Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport

  • Chris Cooper
Oxford Univ. Press 288pp.£16.99 (2012)

Whether sprinting, swimming, lifting or leaping, elite athletes in action are phenomenal — and, as biochemist and sports scientist Chris Cooper shows in this pacy account, some are also assisted by performance-enhancing drugs. To understand a problem that is unlikely to disappear from sport completely, Cooper lays out research on the substances in question, how they work, which are illegal and the methods for detecting them. He explores a number of contexts, ranging from sexual dimorphism and the need for oxygen and key nutrients to gene doping and the science behind the tests.

Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

  • Andrew Keen
St Martin's 256 pp. $25.99 (2012)

In a world gripped by digital utopianism, Silicon Valley insider Andrew Keen is an uber-sceptic. Those in online communities are, says Keen, besotted with a corpse, much like James Stewart's character in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo. Rather than offering a vast, benign e-neighbourhood, he argues, forms of social media breach privacy, encourage narcissism and promote commodification of personality. Aloneness, he says, is a necessary antidote to the hypervisibility of the social-media in “Web 3.0” — and a basic human right.

The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It

  • Fred Guterl
Bloomsbury 224 pp. $25 (2012)

Scientific American's executive editor, Fred Guterl, pulls no punches in this succinct round-up of the global trends that threaten humanity. He considers, in turn and backed by intriguing research, the rise of superviruses, rapid species extinctions, climate change, the disruption of ecosystems, synthetic biology and bioweaponry, and our over-dependence on machines. Ultimately, argues Guterl, the solutions lie in the very technology that propelled us into the current chaos — along with plain human adaptability.

Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion

  • Andrew Robinson
Thames & Hudson 272 pp. £19.95 (2012)

In the first English-language biography of nineteenth-century “father of Egyptology” Jean-François Champollion, Andrew Robinson offers a vivid portrait of a prodigy, and richly contextualizes Champollion's work decoding the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone. The book takes in Egyptomania from ancient Greece to eighteenth-century Britain, Champollion's rapid rise to professorhood, his rivalry with English polymath Thomas Young, years of preliminary work and travels in Egypt, and the advances that followed him — all beautifully illustrated.

Silent Spring Revisited

  • Conor Mark Jameson
Bloomsbury 288 pp. £16.95 (2012)

Natural-history writer Conor Jameson uses Rachel Carson's 1962 work Silent Spring as a focus for reflection on conservation and environmentalism in the decades since then. He begins with tens of thousands of UK birds dying in the 1960s, felled by pesticides, and moves through oil spills, the work of the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the steady decline in avian species. The 'silencing of spring', Jameson notes, continues — but reintroduction programmes, given the right support, are beacons in the gloom.