It’s that time of year again: there’s a chill in the air, the sun bare­ly shows its face, and the leaves are just gold­en mem­o­ries long since car­ried away by the wind. A great time, in fact, to recall some of the out­stand­ing non-fic­tion books that have land­ed on my desk this year.

It’s been a vin­tage year for biogra­phies. Wal­ter Isaacson’s Ein­stein: His Life and Uni­verse is a mas­ter­ly and very read­able sur­vey of the great physicist’s life and work. Of course, Ein­stein is hard­ly a neglect­ed sub­ject in pub­lish­ing. But Isaac­son had priv­i­leged access to over 3,000 pages of fam­i­ly cor­re­spon­dence which were kept under lock and key until 2006, in accor­dance with the will of Einstein’s step-daugh­ter Mar­got. As a result Isaacson’s sym­pa­thet­ic biog­ra­phy of “science’s pre-emi­nent poster boy” can jus­ti­fi­ably claim to be more com­pre­hen­sive than any before.

As well as reveal­ing more details of Einstein’s many affairs, the cor­re­spon­dence casts new light on his rela­tion­ship with his men­tal­ly-ill younger son, Eduard. Ein­stein found it immense­ly dif­fi­cult com­ing to terms with Eduard’s con­di­tion, but Isaac­son detects “a painful sweet­ness in his let­ters to his trou­bled son”. At one point, Ein­stein touch­ing­ly advis­es Eduard: “Life is like rid­ing a bicy­cle. To keep your bal­ance you must keep mov­ing”.

Anoth­er immense­ly enjoy­able biog­ra­phy was Mar­tin Goodman’s Suf­fer and Sur­vive: Gas Attacks, Min­ers’ Canaries, Space­suits and the Bends — The Extreme Life of Dr J. S. Hal­dane. In his life­long quest to under­stand the secrets of res­pi­ra­tion, pio­neer­ing phys­i­ol­o­gist and ser­i­al self-exper­i­menter John Scott Hal­dane (1860–1936) became a con­nois­seur of rare gas­es, an author­i­ty on their detec­tion and effects.

He had a pro­found sense of pub­lic ser­vice and believed pas­sion­ate­ly that the world could be made a bet­ter place through the appli­ance of sci­ence. From min­ers dying of car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing and sol­diers being gassed like rats in the trench­es of World War I, to moun­taineers and avi­a­tors cop­ing with high alti­tudes, Hal­dane showed that sci­ence could bring light into the dark­ness. Good­man has a novelist’s eye for evoca­tive detail that less­er writ­ers might miss and the result­ing biog­ra­phy is as com­pelling as a his­tor­i­cal nov­el.

Andrew Robin­son deserves an award for even attempt­ing a biog­ra­phy of Thomas Young (1773–1829). He has been described as hav­ing “a wider range of cre­ative learn­ing than any oth­er Eng­lish­man in his­to­ry”. From med­i­cine (“Young’s rule” is a method of adjust­ing adult dos­es for chil­dren) and Egyp­tol­ogy (he helped deci­pher the Roset­ta Stone), to physics, in which he chal­lenged Newton’s author­i­ty by propos­ing a wave the­o­ry of light, the ver­sa­til­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty of Young’s mind is sim­ply breath­tak­ing. Appro­pri­ate­ly named The Last Man Who Knew Every­thing, Robinson’s account of Young’s achieve­ments is an immense­ly impres­sive work, although you can’t help feel­ing that to real­ly do jus­tice to this extra­or­di­nary poly­math you would need to write an ency­clo­pe­dia.

In phys­i­ol­o­gy too, Young made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to our under­stand­ing of the mech­a­nisms of the eye, explain­ing how it focus­es, defin­ing astig­ma­tism, and propos­ing the three-colour the­o­ry of how the reti­na detects the sen­sa­tion of colour. This year there have been sev­er­al mem­o­rable books on vision and how we per­ceive colours, espe­cial­ly the blue of the sky. Peter Pesic’s Sky in a Bot­tle (2005; pub­lished in paper­back this year) and Götz Hoeppe’s Why the Sky is Blue: Dis­cov­er­ing the Col­or of Life, both explore the fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry of how we have tried to explain and indeed repli­cate the blue­ness of the sky. It’s a ques­tion that has per­plexed philoso­phers, sci­en­tists and chil­dren alike since the begin­ning of his­to­ry.

