Science Writing and New Media: Science Writing for the Public

Book Talk Reading List

« Back to Book Talk

Book Talk Reading List
Lewis Thomas. Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Viking Press, 1974.
Atul Gawande. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. Metropolitan Books, 2002. 269 p. Bestseller.
Atul Gawande. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. Metropolitan Books, 2007. Some of these essays originally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine or the New Yorker. Another best-seller from Gawande, “by turns inspiring and unsettling” according to one reviewer.
Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Random House, 2001. 271 p. A delightful meditation in 4 parts—apple, potato, tulip, and marijuana—on our role in the evolution of plants.
Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Penguin Press, 2008. 244 p. A science-based argument that culture may be a better guide to eating healthily than science; explains how we are at the same time malnourished and overfed.
Elizabeth Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Picador, 2015. 366 p. Kolbert writes about the accelerating extinction of species in our current era. Very well reviewed.
Evelyn Fox Keller. The Century of the Gene. Harvard University Press, 2001. 186 p. An MIT professor argues that the concept of the gene has shaped research in recent decades and suggests limits of that concept. This book is already a classic, translated into many languages.
Carl Zimmer. Microcosm: E.Coli and the New Science of Life. Vintage, 2009. “A powerful account of the dynamic, complicated and social world we share with this ordinary yet remarkable bug… Exciting, original, and wholly persuasive.” —New Scientist
Ed Yong. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. Ecco, 2018. 368 p.
James Watson. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. Scribner, 1998. 256 p. A classic, this book is available in a Norton Critical edition, which includes reviews and a bibliography.
Edward O. Wilson. The Future of Life. Vintage, 2003. 229 p. Author of Sociobiology and The Ants; honorary curator at Harvard Museum. This book is often referred to.
Marcia Bartusiak. Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time. Berkley, 2003. 249 p. Won the 2001 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. Discusses the observatories involved in trying to discover gravity waves; takes a historical approach. Sees gravity waves as Einstein’s “unfinished symphony, waiting nearly a century to be heard.”
Timothy Ferris. Seeing in the Dark: How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe. Simon & Schuster, 2003. 400 p. From Amazon’s website: “a poetic love letter to science and to the skies…”
Timothy Ferris. A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. Walker Books, 2012. 288 p. This intriguing recent book is half narrative, half drama.
Peter L. Galison. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. 388 p. “Brings the story of time to life as a story of wires and rails, precision maps, and imperial ambitions, as well as a story of physics and philosophy."—Science
Brian Greene. The Elegant Universe. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Approx. 400 p. A popular discussion of superstring theory.
David Lindley. Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science. Anchor, 2008. 257 pages. Well reviewed.
James Gleick. Isaac Newton. Vintage, 2004. 272 p. Well-received biography of the great scientist. A very good read.
Dava Sobel. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Bloomsbury, 2007. 208 p. Surprise best-seller.
Dava Sobel. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard University Took the Measure of the Stars. Penguin Books, 2017. 336 p. Sobel is an award-winning science writer.
Barbara Goldsmith. Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. W.W. Norton, 2005. “A poignant—and scientifically lucid—portrait” of the first woman to win the Nobel prize (NY Times review).
Brenda Maddox. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. Harper Perennial, 2003. 416 p. Franklin was a physical chemist and photographer whose work allowed Watson and Crick to grasp the double-helical structure of DNA. She was virtually unknown before this well-reviewed biography gave her her due.
Evelyn Fox Keller. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. Times Books, 1984. 235 p. Story of the long overlooked researcher in cytology and genetics who eventually was awarded a Nobel prize.
Sylvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind. Simon & Schuster, 2011. 464 p. Popular biography of Nobel-prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who developed schizophrenia as a young man.
Robert Kanigel. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A life of the genius Ramanujan. Washington Square Press, 2016. 464 p. Biography of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan (1887-1920), who was “discovered” by the English mathematician G.H. Hardy and came to England to study. Considered one of the finest books ever written about mathematics.
Paul Hoffman. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth. Hachette Books, 1998. 317 p.
David McCullough. The Wright Brothers. Simon & Schuster, 2016. 320 p. McCullough is a popular historian.
Oliver Sacks. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Vintage, 2002. 337 p. Popular and highly readable memoir by one of our most distinctive and prolific researchers in the field of brain disorders.
