Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius

  • Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster 554 pp. $35 (2011)

Sylvia Nasar, economist and author of A Beautiful Mind (1998), examines genius through the shaping of economics. Her tour of modern economic history takes us from Charles Dickens and journalist Henry Mayhew, who together woke the world to the scale of London poverty, through Karl Marx and the pioneering social reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb, to great innovators such as John Maynard Keynes and Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen. The field emerges as the 'apparatus of the mind' that Keynes saw was needed for understanding and optimizing the workings of society.

Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang. Bloomsbury 336 pp. $26 (2011)

Neuroscientist Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, former editor-in-chief of Nature Neuroscience, pack into this compendium cutting-edge research on the growing brain, from birth to the age of 21. They lay out seven scientific principles behind neural development, including the interaction of genes and the environment; education; sensory experience and play; and issues such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and growing up in poverty. With its clear graphics, this is a useful companion guide for educators and families.

American Anthrax: Fear, Crime, and the Investigation of the Nation's Deadliest Bioterror Attack

  • Jeanne Guillemin
Times 336 pp. $27 (2011)

Bioterrorism is a threat that governments prepare for with huge variability. Medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin chronicles the deadliest such attack in the United States, when five letters carrying anthrax arrived at the Senate and at media organizations in 2001, killing five people and sparking a seven-year investigation. The event was used to justify the Iraq invasion and billions were spent on biomedical defences, yet Guillemin reminds us that the pathogen in the letters originated somewhere within the US military system.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

Richard Dawkins and Dave McKean. Bantam 272 pp. £20 (2011)

Faced with the strange, the sudden and the beautiful in nature, each generation of children asks the same big questions — from how the Universe began to what thunder is. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins takes on the answers, with acclaimed illustrator Dave McKean, in graphic-novel style. By detailing the hard science behind natural phenomena such as species diversity, and detaching accreted myths, Dawkins strives to reveal 'magic' as an aspect of the real. Although pitched at both children and adults, this is a heavy-handed treatment that fits into neither category.

Galvani's Spark: The Story of the Nerve Impulse

  • Alan J. McComas
Oxford University Press 391 pp. £40 (2011)

Serendipity met science when eighteenth-century anatomist Luigi Galvani discovered the nerve impulse — the 'spark' that drives actions, thoughts and sensations — in the twitch of a frog's leg. Neurophysiologist Alan McComas traces the shaping of neuroscience from this point by greats such as Alessandro Volta and David Hubel. From Santiago Ramón y Cajal's meticulous renderings of neural cells to Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley's work on the squid giant axon, McComas chronicles the triumphs and obstacles of the field.