The Fly Trap

  • Fredrik Sjöberg
(Translated by Thomas Teal) Allen Lane (2014)

A shimmering and elusive grace pervades Fredrik Sjöberg's evocation of his life and work as a hoverfly expert. This Swedish best-seller deftly interweaves three threads: the intricate business of fieldwork tracking and trapping flies in the Stockholm archipelago; the life of sawfly expert, art collector and sometime crackpot René Malaise; and a wealth of cultural allusions. Sjöberg is mesmerizing, whether describing the psychology of collecting, hoverflies as “superb impostors” or the moment a maple blooms in greenish glory — when “everything flies, absolutely everything”.

The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

  • Richard Barnett
Thames and Hudson (2014)

Can a panoply of horrors become a thing of beauty? Richard Barnett would have you think so. He has collected scores of appalling, if brilliantly rendered, illustrations from eighteenth- to twentieth-century medical textbooks and other sources, to explore a period in which medicine moved conclusively away from its unscientific past. In his view, images of syphilitic sores and horrifically eroded faces can and should be considered legitimate art as well as historical artefacts. A fascinating book, albeit only for those with strong stomachs.

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

  • Dan Barber
Penguin (2014)

Mapping the provenance of meat and produce — the “farm to table” approach — is now part of the Western food-sustainability paradigm. Lauded chef Dan Barber calls for a more radical shift. His finely orchestrated agricultural model incorporates crop biodiversity and rotation, mixed land use, diverse livestock diets, ethical fishing and a realignment of US eating habits towards 'whole food' cuisine, including 'nose-to-tail' consumption of animals. An inspirational agronomic model — but given the dominance of industrial agriculture in the United States, it may smack of the utopian to some.

The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World's Greatest Invention

  • Alexander Monro
Allen Lane (2014)

Paper may be derided as a waste of trees, and as dead as the dodo in our digitized world. But, as Alexander Monro reminds us in this erudite history, it has been the base layer of world culture. Monro traces paper's trajectory from its second-century-AD origins in China to its passage through Eurasia, the Maghreb and on to world dominance. From Islamic scientific tracts to Copernicus's 1543 De Revolutionibus, paper, as Monro eloquently shows, has filled the supremely important role of placing “truth in the reader's hands”.

The Next Crash: How Short-Term Profit Seeking Trumps Airline Safety

  • Amy L. Fraher
Cornell University Press (2014)

The 700 million people flying in the United States this year might face unexpected turbulence, argues former naval aviator Amy Fraher. Her history of the US aviation industry — including hundreds of interviews with professionals — reveals cost-cutting and lax oversight in recent years. Short-term gain is trumping long-term safety: in 2000–12, carriers earned US$2 trillion, yet risk management is not keeping pace with rapid shifts in the industry.