Best Science Books 2012: The Scholarly Kitchen, Wit and Wisdom of an Engineer, Dwight Garner and Michiko Kakutani

Another bunch of lists 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:

The Scholarly Kitchen: Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2012

• The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don'tby Nate Silver
• Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using data to Change the Worldby Beth Kanter and Katie Paine
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Wit and Wisdom of an Engineer

• The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflictsby Robert D. Kaplan
• The Signal and Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don'tNate Silver
• Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlinesby Richard A. Muller
• The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity by David Zetland

Dwight Garner

• Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Michiko Kakutani

• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovationby Jon Gertner
• Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

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.