Secondhand Science Bargain Book Box SP4161

Secondhand Science Bargain Book Box SP4161

Hawking, Feynman, Dawkins, Gould, Sacks, Dava Sobel, Matt Ridley and Ben Goldacre: seventeen popular science paperbacks covering physics, genetics, the brain, evolution and the history of ideas. The reading list for someone who liked A Short History of Nearly Everything and wants the originals.

1. Musicophilia — Oliver Sacks — People struck by lightning who become composers, amnesiacs who can still play, and what music does to the brain. Sacks at his most personal.
2. A More Perfect Heaven — Dava Sobel — How a young mathematician talked Copernicus into publishing, told partly as a play. From the author of Longitude.
3. Six Easy Pieces — Richard P. Feynman — The six most accessible lectures from the Caltech course: atoms, energy, gravity, quantum behaviour. The place to start with Feynman.
4. Scientist, Soldier, Statesman, Spy: Count Rumford — G.I. Brown — The American loyalist who invented the kitchen range, founded the Royal Institution and married Lavoisier’s widow.
5. Genome — Matt Ridley — Twenty-three chapters, one per chromosome, on what the human genome says about us. Still the best introduction.
6. Looking for Spinoza — Antonio Damasio — Joy, sorrow and the feeling brain, with Spinoza as guide. Neuroscience meets philosophy.
7. Euclid’s Window — Leonard Mlodinow — Geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace, with jokes. Mlodinow co-wrote with Hawking.
8. Bad Science — Ben Goldacre — Homeopathy, nutritionists, the MMR scare and how the media gets science wrong. The book that launched a thousand sceptics.
9. All Us Apes and Other Scientific Wisdom from Ockham’s Razor — ed. Robyn Williams — Essays from the ABC radio programme. Australian science writing at its best.
10. A Promise of Miracles — Robyn Williams — The ABC science broadcaster celebrates the scientific experience.
11. Secrets of the Grown-Up Brain — Barbara Strauch — The surprising talents of the middle-aged mind: what gets better after forty.
12. A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking — Black holes, the Big Bang and the arrow of time. Tenth-anniversary edition, updated.
13. Naked Ape to Superspecies — David Suzuki & Holly Dressel — Suzuki on humanity and the global ecocrisis, with Dressel.
14. River Out of Eden — Richard Dawkins — Evolution as a river of DNA. Short, clear Dawkins, in the Science Masters series.
15. Life’s Grandeur — Stephen Jay Gould — Why there’s no evolutionary ladder, and why .400 hitters vanished from baseball. Gould’s clearest argument.
16. Rewilding the World — Caroline Fraser — Dispatches from the conservation revolution: corridors, predators and the people bringing wilderness back.
17. Pendulum — Amir D. Aczel — Léon Foucault and the experiment that proved the Earth rotates. Science history as a story.