University of California Press, 1992. — 418 p. — (California Studies in the History of Science) From c-Numbers to q-Numbers: The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum Theory explores the critical role of classical analogies in the development of quantum theory, examining how key figures such as Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Dirac employed these analogies to bridge the gap...
Princeton University Press, 2023. — 320 p. Graph Theory in America focuses on the development of graph theory in North America from 1876 to 1976. At the beginning of this period, James Joseph Sylvester, perhaps the finest mathematician in the English-speaking world, took up his appointment as the first professor of mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University, where his...
Stanford University Press, 2025. — 292 p. Energy history is an approach to understanding the past that takes changes in the human exploitation of Earth's energies as its object of inquiry. This interdisciplinary field documents and analyzes how humans have thought about, harnessed, stored, and exploited stocks and flows of energy. In recent decades, in response to evidence of...
Brepols, 2024. — 479 p. — (Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus) Ptolemy's Almagest (2nd century AD) is the most influential work of ancient and medieval astronomy. This work, however, does not tell us the full story about its author's views of the heavens. After completing the Almagest , Ptolemy turned his attention to a physical investigation of celestial motions. The result is the...
Random House, 2025. — 320 p. Pope Francis originally intended this exceptional memoir to appear only after his death, but the needs of our times and the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope moved him to make this precious legacy available sooner. Now, the book stands as his testament; the spiritual, faith-filled, as well as moral, social, and civic legacy that he envisioned and left for...
Brill, 2023. — 682 p. — (Time, Astronomy, and Calendars) Connections between the Society of Jesus and astrology used to appear as unexpected at best. Astrology was never viewed favourably by the Church, especially in early modern times, and since Jesuits were strong defenders of Catholic orthodoxy, most historians assumed that their religious fervour would be matched by an...
Springer, 2021. — 295 p. This book considers the history of modern astronomy and astrophysics in Japan by comparing with the development of astrophysics in western countries. Astrophysics essentially arose in three separate fields: astronomical spectroscopy, stellar structure, and survey of celestial objects. This book introduces readers to the state of astronomy back to the...
Dutton, 2025. — 368 p. From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer comes the untold story of Alice Hamilton, a trailblazing doctor and public health activist who took on the booming auto industry—and the deadly invention of leaded gasoline, which would poison millions of people across America. At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a...
MIT Press, 2025. — 288 p. How to create our industrial future with inspiration and lessons from the originators of the industrial revolution. Climate change, global disruption, and labor scarcity are forcing us to rethink the underlying principles of industrial society. In The New Lunar Society , David Mindell envisions this new industrialism from the fundamentals, drawing on...
Atlantic Books, 2025. — 352 p. An enthralling tour around the rarest languages in the world. From the whistling languages of La Gomera in the Canary Islands and the Hmong people in East and Southeast Asia, to the wars and clashes in Sri Lanka and the conservation efforts in Hawaii and New Zealand, Rare Tongues draws attention to how language and culture are becoming...
W. W. Norton & Co., 2025. — 192 p. A paradigm-shifting tour of genetics and identity arguing that race is at once a biological fiction and a social reality. Biologically, race does not exist. Scientists have proven that human DNA is 99.9 percent identical. But we know that racism and its structural impacts shape our health, opportunities, and lives in profound ways. What is the...
St. Martin's Press, 2025. — 304 p. A gorgeously composed look at the longstanding relationship between prehistoric plants and life on Earth. Fossils plants allow us to touch the lost worlds from billions of years of evolutionary backstory. Each petrified leaf and root show us that dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and even humans would not exist without the evolutionary efforts of...
Thesis, 2025. — 317 p. From a neurologist and the award-winning author of The Sleeping Beauties , a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients. We live in an age of diagnosis. Conditions like ADHD and autism are on the rapid rise, while new categories like long Covid are being created. Medical terms are...
University of California Press, 2025. — 336 p. — ISBN 9780520393035. A 300-million-year tour of the prominent role of the neck in animal evolution and human culture. Humans give a lot of attention to the neck. We decorate it with jewelry and ties, kiss it passionately, and use it to express ourselves in word and song. Yet, at the neck, people have also shackled their prisoners,...
