Smooth Pebbles

Where are the 'best science books' of 2007?

Last month, when all the "Best Books of 2007" lists came out, several regulars on a science writers list-serve I'm on expressed chagrin that most of the most prominent lists held few science books. Even defining "science book" broadly, the New York Times Review Notable Books list contained just one science book (How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman) The Amazon Best 100 lists held somewhere between none and five, depending on how you defined science book. (For more on that, see my sieve of their list at bottom.) John Dupius, who keeps the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian, took to task The Atlantic for including no science books on its list.

To be fair, quite a few places (including Amazon) did put out lists of best science books or included some in their general Best OF lists. Dupuis the Science Libraran covers most of them. But the Times and Amazon's neglect was enough to spark disgruntlement on the sci writers listserve. Best Of lists are great fodder for arguments, of course, and part of the ire in the science writers group was, naturally enough, that fewer of our books were on there. Damn! Still, in an age when science drives much of the economy and culture, to say nothing of health, this low representation was discouraging. And science writers naturally aren't eager to entertain the idea that the low science selection was because no one writing about science was writing well.

The solution, we figured, was to put out our own list. That didn't happen, perhaps because we got such a late jump. Mine, however, is below. Comments, alternate nominations, and arguments welcome.

Best Science Books of 2007

(according to David Dobbs)

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Weisman takes his stunning essay of a couple years ago -- an imagination of what the world becomes were we humans to suddenly vanish -- and somehow improves upon the original shorter form. An improbable and enthralling accomplishment.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

By general acclaim. Nice to have this bio of Einstein on the same list with a highly different work from Weisman, who got his start imagining Einstein's Dreams.

The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology, by Bernd Heinrich

Heinrich has written one splendid, fascinating book after another. This one adds another dimension as it traces his family and scientific lineage. Charming and utterly absorbing.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer

A fine book, and frighteningly good coming from someone just 26. (He's probably sick of hearing that -- but there are worse problems to have.) We'll see more of Mr. Lehrer.

How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande

Groopman gets a bit less press than his fellow New Yorker doctor-writer colleague Atul Gawande, perhaps because he's been around longer. But in this case I think Groopman's is the stronger of these two very strong books, with more to say about what ails medicine. However. my father, a retired surgeon, found otherwise -- though maybe that's just solidarity with fellow surgeon Gawande.

The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, by Helen Epstein

I'm relying on informed outside opinion here.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.

Chance, even simple fairness, would suggest that Sacks would eventually produce a book that is less than fascinating. That day has not yet come. Sacks has been collecting these stories of musical wonders and curiosities for decades, it turns out, and they supply, once again, riveting surprises and conundra from the meeting of brain, culture, and individual sensibility, all filtered by Sacks' unique intelligence and curiosity. A highly companionable read.

That's just eight. I have a haunting feeling I'm leaving something out. Possibly books by friends. Please feel free to draw my attention to oversights.

The (arguably) science books from Amazon's Best 100 Books of 2007:

Some people wouldn't include any of these in a strict definition of science book -- Einstein is a biography, Better and Musicophilia deal with medicine and neurology and music, Weisman is a futuristic riff. I'm more catholic in my definitions: I say let 'em all in.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande

"I Am a Strange Loop" (Douglas Hofstadter), which apparently plumbs the roots-of-consciousness question in a way that considers but then sets aside a reductionist scientific approach.

A Tour of Neurosci - Mind Matters' First Year

At Mind Matters, the expert-written blog I manage for Scientific American, I've posted a review of the material and papers we covered in that blog's first year. It was interesting to see how the blog echoed the interests of the larger neuroscientific world. The opener:

Mind Matters - The First Year

We did not, alas, make it to the Prague Museum, which is pictured above. But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January.

There's more -- hormones, memory, W's decision-making style -- at the post at Mind Matters. We'll try to get to Prague next year.

Best Books I Read in 2007

The best things I read this year, in no particular order:

"Falling Man: A Novel" (Don DeLillo)

"Tree of Smoke: A Novel" (Denis Johnson) This is almost cheating, as I'm still in the midst of reading it. But it'd have to dive a long way in the last few pages to not stay on the list. I'll be brave and leave it in.

"The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)" (T. H. White). Before he wrote the incomparable <em>The Once and Future King</em>, T.H. White trained a goshawk, Gos, and wrote this entrancing book about it.

"A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons" (Robert M. Sapolsky) Sapolsky's near-cult status kept me from reading his popular works for a couple years. My loss. This account of his work with baboons in Africa has some of the delicious pleasures of both Farley Mowat and Peter Matthiessen. Wonderfully entertaining, full of insight, and a nice introduction to today's robust ethology and primatology.

"On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not" (Robert Burton). To be published in February 2008. A favorite subject of mine -- how we know what we know. Burton, a neurologist and novelist, looks at how and why certainty feels utterly the same whether we're right or woefully wrong about the thing we're so certain about. I got a pre-release copy of this (and many other books), and this one stood out. There are many books lately about fascinating neuroscience these days, but few are as fascinating as this one, which eloquently marshals a strong argument about something important on both personal and societal levels.

"On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" (Dave Grossman)

"The Things They Carried" (Tim O'Brien) Reads even better the second time.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" (Joan Didion)

"Rhythms of the Brain" (Gyorgy Buzsaki) At $69.50, not exactly popularly priced. Too bad, as this is one of the most stunning books about the brain I've ever read. I hope to write more on this one later.

"Saturday" (Ian McEwan) The neurologically self-conscious update to Mrs. Dalloway.

Gingerbread-house show at Vermont Folklife Center

Each December the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury has a gingerbread-house exhibit and competition. This year's was better than ever, with some amusing political entries.
I'm not sure which I liked better - "Mission Accomplished," which tests the idea of whether a gingerbread house can be grim:

or the much happier vision of "Downtown Shopping":

You can see more at http://gallery.mac.com/ddobbs#100022

Getting Over Your Fears: Neural Mechanisms of Extinction Learning and Retrieval

If you've a taste for scholarly review papers (and who doesn't?!) and an interest in fear and learning (ditto), a rigorous but substantial treat awaits you, free, in the January issue of Nature Neuropsychopharmacology. Gregory Quirk, a former post-doc in the lab of fear-research pioneer Joe LeDoux (whom I once profiled in Scientific American Mind, is lead author on a review of what we know about how fear learning is extinguished (a poor term; fears are not so much extinguished as replaced by stronger lessons about not fearing) and then revived. He and co-author Kevin Meuller also discuss the potential for drugs for fear and anxiety disorders (OCD, PTSD, etc.) that seem to involve dysfunctions in fear extinction.

Goods stuff for the heart. Here's the abstract:

Emotional learning is necessary for individuals to survive and prosper. Once acquired, however, emotional associations are not always expressed. Indeed, the regulation of emotional expression under varying environmental conditions is essential for mental health. The simplest form of emotional regulation is extinction, in which conditioned responding to a stimulus decreases when the reinforcer is omitted. Two decades of research on the neural mechanisms of fear conditioning have laid the groundwork for understanding extinction. In this review, we summarize recent work on the neural mechanisms of extinction learning. Like other forms of learning, extinction occurs in three phases: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval, each of which depends on specific structures (amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus) and molecular mechanisms (receptors and signaling pathways). Pharmacological methods to facilitate consolidation and retrieval of extinction, for both aversive and appetitive conditioning, are setting the stage for novel treatments for anxiety disorders and addictions.