Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott. Princeton University Press (2016)

9780691157245

As citizens of the cosmos, we are duty bound to explore it. So opine astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Strauss and Richard Gott, guides on this bracing expedition through dusty galactic hinterlands and the vast theoretical vistas of Albert Einstein's work. Each is a master at untangling the abstruse through metaphor: Tyson crams 100 million elephants into a thimble to illustrate neutron-star density, and Gott recounts John Archibald Wheeler demonstrating entropy by mixing tea and water and throwing it into a 'black hole'.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

  • Tim Wu
Knopf (2016) 9780385352017 | ISBN: 978-0-3853-5201-7

Media scholar Tim Wu plunges into the noisome history of “attention harvesting” — the commodification of human attention by industry and government. It began, Wu reveals, with the juxtaposition of advertisements and lurid news in 1830s gutter journalism, and persisted in the engineered demands of “scientific advertising”, the efforts of propagandist Edward Bernays (who persuaded women to smoke) and the infiltration of fast-food ads into US schools. To evade this induced narcosis and reclaim lived experience, Wu argues, we must wean ourselves off the digital.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

  • Amitav Ghosh
University of Chicago Press (2016) 9780226323039 | ISBN: 978-0-2263-2303-9

Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012's Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement — and in a resurgence in our imaginative capacity to envision human existence anew.

Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer

Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella. Princeton University Press (2016)

9780691167411

Among the hundreds of millions of domestic cats, many range freely. That group is effectively a death squad for songbirds, killing an estimated 4 billion US avifauna a year; globally, island cats drive 14% of vertebrate extinctions. This deeply researched overview by conservation scientist Peter Marra and writer Chris Santella interlaces discussions of feline domestication and avian conservation with the science of decline and of feline spillover diseases. It culminates with a stark choice: control free-ranging cats or witness the ongoing erosion of affected ecosystems.

Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs

  • Alexandra Chasin
University of Chicago Press (2016) 9780226276977 | ISBN: 978-0-2262-7697-7

Harry Anslinger helmed the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, shaping US drug policy through what Alexandra Chasin calls “an elaborately disastrous set of policies and laws”. In this idiosyncratic chronicle, Chasin paces the trail from temperance to today, when nearly half the inmates of US jails are incarcerated for drug offences. A sorry tale of how one man's racial prejudice and predilection for prohibition led to a colossal policy failure.