Book recommendations by ABSW members

Photo by Engin Akyurt/Pexel

Some historical science facts and characters remained underreported for a long time until a science writer, a journalist, or even a historian decided to write about them. Words about these science-related stories can be as mind-blowing and engaging (or even more) as novels and fully fictional books.

ABSW-L participants were invited to share some of their preferences and recommendations. But we can keep building this list with your suggestions and comments. (Please, use this form and provide at least the title and author.) 

• 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' (1983), by Andrew Hodges
  • "From the big picture of building on the work of Babbage, to the detail in Turing's family history (one of his relatives coined the name of the electron) to Turing's harsh schooldays and even what he said in his lunchtime quips at Bell Labs about AI, the depth of the research is just incredible, and Hodges weaves a great yarn." – Paul Marks, Technology, Aviation & Spaceflight Journalist

• 'The Invention that Changed the World' (1996), by Robert Buderi
  • "Recalls the small group of scientists whose invention of radar during World War II contributed to the Allied victory, as well as chronicling their significant post-war achievements. 20,000 first printing."

• 'Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behaviour' (1999), by Jonathan Weiner
  • "Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose study of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes have helped revolutionise our knowledge of the connections between DNA and behaviour, both animal and human."

• 'The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius' (2009), by Graham Farmelo
  • "Paul Dirac (1902-84) was the first truly modern theoretical physicist. After a desperately unhappy childhood in Bristol, UK, his training in engineering and mathematics prepared him to co-discover quantum theory, the most revolutionary scientific theory of the twentieth century. A legendary introvert, his golden streak in research from 1925-33 included his successful prediction of anti-matter, which won him a Nobel Prize and brilliant speculations on the existence of magnetic monopoles."

• 'Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets' (2009), by Jo Marchant
  • "In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant tells the full story of the 100-year quest to understand this ancient computer. Along the way, she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters – ranging from Archimedes to Jacques Cousteau – and explores the deep roots of modern technology not only in ancient Greece but in the Islamic world and medieval Europe too."

• 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'(2010), by Rebecca Skloots
  • "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells – taken without her knowledge in 1951 – became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilisation, and more."

• 'The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York' (2010), by Deborah Blum
  • "A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever."

• 'How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival' (2011), by David Kaiser
  • "Dissatisfied, underemployed, and eternally curious, an eccentric group of physicists in Berkeley, California, banded together to throw off the constraints of the physics mainstream and explore the wilder side of science."

• 'Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler' (2014), by Philip Ball
  • "Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state." – The University of Chicago Press

• 'The Invention of Nature. Alexander von Humboldt's New World' (2015), by Andrea Wulf
  • "'The Invention of Nature' reveals the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the way we understand nature today. Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin."

• 'The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women' (2016), by Kate H. Moore
  • "As the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America’s early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights that will echo for centuries to come."

• 'Hidden Figures' (2016), by Margot Lee Shetterly
  • "Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts into space."

• 'Pale Rider. The Spanish Flu Of 1918 And How It Changed The World' (2018), by Laura Spinney
  • "Recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. Spinney shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered, and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test."

• 'Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Patterns, proteins and peace: a life in science'(2019), by Georgina Ferry
  • "Dorothy Hodgkin (1910–1994) won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964 for her work on penicillin and Vitamin B12, and her study of insulin made her a pioneer in protein crystallography." [Revised edition, originally published as 'Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life', 1999]

• 'The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann' (2021), by Ananyo Bhattacharya
  • "An intellectual history of scientific and mathematical developments in the 20th century, thinly disguised as a biography of John von Neumann." – Ananyo Bhattacharya, author

• 'So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs – and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease' (2025), by Thomas Levenson
  • "Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases."

Article first published on 20 May 2025.