Best Science Books 2012: Booklist Online

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: Booklist Online Top 10 Science and Health Books.

• The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds by Julie Zickefoose
• Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
• An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases by Moises Velasquez-Manoff
• Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future by Climate Central
• How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks about Being Sick in America by Otis Webb Brawley and Paul Goldberg
• On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson by William Souder
• The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
• The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body by Frances Ashcroft
• Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen
• Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Fletcher Wortmann

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.