Best Science Books 2009: New Scientist

The New Scientist's CultureLab blog asked a whole slew of editors and contributors to name a notable 2009 book. It's quite an extensive list.

  • Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham
  • Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate by Diego Gambetta
  • The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers
  • Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
  • Confabulation: Views from neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy edited by William Hirstein
  • Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
  • Reading in the Brain: The science and evolution of a human invention by Stanislas Dehaene
  • Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity by James Hansen
  • The Strangest Man: The hidden life of Paul Dirac, quantum genius by Graham Farmelo
  • The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani
  • Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner
  • Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics by Fulvio Melia
  • Not A Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human by Jeremy Taylor
  • An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world by Frances Larson
  • Plastic Fantastic: How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world by Eugenie Samuel Reich
  • Outliers: The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman
  • Naming Nature: The clash between instinct and science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon
  • Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon by Buzz Aldrin
  • Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by K.C. Cole
  • What on Earth Evolved?: 100 species that changed the world by Christopher Lloyd
  • Logicomix: An epic search for truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
  • An Orchard Invisible: A natural history of seeds by Jonathan Silvertown
  • The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson

More like this