Best Science Books 2008: Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Books

This might be the last post for 2008 books, and it's one of the best annual lists out there. Every year, I use this LJ list to catch up on my popular science ordering for the year, to get the good stuff I missed. I don't order a huge amount of popular science for our collection, but I do like to get the best stuff. I like the fact that the books I get are check out quite a bit. There is a demand for popular materials among academic library users.

Here goes, some hightlights:

• Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Ronald, Pamela C. & Raoul W. Adamchak
  
  
• Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End... by Plait, Philip
  
  
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Hölldobler, Bert & Edward O. Wilson (text) & Margaret C. Nelson (illus.)
  
  
• Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by Palfrey, John & Urs Gasser
  
  
• Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Pearce, Fred
  
  
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion–Year History of the Human Body by Shubin, Neil
  
  
• Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked a Nation on Prescription Drugs by Petersen, Melody
  
  
• The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation by Shapin, Steven
  
  
• One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers by Hodges, Andrew
  
  
• Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Zimmer, Carl
  
  
• Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Schutt, Bill (text) & Patricia Wynne (illus.)
  
  
• Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Gazzaniga, Michael
  
  
• The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking To Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Susskind, Leonard
  
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Roach, Mary
  

Best Science Books 2008: Strategy + Business

Thanks to Kris Fitzpatrick of the IEEE for pointing me to this rather extensive list of business books from 2008.

The catagories include General, Strategy, Life Stories, Marketing, Rhetoric, Innovation, Globalization, Human Capital, Capitalism and Community, Management and Miscellany.

In particular, there are a number of very interesting-looking books on community building. The relevant ones from all the lists are here:

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
  
  
• Sony vs. Samsung: The Inside Story of the Electronics Giants’ Battle for Global Supremacy by Sea-Jin Chang
  
  
• Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk by James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer
  
  
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen
  
  
• The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan
  
  
• The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Stephen A. Marglin
  
  
• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

Best Science Books 2008: Seed Magazine

A very nice list from Seed. There are some really interesting books here that I haven't seen on other lists.

• Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure By Paul A. Offit
  
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach
  
  
• Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It By Elizabeth Royte
  
  
• Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain By Kirsten Menger-Anderson
  
  
• The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment By Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
  
  
• Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet By Oliver Morton
  
  
• The Endless City Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic
  
  
• The Hot Topic: What We Can Do About Global Warming By Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King
  
  
• Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique By Michael S. Gazzaniga
  
  
• Icarus at the Edge of Time By Brian Greene
  
  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto By Michael Pollan
  
  
• The Invention of Air: A Study of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By Steven Johnson
  
  
• Jetpack Dreams: One Man's Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was By Mac Montandon
  
  
• The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces By Frank Wilczek
  
  
• The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe By Chris Impey
  
  
• The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom By Simon Winchester
  
  
• Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life By Carl Zimmer
  
  
• Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them By David Anderegg
  
  
• The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life By Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
  
  
• On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science By Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides
  
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely
  
  
• Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food By Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak
  
  
• The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA By Mark Schultz, Illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon
  
  
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strageness of Insect Societies By Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson
  
  
• The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature By Daniel J. Levitin

Best Science Books 2008: The Quackometer

I really have no clue what The Quackometer is, but they do have an pretty decent list of books on "quackery, scepticism, complementary and alternative medicine and its effects on society." What's nice is that most of these books aren't on other lists.

• Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All by Rose Shapiro
  
  
• Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History By Damian Thompson
  
  
• Healing, Hype or Harm?: A Critical Analysis of Complementary or Alternative Medicine By Edzard Ernst
  
  
• Bad Science By Ben Goldacre
  
  
• Don't Get Fooled Again: The Sceptic's Guide to Life By Richard Wilson
  
  
• Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial By Simon Singh, Edzard Ernst
  
  
• The Duck That Won the Lottery: and 99 Other Bad Arguments By Julian Baggini

Best Science Books 2008: The London Times

Books from the Science, Nature and Gardening lists. This list is particularly interesting since it's not centred on the US publishing industry.

• In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  
  
• The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology by Tim Birkhead
  
  
• Consider the Birds: Who They are and What They Do by Colin Tudge
  
  
• Southern England: The Geology and Scenery of Lowland England by Peter Friend
  
  
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
  
  
• Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
  
  
• The Making of Mr Gray's "Anatomy": Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame by Ruth Richardson
  
  
• Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
  
  
• Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Best Science Books 2008: Some Best Business Books lists

Some of the Best Business Book lists I'm seeing definitely have books on them that would interest either the library crowd, the science crowd or both. In general, these lists are very interesting because the books are about placing technology in a social or organizational context.

Here's some highlights from a couple of the lists.

Business Week

• Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys
  
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  
  
• The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives by Michael Heller
  
  
• Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman
  
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Financial Times

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness
  by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
  
  
• The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything
  By Tim Harford
  
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
  
  
• Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Fast Company

• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam
  
  
• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
  
  
• Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn
  
  
• Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns
  
  
• The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

Best Science Books 2008: Library Journal

Wow, another disappointing list:

• The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight To Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott
  
  
• Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg
  
  
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Library Journal did a dedicated scitech last year and I hope they do it again later on for 2008.

Best Science Books 2008: Booklist

Here's the Top 10 Sci-Tech Books for 2008:

• The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George
  
  
• Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey through Your Brain by David Bainbridge
  
  
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
  
  
• Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food by Gene Baur
  
  
• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen
  
  
• Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni
  
  
• The Parrot Who Thought She Was a Dog by Nancy Ellis-Bell
  
  
• The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret by Seth Shulman
  
  
• Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg
  
  
• The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It by Robert Zimmerman

Best Science Books 2008: No Love for Science

Here's some more from the Fimoculus list, these ones notable for not having any science books mentioned when you would think that they could find at least one:

• New York Magazine
  
  
• Salon
  
  
• The Atlantic
  
  
• New York Times 10 Best
  
  
• Publisher's Weekly

As I see more science-free lists, I'll probably just add them here. Fortunately, I do have a bunch of great lists to blog about over the next few days.

