Preston’s style of journalism, he says, is the equivalent of climbing into a boiling pot to better understand soup. In this collection, Preston describes some of his close encounters with the subjects he has written about, telling, for example, how he donned a “spacesuit” to visit a high-security U.S. Army lab where researchers study Ebola virus (the subject of Preston’s celebrated thriller The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story). He goes on to describe how he climbed the tallest tree east of the Mississippi River, right after it had been killed by an invasive species — ...

People like to think they understand their world. They seek explanations for things that go well and excuses for failures. “To swim against the current of human intuition is a difficult task,” Mlodinow notes. In this guide to randomness, he explores how people misunderstand the power of praise and punishment, hot and cold career streaks, and the luck in the lottery, all because of a misunderstanding of the influence of chance. But not to worry. Mlodinow provides lessons on what he calls “a field of subtlety,” from the basic laws of probability, to regression toward the m...

“What makes a man?” Flam, a science writer who pens a sex column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, seeks a scientific answer to this often-asked question. Her search takes her from a seduction boot camp for men to the labs of evolutionary biologists, sociologists and physiologists who study gender differences. From mushrooms with 30,000 sexes to sea worms that compete to be the male, Flam surveys the natural world to explain why human males evolved the way they did, revealing a riotous diversity in the way life begets life. While human males have one X and one Y chromosome, for inst...

The book details the 28 historic deluges that have hit the Lone Star State since 1900, with plenty of black and white photographs. Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2008, 330 p., $35.

An illustrated tour of Egyptian tombs recounts the history and culture of ancient burial rites. Thames & Hudson, 2008, 368 p., $50.

As a child, Seymour Papert fell in love with gears. Papert, now considered a pioneer in artificial intelligence, describes this love in very grown-up, scientific terms: “I remember quite vividly my excitement at discovering that a system could be lawful and completely comprehensible without being rigidly deterministic.” So Papert and other scientists recount in this collection of essays that, in their personal approach, provide an innovative way to talk about science. A sociologist and psychologist by training, Turkle is a scholar in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society. F...

People cry when they watch sad movies or wince when they see athletes fall. This sense of shared experience is thought to be at the core of human society. How empathy physically happens, however, wasn’t known until neuroscientists in Italy stumbled upon a possible explanation 15 years ago. Iacoboni, one of those pioneers at the University of Parma, describes how he and his colleagues initially sought to find which neurons fired when a monkey moved its hands. They attached tiny electrodes to individual cells in the monkeys’ brains, and the monitor buzzed when the monkeys snatched a peanut...

Miller, a Brown University biology professor and outspoken opponent of intelligent design, examines the arguments, passion and motivations of those who reject Darwin’s theory in the larger context of American culture, ending with an exploration of how the ongoing debate over evolution is threatening public understanding of scientific thought. Viking, 2008, 244 p., $25.95

A baby bonobo named Lucy tells children just how similar she is to them. Blue Bark Press, 2008, 33 p., $19.95 The book can also be ordered at www.bonobokids.org

Take a journey to the far corners of the Earth to learn about the emergence of amphibians and reptiles from the primeval water millions of years ago as well as their current plight as some of the species most at risk for extinction. Princeton Univ. Press, 2008, 288 p., $29.95

A scientist and ethicist team up to reveal how decades of animal rights extremism has impacted scientific advancement and examines cases in which activists used terrorist tactics to threaten medical researchers’ lives and work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 174 p., $34.95

Critical to keeping any naturalist, gardener or wanderer of woods rash- and itch-free, this updated pocket-sized guide helps readers identify, avoid and, when all else fails, wade through the many myths, lore and home remedies that have grown up about these noxious plants. FalconGuides/Globe Pequot Press, 2008, 84 p., $14.95

In 1964, Paul Colinvaux began his life’s work—trying to understand the ice-age climate of the Amazon through mud cores and the pollen found within. Having sharpened his drill in the Arctic, the ecologist looked south to “terra incognita.” When he began his effort, no ice-age deposit or site in the Amazon had been identified. Then in 1969, ornithologist Jurgen Haffer proposed a hypothesis to explain the Amazon’s vast biodiversity. During the last ice age (which peaked about 21,000 years ago), he suggested, most of the forest became arid grassland. In pockets of surviving gr...

As Jonathan Swift once said, everyone wants to live forever, but no one wants to be old. Despite that snag, the question has lingered: Must we die so soon? Some people have lived to be mighty old, and Haycock does them justice in this well-researched ramble through the pursuit of long life. Thomas Hobbes’ observation that life in the old days was “nasty, brutish and short” wasn’t entirely true. Europeans have shown an obsession with living longer, even publishing texts in the 1700s that mention people who lived a particularly long time. Among them: a French fellow who lived ...

The former CEO of Amgen narrates the company's rise from start-up to biotech giant. Harvard Business School Press, 2008, 288 p., $29.95