12/13/2013

The Best Science Books Of 2013

22:35 minutes

Do you have a favorite science-themed book from this past year? We’re making our list, and checking it twice, when Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum and Brainpickings.org editor Maria Popova join Ira Flatow to share their top science, technology, and environmental books of 2013.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink

On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes, by Alexandra Horowitz

The Sixteenth Rail: The Evidence, the Scientist, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping, by Adam Schrager

Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from The Edge of Science, by Dorion Sagan (Carl Sagan’s son)

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car and Food on Your Plate, by Rose George

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, by Jon Mooallem

Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? by Gemma Elwin Harris

Smarter Than You Think, by Clive Thompson

The Inheritor’s Powder: A Tale of Arsenic, Murder, and the New Forensic Science, by Sandra Hempel

Einstein and The Quantum: The Quest of the Valian Swabian, by A. Douglas Stone

Segment Guests

Deborah Blum

Deborah Blum is a science journalist & author, the publisher of Undark magazine, and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Maria Popova

Maria Popova is the editor and founder of BrainPickings.org and a MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Meet the Producer

About Annie Minoff

Annie Minoff is a producer for The Journal from Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal, and a former co-host and producer of Undiscovered. She also plays the banjo.

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