TRUTHS and consequences dominate the books we are likely to read in the year ahead. We escaped the food chain, but now we have to defend the living world we once fought against. We have left the planet only to discover all the unexpected ties that bind us to it. Some of us now lead easy lives – for which we reap surprising and unhappy consequences. What can the science that drove our success do to ensure our survival?
Irresistible attraction
We are still a very long way off from understanding how the world works. We still have no clear idea why what goes up must come down. The puzzle of gravity has driven Claudia de Rham’s adventures in science. In (Princeton University Press), we follow her from being an astronaut hopeful to becoming a research physicist.
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Frank Close brings a particle physicist’s perspective to bear on the same puzzle in (Oxford University Press). The secret to gravity, the force that shaped the cosmos, may lie in the exquisite balance of electrical charge within the atom.
Hunter killers
Luckily, Close and de Rham are able to research their world without damaging it. Early natural historians never had that moral luxury, says Jason Roberts, whose (Quercus) tells the story of the rivalry between the great 18th-century cataloguers of life on Earth, Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon. The legacy of their battle – without committing such heinous crimes as introducing invasive species – lives on as we struggle to save the living world.
The contributors to behavioural ecologist Martha Crump’s diverting collection (Comstock Publishing Associates) are Linnaeus and de Buffon’s successors, dangling off cliffs and dealing with leeches to understand the amphibians and reptiles critical to Earth’s vitality.
Field studies of this sort are where art and science meet. Lavinia Greenlaw’s (Faber) is a poet’s response to the puzzle of how we see and understand the unseen. How do we describe what we have never seen before? What helps us see more clearly or persuades us to see what isn’t there?
In (W. W. Norton), meanwhile, novelist Lydia Millet asks how our perspectives must change if we are to refrain from destroying the very lives we love to observe. It is a personal evocation of the glory of nature to warm the heart of every field scientist.
The social network
Our understanding of animal societies expands at an ever-accelerating rate. In (University of Chicago Press), evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin demonstrates that whatever creature you are – from a giraffe to a Tasmanian devil – life is all about who you know.
And the more we understand animal societies, the more we realise how “animalistic” we are. We aren’t, after all, the only animal that cries, laughs, loves or has a moral sense, as Jessica Serra’s (Johns Hopkins University Press) reveals.
The big oddity about humans is that we adapt with incredible speed to changes we ourselves have tinkered into being. This doesn’t happen smoothly, though, and in (Allen Lane), social psychologist Jonathan Haidt investigates the collapse in youth mental health that has followed the rise of smartphone, “selfie” culture and, broadly, the decline of real-world social networks.
Daniel Freeman, a clinical psychologist, offers a more anecdotal, but arguably even more shocking exploration of similar territory in (William Collins), examining what makes us mistrustful and asking how we can overcome this way of thinking.
And in (Princeton University Press), sociologist Allison Pugh sets out on another important quest: urging us to recognise, value and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.
Caught out
Unusual animals run unusual risks and, according to Sabrina Sholts in (The MIT Press), human beings are, by their nature, uniquely vulnerable to pandemics because what we do and what we are helps create them.
Whether humans are uniquely able to overcome them is a moot point. Dali Yang’s account of China’s handling of the covid-19 outbreak in (Oxford University Press) is fascinating, though also daunting and terrifying as we read how it spiralled out of control.
The more we study that global crisis for lessons, the bigger and more difficult those lessons become. In (Johns Hopkins University Press), economist Troy Tassier shows the many entangled and often unexpected ways that people with low incomes bear the brunt of epidemic disease.
Getting to grips with these systemic problems enables us to protect against the next pandemic and also to view other phenomena through an epidemiological lens. In (Johns Hopkins University Press), researcher Yara Asi looks at armed conflict as a huge threat to public health beyond the battlefield and offers new ways of mitigating its effects.
Numbers game
New perspectives on the human plight are always welcome. In (Picador), journalist Jenny Kleeman traces the unintended consequences of cost-benefit analysis and asks what we lose and gain by using cold logic for the judgements that really matter.
Sociologists Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy believe shifts in moral opinion have occurred now that our lives are being so closely measured, ranked and processed. (When was the last time you rode with an unrated taxi driver?) Their book, (Harvard University Press), is a powerful indictment of these automated measures of merit and the way they produce insidious kinds of social inequality.
French economist Daniel Cohen, who died this year, capstoned his career with a similar polemic: , enumerating the many ways the digital revolution has created a new economy and sensibility that is moving us out of civic life and our own mental well-being.
The next wave
The dark side of economic logic dominates Olive Heffernan’s account of (Profile Books). Owned by all nations and no nation simultaneously, our oceans, home to extraordinary biodiversity, are also witness to extraordinary acts of extraction and exploitation.
In (Atlantic Monthly Press), marine biologist Helen Scales asks what can be done to protect them and, thank goodness, finds hope. She has a distinct view on the human condition: no matter where we live, “we are all ocean people”.
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
