Our staff’s favorite books of the year pondered science’s role in some of society’s most pressing issues, from AI to childhood trauma to river restoration. Did we miss your favorite? Let us know at feedback@sciencenews.org.
Rehab
Shoshana Walter
Simon & Schuster | $29.99
In a journalist’s exposé of U.S. drug treatment centers, stories of people who participated in rehab programs unveil how barriers to access and sometimes unethical practices can impede recovery from addiction.
Read our review | Buy Rehab from Bookshop.org
Shadows Into Light
Theresa S. Betancourt
Harvard Univ. | $35
A long-term study followed the lives of children forced to fight in Sierra Leone’s civil war from 1991 to 2002. The research revealed trauma’s effects on their psychosocial development and the factors that have helped some former child soldiers recover.
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Black Religion in the Madhouse
Judith Weisenfeld
NYU Press | $35
After slavery’s abolition and the U.S. Civil War, white psychiatrists pathologized Black religious practices as mental illness. A historian of religion unpacks how these racist views shaped the burgeoning field of psychiatry.
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The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog
Carly Anne York
Basic Books | $30
An animal physiologist makes a case for the value of basic science: Curiosity-driven research, which seeks to understand how the world works, may not always have foreseeable applications but could lead to unexpected benefits.
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Everything is Tuberculosis
John Green
Crash Course Books | $28
Tuberculosis is one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases despite available treatments and cures. In an examination of the medical and social history of the disease, a famous author builds a case for how modern social injustice sustains it.
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The Water Remembers
Amy Bowers Cordalis
Little, Brown & Co. | $30
A Yurok tribal member and attorney recounts her family’s role in the fight to remove dams from the Klamath River in the U.S. Northwest. The Indigenous-led effort to restore the river’s ecosystems culminated in the world’s largest dam removal project thus far.
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A Year With the Seals
Alix Morris
Algonquin Books | $30
Seal populations in North America have rebounded from the brink of extinction over the last century. A science journalist investigates how the growing number of seals has sparked tension in coastal communities.
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The Martians
David Baron
Liveright | $29.99
Reports of “canals” on Mars in the late 1800s and early 1900s ignited a craze about the possibility of intelligent life there. A journalist retraces how the canal theory infiltrated public consciousness and shaped astronomy.
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More Everything Forever
Adam Becker
Basic Books | $32
Tech billionaires envision a future in which humankind, served by superintelligent AI, lives in an ever-growing society in outer space. This sci-fi future, while seductive, is implausible and ethically fraught, a scientist journalist argues.
Read our review | Buy More Everything Forever from Bookshop.org
Tales of Militant Chemistry
Alice Lovejoy
Univ. of California Press | $27.95
A media and cultural historian unfurls how film giant Kodak used its chemical engineering expertise to support the United States’ weapons manufacturing — including the creation of the first atomic bombs — during the two world wars.
Read our review | Buy Tales of Militant Chemistry from Bookshop.org