Outside the Asylum

  • Lynne Jones
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2017)) 978-1-4746-0574-8 | ISBN: 978-1-4746-0574-8

How do you help a poverty-stricken child whose parents were killed in front of her? For psychiatrist Lynne Jones, such layered traumas are a life's work: she has practised in war and disaster zones from Bosnia to Haiti for more than two decades. Her blazingly frank account is as enlightening on shifts in psychiatric treatment as it is on local implications of humanitarian-aid policy. Observing the impossible lives that millions somehow live in troubled regions, she is clear on the meaning of asylum and what keeps her at this front line: not the suffering, but “the proximity to courage”. Brilliantly insightful.

Into the Gray Zone

  • Adrian Owen
Simon & Schuster (2017) 978-1-5011-3520-0 | ISBN: 978-1-5011-3520-0

In 2006, neuroscientist Adrian Owen made a discovery with profound implications for science, medicine and law: up to one-fifth of people in a 'vegetative state' following traumatic brain injury are cognitively intact. Meshing memoir with scientific explication, Owen reveals how functional magnetic resonance imaging can probe the deep space of trapped minds. It's a riveting read, from the march of technology and tests for neural responses — such as imagining playing a game of tennis — to extraordinary personal accounts of the “gray zone” by partially recovered patients.

Almost Human Lee Berger and John Hawks. National Geographic (2017)

9781426218118

Palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger has a knack for finding both fossils and the public limelight. This memoir focuses on Homo naledi, a small-brained species of human relative discovered in a cramped cave system near Johannesburg. If this sounds familiar, that's probably because it is. Berger and co-author John Hawks live-blogged their 2013 excavation, which recovered hundreds of hominin fossils, and last month held a live-streamed press conference to announce the fossils' age (a young 300,000 years old). This is a fine account of the thrills of plumbing the mysteries of human evolution.

The Wonder of Birds

  • Jim Robbins
Viking (2017) 978-0-8129-9353-0 | ISBN: 978-0-8129-9353-0

Birds are central to science far beyond ornithology, reminds Jim Robbins. Aeronautics, dinosaur locomotion and migration have all drawn hugely from the study of avifauna, and human culture has embraced the winged beasts as a potent metaphor for transformation. As Robbins gazes at a murmuration of dunlins to ponder “swarm intelligence”, bands owls with feisty field biologist Denver Holt, contemplates the bone-snapping beak of a vulture and muses over the complex calls of the chickadee, it's hard not to share his wonder at the biological riches of the 10,000 species.

The Happiness Philosophers

  • Bart Schultz
Princeton University Press (2017) 978-0-6911-5477-0 | ISBN: 978-0-6911-5477-0

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number.” The aim of utilitarianism — the nineteenth-century philosophy founded by the likes of William Godwin and Jeremy Bentham — seems baldly 'worthy'. But as Bart Schultz argues in this adroit study, the ethical theories of these men, forged in a politically chaotic era, remain relevant in our own. Schultz journeys beyond the caricatures to reveal their deep influence on education, law and, in Bentham's case, surprisingly modern thinking about homosexuality.