Little, Brown and Company, 2025. — 400 p. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, this is the first major book to expose the catastrophic reality of the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste...
Oneworld Publications, 2025. — 272 p. Want to join the ultimate cosmic treasure hunt? Meteors, with their ethereal, glowing trails slashing through the atmosphere, have entranced us for centuries. But these extraterrestrial visitors are also inestimably valuable. Not just for collectors, who can make their fortunes tracking them down, but for scientists too. Meteorites are the...
Profile Books, 2025. — 288 p. How celestial bodies impact life on earth - from the acclaimed author of Notes from Deep Time . rom your window you can see the stars and distant planets: light years away, it's easy to think that our existences and theirs will never intersect. Yet meteorites - mysterious, irregular rocks of sometimes immense value - connect us with the vastness of...
Mariner Books, 2025. — 336 p. Evolutionary biologist Nathan H. Lents knows what makes humans unique—and it’s most definitely not our sexual diversity. A professor at John Jay College, Lents has spent his career studying what makes us, well, us, and contrary to what the culture warriors want people to believe—diverse sexual behavior is not a new development, or even a human one....
W. W. Norton & Co., 2025. — 464 p. An acclaimed historian of science uncovers the hidden history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today. Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth , “Brainwashing...
Fourth Estate, 2025. — 336 p. In his new book, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley looks to the peculiar mating rituals of birds to better understand the rich origins and ongoing significance of Darwin's sexual selection theory. Animals rarely treat sex as a simple or mutually beneficial transaction. Choosing a mate is often a transcendent event to be approached with...
Overlook, 2018. — 272 p. As the Cold War intensified in the late 1950s, an eccentric Greek-American physicist developed a startling idea: to detonate nuclear explosions in space to create a radiation belt that would destroy incoming Soviet missiles. Drawing on newly declassified sources, this book describes the plans for Operation Argus, the New York Times exposé of the...
Joseph Henry Press, 2004. — 266 p. The first spacecraft to explore the secrets of the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, and the void beyond Pluto, the Pioneer space probes have been the trailblazers of the space age, truly going where no man has gone before. Emblazoned with the nude figures of a man and a woman, etched representations of our human form, the Pioneer generation of probes...
Picador, 2025. — 288 p. From the winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize, a thrilling and thought-provoking account of the rise and fall of humankind. For the first time in over ten millennia, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. The global population is forecast to begin declining in the second half of this century, and in 10,000 years’ time our...
Oxford University Press, 2025. — 304 p. Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet are ever relevant today... Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years,...
W. W. Norton, 2025. — 192 p. A philosopher calls for a revolution in ethics, suggesting we expand our “moral circle” to include insects, AI systems, and even microbes. Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritize humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of...
Profile Books, 2025. — 272 p. How much can one love a tree? Rajasthan, in northern India, is home to the Bishnoi, a community renowned for the extreme lengths they go to in order to protect nature: Bishnoi men and women have died to defend trees from loggers and wildlife from poachers. Writer and conservationist Martin Goodman, one of few trusted outsiders, relates the history...
Princeton University Press, 2013. — 192 p. Mathematical subjects come and go. If you glance at a textbook from a century ago you may recognize some of the contents, but some will be unfamiliar or even baffling. A high school text in analytic geometry, for instance, once contained topics like involutes of circles, hypocycloids, and auxiliary circles of ellipses: topics that most...
Pantheon, 2025. — 368 p. A groundbreaking new perspective on the moral mind that rewrites our understanding of where moral judgments come from, and how we can overcome the feelings of outrage that so often divide us. It’s easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have radically different moral foundations. In Outraged , Kurt Gray showcases the latest science to demonstrate...
Routledge, 2020. — 332 p. Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to...
Stanford University Press, 2023. — 328 p. From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world...
