The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

  • Al Gore
Random House 592 pp. $30 (2013)

Seven years on from his climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore takes on six planetary paradigm shifts. The former US vice-president pulls few punches in analysing economic globalization, the balance of power, the Internet, population and resources, biotechnology and digitization, and environmental crises. The idea that Net-based “public squares” could add significantly to the democratic process may be optimistic. But Gore's data synthesis impresses —; as do his cogent critiques of scientific and political myopia, such as the corrosion of self-governance by market forces.

How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown

  • Edward Shorter
Oxford University Press 272 pp. $29.95 (2013)

Historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter wonders at the disappearance of 'nerves' from psychiatry, arguing that today's classification of mood disorders is deeply problematic. Data from the US National Center for Health Statistics for 2005–08, for instance, showed that more than 22% of US women were on antidepressants. To rationalize treatment, Shorter calls for a relabelling of major depression as “melancholia”, and more acuity in seeing that many 'depressives' actually suffer from whole-body nervous conditions.

The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America

  • Ernest Freeberg
Penguin 368 pp. $27.95 (2013)

American geekery had a shining moment in 1879, when Thomas Edison unveiled the incandescent light bulb. The invention literally electrified the country, drawing rural residents to the bright lights of the burgeoning cities and illuminating surgeries, fairgrounds and more. But as Ernest Freeberg's history shows, Edison was no lone genius: funding, patenting and a science-savvy public all played a part in his invention of modern research and development. As for the dazzling bulb, we are still grappling with its energy-guzzling ways.

Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own

  • David Toomey
W. W. Norton 288 pp. $25.95 (2013)

At least 30 billion species have inhabited Earth, David Toomey tells us — each extraordinary in some way, like the extremophile bacteria that cluster at sea-floor vents. Yet all arose from a single ancestor. Toomey leads us into a speculative world of life outside that singular club. We visit the “shadow biosphere” of as-yet-only-imagined microbes posited by astrobiologists; the possibility of microbial life in Venusian clouds; doppelgangers in the multiverse; and much, much more. Weird indeed, and not a little wonderful.

A Palette of Particles

  • Jeremy Bernstein
Belknap 224 pp. $18.95 (2013)

Physicist Jeremy Bernstein pays homage to the subatomic, tinting particles according to era of discovery. So electrons, neutrons and neutrinos are assigned primary colours; the muons through to quarks, secondary colours; and the Higgs boson, neutrino cosmology and squarks, tachyons and the graviton, pastels. The abstractions come alive as Bernstein meshes history and science with anecdotes on everyone from Murray Gell-Mann to Richard Feynman. A colourful chronicle backed by 50 years in the field.