Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

  • Adam Minter
Bloomsbury (2013)

Junk really is filthy lucre — the basis of a global scrap trade worth up to US$500 billion a year, writes Adam Minter. Scion of a professional recycling family, Minter anatomizes this complicated, half-hidden industry that he argues is, even at its dirtiest, greener than harvesting raw resources. He focuses on scrap metal, a prized commodity now recycled in innovative ways, and the kingpins of the trade. Leonard Fritz, for instance, rose from extreme poverty to run the Michigan-based Huron Valley Steel Corporation, which annually processes almost half a million tonnes of shredded automobile.

Cut It Out: The C-Section Epidemic in America

  • Theresa Morris
New York University Press (2013)

Birth by Caesarean section is expensive and carries a higher risk of medical complications than vaginal birth. Yet in 2011, 33% of US births were by Caesarean. To investigate why, sociologist Theresa Morris crunched the numbers and interviewed more than 100 medical staff and mothers. The culprit, she concludes in this excellent and detailed study, is a risk-averse US medical culture that favours heavily managed births — such as the overzealous use of fetal heart monitors, which restrict the mother's movement — and that frowns on women having vaginal births after Caesareans.

Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination

  • Joyce Appleby
W. W. Norton (2013)

A sea change gripped Europe from the late 1400s as word of the thrillingly strange New World spread. Maps were redrawn and the 'book of nature' swelled with new species, from penguins to chillies. In a history stretching from Christopher Columbus to Charles Darwin, Joyce Appleby reveals how a thirst for empiricism grew with the need to sift out tall tales from genuine reportage. She treads the trail of paper and specimens left by the likes of ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún and “first ecologist” Alexander von Humboldt.

To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World

  • Simon Garfield
Canongate (2013)

The letter — that pillar of the historical record — may itself soon be history. As Simon Garfield reminds us in this elegy to the post, letters uniquely revivify past eras and the psychological complexities of people living through them. The first stirrings and exponential rise of e-mail are touched on, but Garfield's focus is the physical missive and the depth of thought it allows. From wooden tablets dug up at the ancient Roman garrison Vindolanda, UK, to the epistolary gems of novelist Virginia Woolf, this is a billet-doux to two millennia of the impassioned, often life-changing power of private correspondence.

Survive! Inside the Human Body, Vol. 1: The Digestive System

Gomdori co., Suk-young Song and Hyun-dong Han. No Starch Press (2013)

From volcanic burps to colonic bacteria, this comic-book ride through the human digestive system is a delirious joy for pretty much everyone aged eight and over. Hyun-dong Han's lurid images and zippy text by Suk-young Song deliver on facts even as they shamelessly milk the 'yuck' factor. Take the plunge with hero Geo and “self-proclaimed genius” Dr. Brain as they shrink and are sucked into the ever-hungry Phoebe: the ultimate inside story.