Notre Dame Press, 2023. — 408 p. — (ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern) Nicole Rice’s original study analyzes the role played by late medieval English hospitals as sites of literary production and cultural contestation. The hospitals of late medieval England defy easy categorization. They were institutions of charity, medical care, and liturgical commemoration. At the same...
University of Texas Press, 2023. — 392 p. Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers, and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision...
University of Minnesota Press, 2023. — 110 p. — (Forerunners: Ideas First) The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid. Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of...
Duke University Press, 2023. — 432 p. In A Book of Waves Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Helmreich details how scientists at sea and...
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. - 312 p. Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it...
Cambridge University Press, 2024. — 293 p. We live in an era of major technological developments, post-pandemic social adjustment, and dramatic climate change arising from human activity. Considering these phenomena within the long span of human history, we might ask: which innovations brought about truly significant and long-lasting transformations? Drawing on both historical...
Routledge, 2023. — 418 p. The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things - ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo - and the humans enthralled with them. Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across...
Brandeis University Press, 2023. — 144 p. A historian offers a unique look at the pandemic, climate change, and the human versus nonhuman. Climate change represents a deep conundrum for humans. It is difficult for humans to give up the unequal and yet accelerating pursuit of a good life based on an insatiable appetite for energy sourced mainly from fossil fuel. But the same...
University of Chicago Press, 2025. — 336 p. An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers’ hidden labor. Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these...
Duke University Press, 2023. — 248 p. In The Pulse of the Earth Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese...
Oxford University Press, 2022. — 384 p. This book studies the regional tradition of mathematics in the Tamil-speaking areas of Southern India. It questions the established nature of Indian history of mathematics, which is based only on the Bhatta-Bhaskara tradition. Instead, it brings in practitioners like village accountants and school teachers as primary agents in the...
Springer, 2023. — 264 p. — (Springer Praxis Books) This book features several of the significant scientific debates and controversies that helped develop space science in the early space era. The debates led to significant new understandings of the constituents and processes occurring beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and often opened new research directions. Scientific speculations...
Springer, 2021. — 381 p. — (Historical & Cultural Astronomy) Angelo Secchi was a key figure in 19th century science. An Italian Jesuit and scientist, he helped lead the transition from astronomy to astrophysics and left a lasting legacy in the field. Secchi’s spectral classification of stars was a milestone that paved the way for modern astronomical research. He was also a...
Penguin Classics, 2023. — 672 p. 'How great, then, must be the incomprehensible space all the way to the furthest fixed stars? How wide and immense must be the depth of that fantastical sphere?' In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that the earth stood motionless at the centre of a small, ordered cosmos. Just over two centuries later, everything had changed. Not only...
Picador, 2024. — 448 p. In Lost Wonders Tom Lathan tells ten powerful stories of species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century. Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years – a trend that will only...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. — 272 p. The inspiring, on-the-ground story of the rising grassroots leaders in the abortion rights movement during the pivotal first year after Dobbs. When the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization - overturning the constitutional right to abortion care-the country was thrown into chaos. Abortion providers and their...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. — 352 p. An acclaimed cultural historian takes readers on an intellectual thrill ride through the kaleidoscopic story of futurology, a surprisingly powerful force in the modern world. For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists...
Abrams Books, 2025. — 352 p. In this frank, funny, and meticulous book, a leading social scientist lays out the striking facts we know about racism, how we have uncovered them, and how we can start to fix them Studies and surveys show, time and again, that about 50 percent of people believe that racism is no longer an issue today. The other half would disagree—vehemently. And...
Yale University Press, 2024. — 400 p. A leading scientist’s guide to the way our immune system protects us—but only most of the time What is our immune system, and how does it work? A vast array of cells, proteins and chemicals spring into action whenever our bodies are damaged, but immunity is not something you can see, touch or feel. It can fight off malicious bacteria and...
Princeton University Press, 2024. — 440 p. A new account of the central role developmental processes play in evolution. A new scientific view of evolution is emerging—one that challenges and expands our understanding of how evolution works. Recent research demonstrates that organisms differ greatly in how effective they are at evolving. Whether and how each organism adapts and...