists, including 68 Nobel laureates. This distillation features excerpts from 111 of these frank conversations. Featured are mathematician John Conway on how his discovery of surreal numbers was like finding a palace after drifting around a strange city; physicist Gerard 't Hooft on the improbability of intelligent extraterrestrials; and physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, biologist Francis Crick, and more on the fascination of the life scientific.

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

Judy Melinek and T. J. Mitchell. Scribner (2014)

9781476727257

“A hard hat was still there, lying on its side in a pool of blood and brains, coffee and doughnuts.” Judy Melinek's inside story on forensic-pathology training, written with her husband, writer T. J. Mitchell, is inevitably big on gore. But Melinek, a “sunny optimist”, offers more than cheap thrills. The flamboyant disclosures — how to handle rotting flesh or use pruning shears to snap ribs — are balanced by her soul-baring account of identifying human remains in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001.

The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One Flush at a Time

  • Mark Nelson
Synergetic (2014) 9780907791522 | ISBN: 978-0-9077-9152-2

It takes 1,000 tonnes of water to move 1 tonne of human faeces, notes engineer Mark Nelson. His alternative to costly, unsustainable sanitation is constructed wetland — subsurface-flow gravel beds in which plant roots and microbial action purify wastewater for a full range of uses. Nelson, a veteran of the 1990s US survivability experiment Biosphere 2, has built “wastewater gardens” from Algeria to Australia, Mexico and beyond.