Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens

  • Steve Olson
W. W. Norton (2016) 9780393242799 | ISBN: 978-0-3932-4279-9

When Mount St Helens in Washington state erupted in 1980, it woke the nation from political and economic torpor. The huge sideways blast — a pyroclastic flow — killed 57, triggered the largest landslide ever recorded and spewed ash over 11 states and several Canadian provinces. Steve Olson intercuts stories of victims including David Johnston, the volcanologist who was monitoring the explosion, with an account of its impact on science — such as popularizing the use of lidar. With 1,500 potentially active volcanoes worldwide, this is an urgent reminder of the need for advances in the field.

And the Sun Stood Still: A Play

  • Dava Sobel
Bloomsbury (2016) 9780802716941 | ISBN: 978-0-8027-1694-1

The centrepiece of science writer Dava Sobel's acclaimed 2011 history A More Perfect Heaven (Bloomsbury) is a dramatized telling of a crucial meeting: the 1539 encounter between Nicolaus Copernicus and German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who would broker the publication of the Polish astronomer's great treatise on heliocentrism, De Revolutionibus. Now reworked as a play, Sobel's imaginative exploration of how Rheticus convinced the “starry canon” to air his theory is a revelation of world-shifting science illuminating the human mind, leavened with a sparkling immediacy.

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

  • Abby Smith Rumsey
Bloomsbury (2016) 9781620408025 | ISBN: 978-1-6204-0802-5

A door is opening on a frightening prospect: the future of history. So notes scholar Abby Smith Rumsey in this erudite treatise on how the digitization of archival technology makes it all too easy to rewrite our cultural past. She analyses our journey in recorded memory, interweaving neuroscience with a history of the archive, and ranging from classical mnemonic devices to the collective amnesia that can follow the destruction of libraries. Books, she shows, are “memory machines” that we have learned to manage. Digitized data in toto is a different beast — and one bucking under our attempts at control.

Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World

  • Leif Wenar
Oxford University Press (2016) 9780190262921 | ISBN: 978-0-1902-6292-1

Petroleum is truly globalized. But for exporting countries such as Nigeria, high-demand raw materials can be a “resource curse”, linked to political corruption and socio-economic inequality (see J. Vidal Nature 482, 306; 2012). In this straight-talking manifesto, philosopher Leif Wenar draws on economics and political science to call for a rethink on global supply chains. Clean trade policies to protect public property and accountability are needed, he argues, if poorer nations are to achieve resource sovereignty and Western importers are to stop buying blindly into oppressive regimes.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

  • Douglas Rushkoff
Portfolio (2016) 9781617230172 | ISBN: 978-1-6172-3017-2

Technology writer Douglas Rushkoff delivers an incisive analysis of digitized culture in this shrewd study of the economic rot at its heart. Issues such as the corporate growth model and “platform” monopolies are, he shows, threatening the public good. He suggests that the rage of protestors who attacked shuttle buses carrying Google employees in 2013 would be better channelled into “digital distributism” — an economy that hinges on democratic ownership of the means of production, cooperatives and genuine sharing.