I don’t know how I missed this when it came out in 2014: It was the Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, as well as a New York Times Notable Book of 2014.
This deep dive into materials science is just the sort of pop-physics book that is perfect for consuming with the sounds of waves slapping the beach as your background music. If you are curious as to why glass is see-through, how elastic stretches and returns to its original shape, or why any of the 11 common materials Miodownik looks at behave the way they do -- I know I am -- then you might share my enthusiasm for this book.
8. “Originals: How Non-Conformist​s Move the World,” by Adam Grant
Original thinkers are few and far apart. When we find a true original -- Grant’s “Give and Take” showed the top-ranked Wharton professor to be one -- it is worth paying attention to their ideas. Grant’s latest is a look at how people, especially those outlying nonconformists, drive society’s debates forward, pressing new ideas into the mainstream.
Avoiding groupthink, keeping your biases in check, and thinking deeply about controversial concepts are why this is on my summer reading list. (I was so intrigued by “Give and Take” that Grant is an upcoming guest on Masters in Business.)
9. “The Gene: An Intimate History,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and a staff cancer physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia. Given all of the progress being made in genomics as well as oncology, who better to take the reader on a historical review of not only genetics but life itself than the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”?
Mukherjee tries to answer one of the defining questions of our time: What becomes of humanity once we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?
10. "On the Move: A Life,” by Oliver Sacks
I have long been a fan of Sacks’s work; “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” changed the way many of us looked at how the human brain operates. We often learn more about brain functioning when disease or injury strikes; this book was a huge breakthrough, surprisingly relevant to behavioral economics. Music fans may find “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” similarly fascinating.