For Pesic, answer­ing this ques­tion leads us to probe “the secrets of mat­ter and light, the scope of the uni­verse in space and time, the des­tiny of the earth, and deep human feel­ings.” Leonar­do da Vin­ci was one of the first to try to cap­ture an “arti­fi­cial sky” in a bot­tle, prob­a­bly a sat­u­rat­ed solu­tion of cop­per sul­phate and ammo­nia. Both books are excel­lent, although each has dif­fer­ent strengths: Hoeppe jour­neys deeply into the sci­ence and Pesic, as ever, has a fine­ly attuned ear for the way sci­ence res­onates in oth­er dis­cours­es, such as lit­er­a­ture.

Two oth­er stud­ies of vision out this year that deserve to be men­tioned are The Eye: A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, by Simon Ings, and Van­i­ties of the Eye: Vision in Ear­ly Mod­ern Euro­pean Cul­ture, by Stu­art Clark. The for­mer is a won­der­ful­ly expan­sive book on just about every­thing you ever want­ed to know about the eye and its work­ings; the lat­ter is a dense­ly argued but won­der­ful­ly sub­tle explo­ration of how, dur­ing the 15th to the 17th cen­turies, peo­ple devel­oped a com­plex under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ship between what was seen and what was known.

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al events of 2007 was undoubt­ed­ly The Simp­sons Movie. The con­tri­bu­tion of Homer Jay Simp­son (aka the “Wiz­ard of Ever­green Ter­race”) to sci­ence is often sad­ly over­looked. Physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing is a great fan of the TV show and has appeared twice. He knows a good sci­en­tif­ic idea when he sees one and Homer’s the­o­ry that the uni­verse is shaped like a donut made an imme­di­ate impres­sion: “intriguing….I may have to steal it.” This as well as many oth­er weird and won­der­ful sci­en­tif­ic moments in the series – such as what process­es could pro­duce Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish and do toi­lets in the north­ern and south­ern hemi­spheres real­ly swirl in oppo­site direc­tions (as Lisa claims in “Bart vs Aus­tralia”) – are explained in What’s Sci­ence Ever Done for Us? What The Simp­sons can teach us about Physics, Robots, Life, and the Uni­verse, by Paul Halpern. A delight­ful book; as Mr Burns might say: “Exx-cel­lent!”

Some won­der­ful clas­sics were reis­sued this year. Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind (1941) is, says her biog­ra­ph­er Lin­da Lear, “her most suc­cess­ful book”. It is indeed beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten: exquis­ite­ly craft­ed and metic­u­lous­ly observed – a per­fect union of the poet­ic and the sci­en­tif­ic. Carson’s book is a time­less evo­ca­tion of life beneath the waves and at the water’s edge. Anoth­er remark­able study of the ocean is Sev­en-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresh­olds, by James Hamil­ton-Pater­son, which first appeared in 1992. He empha­sis­es the oth­er­ness of the sea, the sense that the true sig­nif­i­cance of the water that cov­ers sev­en-tenths of the Earth’s sur­face is beyond the reach of sci­ence or even lit­er­a­ture. He sug­gests its sig­nif­i­cance is both ele­men­tal (“the salt which is in sea­wa­ter is in our blood and tears and sweat”) and ances­tral: the thought of its oth­er­ness “makes us ache, sea crea­tures that we once were, as for a coun­try we have lost on the far side of a fron­tier we can bare­ly even dis­cern”.

