The Ten Best Science Books of 2024
From captivating memoirs by researchers to illuminating narratives by veteran science journalists, these works affected us the most this year
published : 09 March 2024
This year the news cycle was dominated again by stories about Covid-19, and rightly so, but other big discoveries were made throughout the sciences. NASA landed another rover on Mars, researchers discovered a new possible species of human, and scientists found ways climate change is influencing the evolution of animals—all topics that may lend themselves to future books.
In 2021, with one year of the battle against the coronavirus behind us, several books came out related to the pandemic. One of those books, The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, is on this list. Another important book that has bearing on how we fight disease, The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson, is instead listed among Smithsonian scholars’ picks of the best books of the year. (We didn’t want to review it a second time here.) The books we have selected include dispatches from researchers on their scientific quests to search for an elusive physics equation and learn about the connections betwen trees and in-depth narratives from veteran science journalists exploring everything from solutions to major environmental problems to the benefits of sweat. With so many informative and entertaining works to choose from, it was hard to pick just ten, but these are the books that influenced our thinking the most in 2021.
Under a White Sky:The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the wild ways scientists are solving complicated environmental problems in Under a White Sky. As Kolbert notes, humans have directly transformed more than half of the ice-free land on Earth, and indirectly transformed the other half—with many negative consequences in need of fixing. She takes the reader to a canal near Chicago, where officials have electrified the water so damaging invasive carp don’t make their way up the waterway and into the Great Lakes. She heads to Hawaii and Australia, where marine biologists are trying to engineer super corals that can withstand rising water temperatures to save reefs. And she details a geoengineer’s plan to pump diamond dust into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce the impact of climate change. Late in the book, she talks to Dan Schrag, a geologist who helped set up Harvard’s geoengineering program. He says, “I see a lot of pressure from my colleagues to have a happy ending. People want hope. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.’” And that is exactly what Kolbert does in her book. She paints a realistic picture of exactly where we’re at. (Joe Spring)
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis
The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, is a thriller, though you know from the start its heroes lose. The book follows several public servants and scientists who saw Covid-19 coming, and did everything within their powers to stop the virus from spreading in the United States. Lewis sticks to his brand: He parachutes readers into the lives of unconventional thinkers who challenged so-called experts. In earlier works, those insiders were Wall Street traders and pro-baseball scouts (The Big Short and Moneyball, respectively). The Premonition’s antagonists are high-ranking government officials that ignore or muzzle our heroes, and bureaucratic systems that pose barriers to their success. In Part I, Lewis recounts the protagonists’ backstories, including a public health officer once damned to hell by hometown church leaders for attending medical school; a microbiologist who injected an Ebola cousin into the hearts of live pythons; and the Wolverines—a covert group of medical and military government insiders pushing pandemic preparedness. In Part II, mostly set in early 2020, the characters meet and try to contain Covid. Lewis’ account then becomes a maddening page-turner, as politics, optics and profits thwart our heroes and allow the virus to rampage. (Bridget Alex)
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard
Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard penned our favorite book by a scientist this year with her deeply personal and engaging Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard grew up in Canada in a logging family and, at age 20, worked as a seasonal employee for a logging company. But even early on, she had a sense that clear-cutting forests and poisoning the earth so monocultures could grow was the wrong approach. Simard suspected that forests were made up of interconnected entities that helped each other out, and so she pursued a career in science—studying silviculture for the Forest Service and eventually earning a PhD in forest sciences at Oregon State University. In experiments, she documented that birch and Douglas fir trees traded carbon underground. She established that the forest is a “wood-wide web,” with plants exchanging nutrients and chemical signals via their roots and fungal networks, and found that large old trees, or “Mother Trees,” were at the center of these networks, often helping their offspring.
Simard’s discoveries have implications for how governments should manage forests. Clear-cutting swaths and suppressing all but the desired species may not be the best approach; the ecologist instead argues for leaving Mother Trees and enabling plants to grow together and support each other. But Simard’s science alone isn’t the reason this book impresses. Throughout it, she shares personal stories as she embarks on her scientific quest—her close relationship with her brother, the breakdown of her marriage and her battle with breast cancer. In the midst of all this, Simard continues to push the limits of what is known about how forests work. She brings the reader with her—to scientific conferences where she speaks about research that many in the audience discount, to her lab at the University of British Columbia where she does field experiments with graduate students and to forests in western Canada where grizzly bears roam. By crafting a narrative that incorporates so many personal and professional relationships, she shows how connections as intricate as the root and fungal network beneath the forest floor shaped her scientific journey. (J.S.)
