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
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