The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them

  • Joseph E. Stiglitz
W. W. Norton (2015) 9780393248579 | ISBN: 978-0-3932-4857-9

That 1% of the world now owns nearly half of the wealth is weakening the global economy. So argues Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz in this collection of writing originally published in Vanity Fair and elsewhere. He ranges with searing honesty from the deregulation and tax cuts for the rich that spurred the 2008 meltdown to the ebbing of socio-economic mobility. His solutions to the crisis are presented authoritatively as eminently doable — from boosting corporate taxes to investing in science and education.

A Natural History of English Gardening

  • Mark Laird
Yale University Press (2015) 9780300196368 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-9636-8

In this vast, stunningly illustrated history of gardening in England, landscape historian Mark Laird focuses on a fertile moment — the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. During that time, he argues, natural history (the discovery of order in nature) emerged from the evolution of the garden (nature's ordered microcosm). Laird marshals climatic events such as the Little Ice Age winter of 1683 and the drought a century later to contextualize advances in forestry and garden design by John Evelyn, and in horticultural science by Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, among other developments.

Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World

  • Richard C. Francis
W. W. Norton (2015) 9780393064605 | ISBN: 978-0-3930-6460-5

We humans evolve side by side with other animals in the process of domestication, and in this intriguing study, science journalist Richard Francis tracks those changes. As he shows, both natural and artificial selection have worked powerfully to create diversity in size and shape in domesticated animals, notably the dog. Yet “evolution is still fundamentally conservative”, he notes: the wolf lingers in the chihuahua. Francis presents numerous case studies, from ferrets and camels to reindeer and us. Our self-domestication, he avers, has driven the cultural dynamism that has made us what we are.

Elephant Don: The Politics of a Pachyderm Posse

  • Caitlin O'Connell
University of Chicago Press (2015) 9780226106113 | ISBN: 978-0-2261-0611-3

The jaunty title belies the scholarly weight of Caitlin O'Connell's study on social behaviour in a group of African bull elephants in Namibia's Etosha National Park. O'Connell, who also works on the role of vibration in mammal communication, offers a riveting account. We see the pachyderms dipping their trunks into the mouth of dominant bull Greg; battling or welcoming would-be members; and, when Greg disappears, standing tail to tail, facing out as if listening for some seismic clue. Full of vivid detail, such as waking up to the “demonic-sounding giggling” of hyenas.

Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World

  • Christian Sardet
University of Chicago Press (2015) 9780226188713 | ISBN: 978-0-2261-8871-3

They have vital roles in climate and food chains, but their minuscule size means that plankton impinge little on the public consciousness. In this beautiful book, marine scientist Christian Sardet shows that tiny plankton, not enormous blue whales, are the real stars of the ocean. Macro pictures of the huge variety of plankton forms and short details of their lives force a reconsideration of our view of them as part of an amorphous soup. A celebration of the small, and an unalloyed joy. (See the Nature video at go.nature.com/gegecq.)