Proof: The Science of Booze

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen

Harold McGee · 684 pages

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a kitchen classic. Hailed by Time magazine as "a minor masterpiece" when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible to which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious. Now, for its twentieth

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan · 244 pages

What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the que

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

Amy Stewart · 400 pages

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet? In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries. Of all the extraordinary a

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food

Jeff Potter · 458 pages

Are you an innovative cook, accustomed to expressing your creativity instead of just following recipes? Are you interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking? Do you want to learn what makes a recipe work so you can improvise and create your own dish? More than just a cookbook, [Cooking for Geeks][1] inspires you to be inventive in the kitchen and piques your curiosit

Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor

Herve This · 377 pages

**Publishers notes:** "An international sensation, Molecular Gastronomy debunks a variety of time-honoured rules and dictums about cooking, but also presents new knowledge from which readers can improve the preparation of a variety of dishes."

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Kelly Weinersmith · 448 pages

Origins: 14 Bllion Years of Cosmic Evolution

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Donald Goldsmith · 336 pages

"Drawing on the current cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins explains the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the universe while capturing the importance of such extraordinary events as the first image of a galaxy being born and the exploration of Martian frontiers by Spirit Rover. Distilling complex science into clear and lively prose, coauthors N

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · 560 pages

A Short History of Nearly Everything by American author Bill Bryson is a popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more so to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from

Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

Sharon Moalem · 279 pages

Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity is a 2007 New York Times Bestselling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration. It was originally titled, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Steven Johnson · 288 pages

"Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model, rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner; emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different - ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems - all

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe · 312 pages

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a

I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking

Alton Brown · 287 pages

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach · 304 pages

A hilarious and witty look into the history of using cadavers for science, grave diggers, and options to consider about your burial plan. A dark and uncomfortable subject made more palatable and downright funny.

Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bloomsbury Sigma)

Kathryn Harkup · 305 pages

Bully for Brontosaurus

Stephen Jay Gould · 540 pages

Essays from the author's column This view of life, published in Natural history.

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin · 240 pages

Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of

Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask

New Scientist · 211 pages

Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Richard Dawkins · 352 pages

Did Newton "unweave the rainbow" by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says Dawkins - Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved; the solution is often more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deep

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

Laurie Garrett · 750 pages

This is an amazing book that Laura Garrett wrote back in the 90's. For anyone that has read the more popular book by Richard Preston "The Hot Zone" this is a must read. It is a much tighter more informative book. She takes us through the history of viruses in a journalistic/story approach. She breaks down the emergence of Ebola and the other emerging viruses and what it could mean in a brilliantl

Life: An Unauthorised Biography: A Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth

Richard Fortey · 416 pages

Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment befo

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks · 243 pages

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who

A Natural History of Love

Diane Ackerman · 358 pages

Following the triumphant success of her A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman has turned her formidable gifts to that greatest gift of all - the elusive, eternal, and endlessly interesting matter of love. The result is pure Ackerman: a splendid, serious, scientific, poetic, playful, and lyrical "tour d'horizon" of love's many forms and faces. Ackerman draws on a variety of sources, both

Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Matt Ridley · 344 pages

The human genome, the complete set of genes housed in twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, is nothing less than an autobiography of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been edited, abridged, altered and added to as it has been handed down, generation to generation, over more than three billion years. With the first draft of t

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo

Sean B. Carroll · 384 pages