Best Science Books

Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded alone on Mars after his crew evacuates, and must use science, engineering, and dark humour to survive until a rescue mission can reach him.

David McCullough tells the gripping story of two self-taught bicycle mechanics from Dayton who changed the world by inventing powered flight.

Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has ever happened, from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation — written with his characteristic wit and warmth.

Stephen Hawking's landmark exploration of cosmology, from the Big Bang to black holes, written for readers with no background in physics.

A science journalist investigates the health implications of how we breathe — and finds that most people are doing it wrong, with significant consequences for their health.

Using data from archaeology, history, psychology, and criminology, Steven Pinker argues that violence in virtually every form — war, murder, torture, child abuse, animal cruelty — has declined dramatically over human history, and identifies the institutional, cognitive, and cultural forces responsible.

A neuroscientist reveals the life-transforming power of sleep. Walker shows why sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body — and the catastrophic consequences of neglecting it.

What happens to human bodies donated to science — surgical training, crash testing, forensic decomposition research, ballistics testing, and the specific history of what cadavers have contributed to human knowledge. Rendered with Roach's characteristic meticulous research and deadpan wit.

The definitive life of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan Project, witnessed the first atomic detonation at Trinity, and was subsequently destroyed by the McCarthyite security apparatus he had helped to empower. Twenty-five years in the making, it won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of how consciousness, self-reference, and meaning emerge from formal systems, through the intertwined work of a mathematician, an artist, and a composer.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer — its origins, treatments, and future — told through the stories of patients, scientists, and physicians across centuries.

A comprehensive exploration of the biological underpinnings of human behaviour — from the neural firing a second before an act to the evolutionary pressures that shaped our species over millions of years.

James Gleick chronicles the birth of chaos theory and the scientists who discovered that randomness and disorder follow surprising mathematical patterns.

Psychologist Anders Ericsson, the father of deliberate practice, reveals the science behind how world-class expertise is actually achieved.

A comprehensive history of the gene from Mendel's peas to CRISPR — and a searching investigation of what our growing power over the genome means for humanity.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains the two systems that drive the way we think — and reveals how our intuitive System 1 thinking leads us astray in predictable, correctable ways.

Why did Europeans conquer the Americas, Africa, and Australia rather than the other way around? Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning answer overturns centuries of racial and cultural explanations: the answer lies in geography, agriculture, and the uneven distribution of domesticable plants and animals.

Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science, revealing how the brain's lifelong capacity to change its own structure — neuroplasticity — offers hope for previously untreatable conditions.

James Gleick traces the history of information from African talking drums through Claude Shannon's information theory to the digital deluge of the modern age.

Richard Dawkins's landmark restatement of Darwinian natural selection from the perspective of the gene, introducing the meme concept and transforming evolutionary biology.

Elizabeth Kolbert reports from the front lines of the ongoing mass extinction event — the sixth in Earth's history, and the first caused by a single species.