Oliver Sacks. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Vintage, 2008. 381 p. A popular account that combines the latest brain science with the important role music plays in our lives.
Steven Johnson. The Ghost Map. Riverhead Books, 2007. 299 p. An engaging narrative about one cholera epidemic in London in the 1850s, and how it led to the discovery of the way cholera is contracted. A meditation on the nature of the scientific method, modern cities, and public health works.
Steven Johnson. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America. Riverhead Books, 2009. 254 p. “A look at the classical age of science and the early history of the United States through the work of the remarkable Joseph Priestley” (NY Times).
Neil Shubin. Your Inner Fish: A journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body. Vintage, 2009. 229 p. A popular account that combines evolutionary theory and human anatomy. “Compelling… will change forever how you understand what it means to be human.” (Blurb by Oliver Sacks)
Jerry A. Coyne. Why Evolution is True. Penguin Books, 2010. 282 p. “’Evolution is far more than a scientific theory,’ argues Coyne; it is a scientific fact.’” –well reviewed in Boston Globe.
Henry Petroski. _Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing._Harvard University Press, 1996. 242 p. “Case studies of engineers who… have created important new structures or devices. Whether designing something as small as a pencil or as large as the World Trade Center…”
Henry Petroski. Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering. Vintage, 1998. 256 p. A collection of magazine essays covering such topics as the Panama Canal, the Ferris Wheel, and the Hoover Dam.
Alexandra Horowitz. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Scribner, 2010. 359 p. Best-seller.
Bill McKibben. The End of Nature. Random House, 2006. 226 p. A classic, influential book by one of the godfathers of the contemporary environmental movement.
Bill McKibben. Eaarth. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011. 253 p. The extra “a” is intentional—to McKibben it signifies that our planet is forever changed. A polemic against man-made climate change and environmental degradation.
Tony Koslow. The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology and Conservation of the Deep Sea. University of Chicago Press, 2009. 270 p. Overview of deep sea ecology from a practitioner; very well reviewed.
Iain McCalman. The Reef: A Passionate History. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. 336 p.
Jacques Pepin. The Origin of AIDS. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 293 p. “Scholarly and immensely readable.” (Amazon)
Walter Lewin and Warren Goldstein. For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time—A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics. Free Press, 2012. 302 p.
Richard Fortey. Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind. Vintage, 2012. 332 p.
David Mindell. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. MIT Press, 2011. 359 p.
Daniel J. Levitin. This Is your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Penguin, 2007. 324 p.
Steven Strogatz. The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. Mariner Books, 2013. 336 p.
Paul Hoffman. Archimedes’ Revenge: The Joys and Perils of Mathematics. w.w. Norton & Company, 1988. 300 p.
Edward Frenkel. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Basic Books, 2014. 292 p.
Ian Stewart. Visions of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems. Basic Books, 2013. 352 p.
S.M. Ulam. Adventures of a Mathematician. University of California Press, 1991. 384 p. Memoir by a mathematician involved with the Los Alamos lab.
Christine Kenneally. The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. Penguin Books, 2015. 368 p.
Lee Billings. Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars . Current, 2013.
Jay Jayawardhana. Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. 256 p.
Gregory Berns. How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain.New Harvest, 2013. 248 p.
Daniel Chamovitz. What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. 192 p.
Mark Miodownik. Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. Mariner Books, 2015. 252 p.
Evan Schwartz. The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit and the Birth of Television. Harper Perennial, 2003. 352 p.
Daniel Stashower. The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television. Broadway, 2002. 304 p.
Peter Moore. The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 400 p. Recounts the 19th-c. origins of the science of meteorology. Well reviewed.
Rebecca Skloot. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Broadway Books, 2011. 381 p. Best-selling story of the first productive cell-line and the woman whose cells were used, unbeknownst to her and her family.
Don Norman. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, 2013. 368 p.
Hope Jahren. Lab Girl. Vintage, 2017. 90 p.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff. An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Disease. Scribner, 2013. 416 p.
Alan Schwarz. ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic. Scribner, 2017. 338 p.
Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016. 368 p.
David Biello. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. Scribner, 2017. 304 p.
Peter Godfrey-Smith. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 255 p.
David Owen. Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River. Riverhead Books, 2018. 288 p.
Dan Egan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. 384 p.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, 2011. 368 p.