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Editors' Picks
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer (Allen Lane, 2011)
Today the key to instant recall is an Internet connection and a Google search term or two. But memory was once our only world wide web, and scholars well into the Renaissance memorized the corpus of knowledge by building imaginary 'memory palaces' in which they arrayed facts linked to indelible images. Joshua Foer's artful book interweaves the history of memory techniques with the story of his own triumph in the 2006 US National Memory Championship.
“An exercise in participatory journalism had become an obsession,” he writes about his months in his parents' basement, wearing earmuffs and black-painted goggles to block distractions as he practised building his own memory palaces. Along the way to his triumph — in which he memorized the order of an entire deck of playing cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds — Foer explores the role of memory in human identity and explains why, even today, memorizing is more than a parlour trick. (See Nature 472, 33–34; 2011.) Tim Appenzeller, Chief Magazine Editor, Nature
Incognito
David Eagleman (Pantheon, 2011)
Before the sirens of cheap pulp fiction start singing from the beach this summer, secure what David Eagleman calls a 'Ulysses contract' with your own unconscious. Get yourself firmly tied to the mast of brain exploration by buying his thriller at the highest possible price — the hardcover edition is still available — to maximize your commitment to a completely brilliant book that could have been titled '2011 – A Mind Odyssey'.
Strap in for a fantastic voyage through myriad case studies on "the vastness of the inner space", all treated with perfect scholarship in crisp and graceful style. En route, you will gain deep insights about brain function — such as how conscious cognitive chores are burned into implicit skills through the plasticity of neuronal circuitry — and human nature, including free will, criminal responsibility and future legal systems. (See Nature 473, 280–281; 2011.)Tanguy Chouard, Biology Editor, Nature
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 2010)
Reading Lewis's page-turner on the financial crash of 2007–08 is like feasting on ten sumptuous articles from The New Yorker. He zeroes in on the handful of men (and they were all men) who saw the housing-debt market for the venal tower of collective denial that it was, and who bet on its collapse. Lewis charts the improbable journeys of these geeks, nerds and misfits as they dig into the byzantine trade in increasingly opaque financial products and uncover the vast scale of the crisis to come.
Some of these unlikely seers keep their discovery to themselves, some bellow it from the rooftops. But Wall Street and the world don't want to know how an illegal immigrant of no fixed abode can get mortgages on five properties; or how such loans get stamped with the 'safest' AAA rating. We should all know: as Lewis's lucid prose makes clear, it could happen again. Read the book — if only for the conference scene in Las Vegas, where 7,000 credit-default swap players come together to eat edamame and shoot Uzis. Sara Abdulla, Chief Commissioning Editor, Nature
The Honest Look
Jennifer L. Rohn (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2010).
It was Goethe who said that scientists "forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends". Shy Claire Cyrus, with her newly minted PhD, enters the looking-glass world of a biotech start-up outside Amsterdam, which has its hopes pinned on a promising cure for Alzheimer's disease.
Claire is almost the only person in the world who can operate a costly machine, developed by her supervisor, that can identify proteins inside living cells. An innocent stranger in a strange land, Claire invokes the machine's demons while trying to quench her love for poetry, inherited from her late father, and negotiating the shoals of jealous colleagues and romantic entanglements. The Honest Look, Jennifer Rohn's second novel, is much better than her first (Experimental Heart, 2008): the characters are more rounded, the themes deeper and the bittersweet aftertaste more poignant. Henry Gee, Biology Editor, Nature
Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout
Lauren Redniss (It Books, 2010)
Graphical biographies of scientists seem to be on the rise. Radioactive stands out as a piece of art, in which Lauren Redniss provides a dazzling take on the lives of chemist couple Marie and Pierre Curie. Each page is hand-drawn and etched using the cyanotype technique — chosen by Redniss because its blue hue is reminiscent of the eerie glow of radium, the element on which the Curies worked.
Redniss relates how Marie moved to Paris from Warsaw in 1891 to work in Pierre's lab; how they fell in love and honeymooned on bicycles; how they worked on radioactivity together; how Marie was stunned at the death of Pierre in a traffic accident in 1906; and how she was met by scandal when she embarked on a relationship with a married scientist, Paul Langevin. Redniss's prose is minimal and poignant. Her sketches are simple yet emotive. It is a lovely book. (See Nature 469, 29; 2011.)Joanne Baker, Books & Arts Editor, Nature
Intuition
Allegra Goodman (Dial Press/Atlantic: 2006/2009)
Many, if not all, novels I've read about science exaggerate. Typically the scientists themselves are deranged or the discoveries they attempt to make are Earth-shattering. Rarely is the truth presented in as realistic and yet compelling manner as in Allegra Goodman's excellent novel. She lays out the science, in this case cancer biology, in all its boring, frustrating detail. In this field, three years' effort can result in an incremental advance — if you are lucky.
When a postdoc makes a breakthrough and has a paper accepted for publication in Nature, a colleague comes to suspect that the data have been reported selectively. What begins as a simple concern is blown out of proportion and misused by those with very different agendas — scientists, politicians, government officials and journalists. Intuition is an utterly authentic book: several of the cases and personalities described in it are real (although names have been changed), and are depicted with confidence. There are no obvious villains or heroes — just like real life. Maxine Clarke, Executive Editor, Nature
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot (Macmillan, 2010)
If you've missed this critically acclaimed read, be sure to pick up a copy. It is an engrossing portrait of Henrietta Lacks, the patient whose deadly cervical cancer launched a million biological experiments as the ubiquitous HeLa cell line, and of her family — arguably mistreated by the biomedical establishment that benefited from her unauthorized donation to science.
