Book recommendations

It’s the time of year when people are asking “What can I buy for my favourite nerd?”. Here are some books s/he might like, a mixture of older and new.

• Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame). A coffee-table book of annotated drawings, along the lines of his 2012 Up Goer Five. I reviewed this for the Listener.  It’s really good.
• Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist by Chad Orzel.  I’ve mentioned this book before on StatsChat. It’s a great look at how science works. In the process, it attacks a lot of the myths about scientists.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. With Amos Tversky, he pioneered the study of why people are bad at probability and risk assessments. He won a Nobel-like Prize for Economics shortly after the book came out. Unlike many books of its kind, it doesn’t need the subtitle “Why I am Right About Everything”.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. The HeLa cell line is a mainstay of laboratory research, but until fairly recently even most scientists didn’t know where it came from. Skloot’s book tells the story of an African-American woman treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins, and how her cells lived on without her or her family’s knowledge.
• How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. Ellenberg is a highly-respected pure mathematician, but his book is about statistical thinking in everyday life.
• The Canon, by Natalie Angier. A survey of the most important things we’ve learned about the universe. Includes a chapter on probability and statistics featuring the wonderful Deb Nolan.
• The Secret Life of Money, by Daniel Davies and Tess Read. One of the many books trying to explain the world in terms of microeconomics or vice versa. Less everything-you-know-is-wrong and more entertaining writing than Freakonomics.  I’m not sure if reading Davies’s account of a visit to New Zealand will make you more or less likely to want the book.
• The Philadephia Chromosome, by Jessica Wapner. This tells the story of the selective tyrosine kinase inhibitor imitanib (Gleevec),  and its (largely unfulfilled) promise of cancer treatment targeting the cause of disease without toxic side-effects.
• The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean. The eponymous spoon is made of gallium, which melts at about 30C; the book is an entertaining and informative survey of the periodic table.