The most recommended popular science books

This is actually not one book but a five-volume (!) series of books which contains some of the best writing on classical music I’ve ever come across.

Taruskin, who passed away recently, was a legendary musicologist. In his writings, he managed to combine analytic writing that addresses his colleagues with unbelievably sharp and insightful writing that I, as a classical music fan who is not a pro, enjoy tremendously.

Taruskin loved picking intellectual fights, and this sort of combative energy is gripping. In this series, there are major story arcs like the interplay between “oral” and “literate” traditions or the role of nationalism in 19th-century music. I liked how Tarsukin switches smoothly between a close analysis of a piece and a discussion of how it relates to the wider culture.

It’s fashionable to think doomsday is coming, so fashionable that young people’s mental health is being harmed by relentless negativism in education, politics, the media, and Hollywood. 

Yet all previously predicted doomsdays did not happen! 

Historically, optimists have proven right far more often than pessimists. In this book Ridley makes the case that a revival of intellectual respectability for optimism would be good for society. Pessimists think there is no hope. Optimists believe reforms will succeed and society can improve.

Written with the clarity and zest of Bryson and McPhee, but with the added benefit that Hazen is a professional geologist. I like this book because of how Hazen takes the reader into the process of how a geologist works and thinks. Hazen’s specialty is mineralogy, and his main thesis—that living organisms and minerals evolved together with each shaping the other’s future—makes for a unique and thought-provoking take on the history of our planet. 

This often startling book provides a tour d'horizon of unsettled questions in modern physical science and, most importantly, of the intriguing directions the answers could take. It should inspire many in the rising generations of students to take the baton from their elders and seek a career in science at the edges of human understanding. A book I so wish had already been around when I began studying physics.

Tom Siegfried is a distinguished science journalist. 

In my work, I try to combine my love for brilliant visuals and my fascination for complex scientific topics. You can easily guess why the National Geographic Magazine has always been one of my favourites. Its first issue appeared in 1888, and from an early stage, NatGeo’s editors have made extensive use of excellent infographics and photography alongside their stories. For this book, National Geographic has teamed up with Taschen to assemble a marvellous collection of the best infographics ever published in the magazine. Attention: This is highly inspiring and – quite literally – a heavyweight.

Although I am a classical music fan, 19th-century romanticism isn’t generally my cup of tea. And yet, I couldn’t stop reading Charles Rosen’s book about the romantic composers in 1830-1850.

While Richard Taruskin was an academic scholar with a side gig as a performer, with Charles Rosen, the situation was reversed. His identity as a professional pianist is quite palpable in this book. However, as with Taruskin, I enjoyed how Rosen was able to move back and forth between analyses of musical scores and discussions of the wider European culture in the 19th century.

This book helped me become a huge fan of Schumann’s piano music. What more can one ask from a book on music?

We need to cut our carbon footprint to 'save the planet'. But how do we do so without an understanding of the carbon footprint of what we buy. Mike's book brings this important subject to life. The impact of bananas, grown in the tropical sunshine, is not as bad as you might expect as shipping has a fairly low carbon impact, but when buying coffee it is the milk, not the coffee granules, or boiling the water that has the big carbon impact. Avoid milky lattes at all costs! A quirky and fun book.

Possibly the best popular science book I’ve ever read.

Palmer explores the nature of mathematically chaotic systems and shows how we can deal better with the uncertainty they embody.

Many real-world systems, from something as complex as the weather to something as simple as a jointed pendulum, are chaotic, meaning that they are hard to predict as very small changes in the way they are set up produce vast differences in outcome.

Palmer covers a whole series of different topics, in several cases giving the best explanation I’ve ever seen. It’s not that this is an easy read. I had to go back over a couple of sections to really take them in – but it was very rewarding.

I am an academic economist, but even more interested in intellectual debates. I discovered this book when I was a PhD student, and it has remained a favorite of mine.

In the 1970s, macroeconomics (not my field) underwent a revolution. The old guard was “Keynesian,” the new Turks were “new classical”. This book is a series of conversations from the early 1980s with the protagonists of this epic period, many future Nobel laureates.

The interviewer, Arjo Klamer, was interested in the rhetoric and culture of economics, and he constructed the interviews in a way that nicely brought out these elements. The interlocutors are brilliant, acerbic, and funny. If you think economics is dry or boring, you won’t think so after seeing how passionate these people are.

This book makes the complex subject of the immune system fun to learn about.

At a time when our immune systems are taxed by the COVID epidemic, many people are confused about the role of our immune response, and this book provides an in-depth description of our body’s defenses in an entertaining and compelling way.

Critically important is that there is an immune system in the brain. When chronic inflammation occurs in the body, it also occurs in the brain, contributing to depression and cognitive deficits.