Skloot, a journalist, undertook more than 10 years of painstaking research and delicate negotiations with Lacks's proud but bitter descendants to weave a narrative that delves into the history of cell culture, intellectual property in biomedical research and informed consent. Skloot doesn't shy from the science, such as the challenge of culturing an immortal cell line, but it is the characters, particularly Henrietta's daughter, the electrifying Deborah Lacks, who make the story of strife and self-discovery unforgettable. (See Nature 463, 610; 2010.) Brendan Maher, News Features Editor, Nature
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1987).
If you want a history of the Manhattan Project, there are many places to look, from scholarly tomes to opera. If you want a history of everything that went into the making of the atomic bomb, then Richard Rhodes' classic study remains the definitive work. Beginning with Ernest Rutherford's early experiments, this book tells the story of physics in the first half of the twentieth century, taking in substantial chunks of political history too.
The vast cast of characters is enriched through personal stories, and the apparatus from essential experiments is presented in precise line drawings. There is even that essential component of a good scientific history: a questionable rejection by Nature of a fundamental paper, in this case, the Fermi constant. One is constantly mindful that these events are not just about physics, but have wide-reaching consequences for sciences as disparate as game theory, molecular biology and environmental science, as well as for the history of the planet itself. (For a review of The Twilight of the Bombs, the final book in Richard Rhodes' atomic quartet, see Nature 467, 528–529; 2010.)Patrick Goymer, Biology Editor, Nature
The Morville Year
Katherine Swift (Bloomsbury, 2011)
Morville in Shropshire is a microcosm of rural England — a twelfth-century church, the big house, village and school all clustered in a fertile green valley. When Katherine Swift created a garden for the Dower House at Morville Hall, she did her research. She built a series of plots that, through design and planting, reflect the human and natural history of the site, including the traditions of Morville's priory. Hence the format of The Morville Hours, in the tradition of a medieval book of hours, which became a surprise 2008 best-seller charting the evolution of the garden.
In The Morville Year, based on her column in The Times newspaper, Swift keeps to the diary format in following the gardening year but finds time for scholarly reflection on nineteenth-century plant hunters, botanical nomenclature and the psychological boost to be gained from working with and just looking at nature. The readability of her books stems from Swift's ability to share her enthusiasm for her garden, which is open to visitors during the summer months. Charles Wenz, Coordinating Editor, Nature
Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority
Steven Shapin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
Never Pure is a collection of academic papers from Harvard University's pre-eminent historian of science, Steven Shapin. With its 550-plus pages it weighs in at nearly a kilogram, a quarter of which is notes and references. So Shapin's book is not exactly light reading for the beach. But his writing is always engaging as he sets out his stall that science must be considered as something created by people immersed in the real world, and all the problems that brings.
There is much for today's researchers in Shapin's analysis of how leading lights of the past established themselves and their work as reputable — by their relationships with society as well as by setting themselves apart, such as Robert Hooke's and Robert Boyle's attempts to convince their public of the validity of their experimental results. The short closing treatise on science in the modern world confirms how lucky we are to have Shapin's critical analyses of the gloriously messy process of creating knowledge. Daniel Cressey, News Reporter, Nature
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)
In his 1941 short story The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges invents a book that contains all possible stories and every twist of every plot. Now Brian Greene shows us how the same description may apply to our existence.
Greene notes the curious frequency with which the concept of parallel or multiple universes arises out of many subdisciplines of theoretical physics. He offers his own branching journey through at least nine variations on the theme, from the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics to the bubble universes of inflationary cosmology, among others. Although Greene is not the first to note the proliferation of multiplicities, he gives the subject his own elegant spin, taking readers on a journey that leads to the limits of scientific enquiry and the chance to ponder how much 'there' is really out there. Those with less time for such speculations can achieve the same with a few minutes of Borges. (See Nature 469, 294–295; 2011.) Ivan Semeniuk, Chief US News Editor, Nature
Mendel's Dwarf
Simon Mawer (Doubleday, 1997; republished by Abacus, 2011)
One of science-in-fiction's great love stories, Mendel's Dwarf relates two unlikely romances. Ben Lambert is the great-great-great nephew of Gregor Mendel, the monk who launched modern genetics with his pea experiments. Ben is also a geneticist. And a dwarf. The mutated gene that caused his condition becomes the obsessive focus of his research. Ben loves a married, religious woman who, against her conscience, cannot resist the passionate relationship he offers. Mendel, bound to celibacy, does nothing about his reciprocated attraction to a fictionalized (also married) companion, Frau Rotwang. As an embittered victim of the random cruelty of genetics, Ben cannot believe in God. But with his genetic skills he plays God in his personal relationship, and that brings tragedy.
This piece of literature works on many levels: historical, moral and scientific. There is no authorial voice insisting the reader acquires an education in genetics; that happens subtly. For all its depth, Mendel's Dwarf is a rollicking read — and, following the shortlisting of its author for the 2009 Booker Prize (The Glass Room), once more in print. Alison Abbott, Senior European Correspondent, Nature
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Lyubomirsky, S., Salafsky, N., Freitas, S. et al. Summer books. Nature 475, 32–35 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/475032a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/475032a
