ADHD Nation

  • Alan Schwarz
Scribner (2016) 9781501105913 9781408706572 | ISBN: 978-1-5011-0591-3

Some 15% of US children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Journalist Alan Schwarz is sceptical about that incidence and the powerful pharmaceuticals prescribed for the condition, calling ADHD “the most misdiagnosed condition in American medicine”. His nimble investigation interweaves the narratives of pharmaceutical companies with those of child psychologist Keith Conners, who led ADHD's 'Manhattan Project', and young people grappling with the medical fallout. An intriguing sidelight is the misuse of ADHD drugs as performance enhancers.

The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World

  • Julian Baggini
Yale University Press (2016) 9780300208238 | ISBN: 978-0-3002-0823-8

Humanity has lost its reason, asserts philosopher Julian Baggini: many trust gut feelings and received wisdom, decrying rationality as “a cold tool of desiccating logic”. Baggini reveals it as anything but. Debunking myths such as the idea that reason is purely objective, he reminds us how reason actually functions in diverse arenas. Thus science, although hyper-rational and data-ruled, integrates the mess of guesswork and inspiration. And a rational stance in politics demands that we embrace complexities — in debate, difference and diversity. A thoughtful analysis for hyper-emotional times.

Einstein's Greatest Mistake: The Life of a Flawed Genius

  • David Bodanis
Little, Brown (2016) 9780544808560 9781408708095 | ISBN: 978-0-5448-0856-0

In 1915, Albert Einstein created a masterpiece: the equation at the core of his general theory of relativity. Its profound implications for many aspects of physics are assured. But, argues science writer David Bodanis, Einstein's confidence and intuitive brilliance tipped over into hubris in the quantum debate, when he found himself ranged against the likes of Niels Bohr. This is a sympathetic appraisal of Einstein's intellectual development. But however wrong the old revolutionary was about the new thinking, hanging a full biography off such a weighted title seems a little tendentious.

Something in the Blood

  • David J. Skal
Liveright (2016) 9781631490101 | ISBN: 978-1-6314-9010-1

The vampire, a cultural trope that crept bloodily along for centuries, has finally achieved ubiquity in film, television and fiction. Yet the man who embedded the archetype remains an enigma. Cultural historian David Skal reveals Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897), as a figure marked by childhood paralysis (which may have involved blood-letting) and maturation in an era of epidemics, famine and a titanic tug-of-war between science and spiritualism. Stoker's opus emerges as a psychological reading of the age — a “veritable Rosetta Stone of Victorian anxieties”, as Skal puts it.

Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

  • Ian Stewart
Profile (2016) 9780465096107 9781781254318 | ISBN: 978-0-4650-9610-7

Mathematician and prolific writer Ian Stewart turns a lens on how maths has helped us to decipher the celestial. As space probes explore new ground from asteroids to regions beyond the heliopause, Earth-based number-crunching informs everything from Jupiter's asteroid-pitching tendencies, the behaviour of planetary rings and the stubborn shyness of dark matter to the 'interplanetary superhighway' that provides efficient routes between planets. A fascinating tour, seamlessly spliced and historically contextualized.