Step­ping onto dry land for a moment, Dirt: The Ecsta­t­ic Skin of the Earth (first pub­lished in 1995) by William Bryant Logan) is a glo­ri­ous cel­e­bra­tion of dirt – not soil or earth, but dirt: “It takes dirt to grow an oak from an acorn. It takes the rot and the shit that is the root mean­ing of ‘dirt’ – drit­ten means ‘shit’ in Old Norse.” If you want to know what makes your gar­den grow (or not as the case may be) then this is the book for you. From the for­ma­tion of the Earth’s sur­face some four and a half bil­lion years ago as the plan­et began to cool, to the prin­ci­ples of com­post­ing (includ­ing a great recipe for scal­lop vis­cera com­post), Logan writes with an almost mys­ti­cal inten­si­ty about the sci­ence and the meta­physics of soil. Although these three clas­sic books are very dif­fer­ent in style, each offers the read­er a mas­ter­class in writ­ing. Non-fic­tion doesn’t get any bet­ter than this.

In Britain we tend to take the sta­bil­i­ty of the ground some­what for grant­ed. It came as some­thing of a shock, there­fore, to learn that even though we don’t live on a geo­log­i­cal fault, there have in fact been 500 trem­blors record­ed in our green and pleas­ant land since the 10th cen­tu­ry. In 1580 what became known as the “Lon­don earth­quake” dam­aged St Paul’s cathe­dral and caused tsunamis that sank over 100 ships. Shake­speare even referred to this quake in Romeo and Juli­et: “’Tis since the earth­quake now eleven years”. This and many oth­er fas­ci­nat­ing links between cul­ture and the shift­ing sands on which we live can be found in Earth­quakes in Human His­to­ry: The Far-Reach­ing Effects of Seis­mic Dis­rup­tions, by Jelle Zeilin­ga de Boer and Don­ald Theodore Sanders, out this year in paper­back.

While I’m on mat­ters geo­log­i­cal, I must men­tion Super­con­ti­nent: Ten Bil­lion Years in the Life of Our Plan­et, by Ted Nield. In what is one of the best pop­u­lar­iza­tions of geol­o­gy since Richard Fortey’s Earth, Nield tells the sto­ry of “the great­est cycle of nature”, the process by which super­con­ti­nents form and break up over a peri­od last­ing between 500 and 750 mil­lion years. The timescales involved are mind-bog­gling, but Nield man­ages to bring “this slow­est of all unfold­ing dra­mas” vivid­ly alive, giv­ing us a won­der­ful sense of the ancient yet pow­er­ful forces at work under­neath us. Super­con­ti­nent real­ly will change the way you look at plan­et Earth.

The Asian Tsuna­mi three years ago, on 26 Decem­ber 2004, was caused by a mas­sive earth­quake with a force equiv­a­lent to almost a giga­ton of explo­sive – ten times big­ger than the largest hydro­gen bomb ever built. It killed almost 300,000 peo­ple. We ignore the ground beneath our feet at our per­il, for as poet Hugh Mac­Di­armid has said:

“What hap­pens to us
Is irrel­e­vant to the world’s geol­o­gy
But what hap­pens to the world’s geol­o­gy
Is not irrel­e­vant to us.”

As I write this, the news reports are dom­i­nat­ed by the UN cli­mate change con­fer­ence at Bali. This year the cli­mate cri­sis was scarce­ly out of the head­lines. Two mem­o­rable books pub­lished in paper­back in 2007 high­light­ed the dam­age we are doing to the envi­ron­ment – The Cre­ation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by E O Wil­son, and Field Notes from a Cat­a­stro­phe: A Front­line Report on Cli­mate Change, by Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert. With­out being sen­sa­tion­al­ist, Wil­son and Kol­bert speak pow­er­ful­ly about what is undoubt­ed­ly one of the most impor­tant sub­jects today.

I’m sure I’ve left out some books that deserve to be men­tioned. Feel free to put the record straight by leav­ing your own rec­om­men­da­tions! If you want to read more about these books or oth­ers from 2007, they’re all here.

Hap­py Christ­mas to all of you and here’s to a New Year packed with equal­ly great books!

[also post­ed on TNB]