Best Science Books 2012: Boing Boing Gift Guide

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.

Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.

All the previous 2012 lists are here.

This post includes the following: Boing Boing Gift Guide.

• The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science by Matt Lamothe, Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and David Macaulay
• Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
• Illustrated Guide to Home Forensic Science Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson
• Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt
• Geek Mom: Projects, Tips, and Adventures for Moms and Their 21st-Century Families by Natania Barron, Kathy Ceceri, Corrina Lawson and Jenny Williams
• Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients by Ben Goldacre
• The Science of Good Cooking by The Editors of America's Test Kitchen and Guy Crosby Ph.D
• The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix by James D. Watson, Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski
• The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (Open Laboratory) by Jennifer Ouellette and Bora Zivkovic

I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot ca or in the comments.

I am picking up most of my lists from Largehearted Boy.

For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t a science book is squishy at best, especially at the margins, but in the end I pick books that seem broadly about science and technology rather than something else completely. Lists of business, history or nature books are among the tricky ones.

And if you wish to support my humble list-making efforts, run on over to Amazon, take a look at Steve Jobs or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or maybe even something else from today's list.