Update 2008.12.13:

• Time
  
  
• Village Voice
  

Update 2008.12.21:

• NPR -- no science list or any science books appearing on any of the other lists.
  
  
• Slate -- the medical editor chose Stalking Irish Madness by Patrick Tracey but it seems too marginal for me to count as a science book

Best Science Books 2008: The Globe and Mail Gift Books

After the depressing LA Times, one of my favourite annual lists -- Globe and Mail Gift Books. There's an incredible array of fantastic suggestions here, both from the scitech world and arts, culture and history. There's tons of stuff here that I wouldn't mind finding under the tree in a few weeks.

Here's the science-y ones from the History, Nature and Miscellaneous categories:

• The Atlas of Exploration Foreword by John Hemming
  
  
• Animals: A Visual Encyclopedia edited by Carrie Love and Caroline Stamps
  
  
• Mission Space: A Full-Throttle Tour of the Universe by Carole Stott
  
  
• Hubble: Imaging and Time by David Devorkin and Robert W. Smith
  
  
• Antarctica: Secrets of the Southern Continent by David McGonigal
  
  
• The Owl and the Woodpecker: Encounters with North America's Most Iconic Birds by Paul Bannick
  
  
• Arctic Visions: Pictures from a Vanished World by Fred Bruemmer
  
  
• Aviation Canada: The Pioneer Decades by Larry Milberry
  
  
• Cool Stuff Exploded: Get Inside Modern Technology by Chris Woodford

And here's some really cool-looking ones from the various categories (hint, hint):

• Battle at Sea: 3,000 Years of Naval Warfare by R. G. Grant
  
  
• Horror Cinema Edited by Jonathan Penner and Steven Jay
  
  
• Marvel Chronical: A Year by Year History Foreword by Stan Lee. Afterword by Joe Quesada
  
  
• Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell
  
  
• Historical Atlas of Toronto by Derek Hayes,
  
  
• The Beer Book Edited by Tim Hampson
  
  
• Drinks: Enjoying, Choosing, Storing, Serving and Appreciating Wines, Beers, Cocktails, Spirits, Aperitifs, Liqueurs, and Ciders by Vincent Gasnier

Best Science Books 2008: Los Angeles Times + Book Covers

Wow, the most catastropically disappointing list so far. A major paper like the LA Times can't find even one science book worth mentioning. The only one close is a nature title. From the non-fiction list:

• The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman

Interestingly, there are science fiction and mystery lists, something many other papers don't bother with.

On a more cheerful note, Joseph Sullivan's list of the best book covers of the year does have a few really nice examples from science books.

Best Science Books 2008: Christian Science Monitor

Decent list:

• The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret by Seth Shulman
  
  
• Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee
  
  
• In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  
  
• The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded and Gladwell's Outliers are two marginal science books that seem to be getting a lot of mentions.

(Thanks for Mita for pointing me to this site!)

Best Science Books 2008: The New York Times

This year's list of notable books is a very slightly better than last year's total of just 3. Stretching my definition of science book gives us five this year.

• Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene by Masha Gessen
  
  
• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
  
  
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
  
  
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
  
  
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America is a related book that I think a lot of people will be selecting this year.

Best Science Books 2008: The Globe and Mail

This year's Globe and Mail Globe 100 is quite a disappointing list, first of all because I only really identified 5 science books this, about half of last year's tally. I sort of thought that the Globe was deemphasizing science in the book review section this year, but this comes as a real confirmation of that trend.

But first, the science books that made the list (and a few interesting outliers, too):

• Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time by Christopher Dewdney
  
  
• Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe
  
  
• The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani
  
  
• The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head by Raymond Tallis
  
  
• Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen

Some interesting related books, including two novels with scitech themes:

• Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida
  
  
• The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek by Sid Marty
  
  
• Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs
  
  
• Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman
  
  
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  
  
• The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci

It's telling that that the non-science outliers are more numerous than the core science books. What's missing? Even from the books I reviewed this year, I would say that The Quantum Ten is really glaring in it's omission, especially since it's by a Canadian author. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is probably the best book about the impact of technology on society in years and it's really embarrassing it's not on the list. Equally embarrassing is that there were really no non-environmental books that dealt with technology and society. It's also odd that they chose Dewdney's book on time rather than Canadian Dan Falk's similar title. They both got good reviews -- Dewdney even reviewed Falk's book for the Globe a few weeks ago.

It's also disappointing that the Globe did not see fit to include any sf, fantasy or horror books aside from Doctorow's rather obvious YA choice. Mysteries and thrillers get their own dedicated column and maybe sffh deserve the same treatment.

Best Science Books 2008: Amazon

It has begun. This is the first post in my annual round-up of Year's Best Science Book Lists.

Today, it's highlighting a couple of lists from Amazon for 2008. They still haven't published their Computers & Internet list, so I'll post that one when I see it.

Here goes, all the best science books and some relevant items from other lists:

Best Science Books

• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
  
  
• Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul by Kenneth R. Miller
  
  
• Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga
  
  
• The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind
  
  
• In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA by James Schwartz
  
  
• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow
  
  
• Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels
  
  
• 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks
  
  
• Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene Pepperberg
  
  
• Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer
  

Business & Investing

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li

Current Events

• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Outdoors & Nature

• The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird by Bruce Barcott
  
  
• Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt
  
  
• The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery by Howard G. Wilshire