2019 Summer Reading List: Popular Sciences Books
Here are 20 popular science books to inspire you this summer! Each book has a link to the UCLA Catalog or Melvyl (you can use Melvyl to locate books in your local public library). Happy reading!
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Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneider An overview of digital surveillance and the disappearance of privacy. |
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Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh The story of the quest to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. |
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Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics by Eugenia Cheng An introduction to the concept of infinity and how it applies to our lives. |
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How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movement and the Robots of the Future by David L. Hu What can robotics designers learn from the animal world? |
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Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J. E. Gordon A classic and nontechnical guide to materials science. |
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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert An investigation of the ongoing mass extinction. |
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer An indigenous botanist writes about the importance of traditional relationships to land. |
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by Rachel Carson A classic work on the environmental damage caused by pesticides. |
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by Siddhartha Mukherjee A large-scale work on genetics, heredity, and humankind. |
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Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson Bees from their evolution to now. |
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A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the geology that caused it. |
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Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin LIGO and the monumental discovery of gravitational waves. |
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Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams A scientific and social history of the elements. |
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Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos by Priyamvada Natarajan A tour of the 'greatest hits' of cosmological discoveries. |
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Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder Is modern physics' preoccuptation with aesthetics preventing advancement in the field? |
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by Harriet A. Washington The history of American medicine's exploitation of African Americans. |
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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande The medical field has mostly failed to support high quality of life for the old and dying, but it doesn't have to be that way. |
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by Steven Johnson How the first epidemiologist solved the mystery of a cholera outbreak. |
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts A firsthand account of the political failures during the AIDS crisis. |
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I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong An introduction to the microbiome, the non-human parts of ourselves. |
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