Books & Arts in 2013

Richard Rhodes explores a history of Britain's little-known role in the race to develop an atomic bomb.

Ann Finkbeiner ponders a chronicle of airborne war.

Jan Witkowski relishes the interwoven stories of Nobel laureates Jacques Monod and Albert Camus.

David Singmaster delights in the autobiography of Martin Gardner, whose Scientific American maths column enchanted tens of thousands.

Sean Carroll finds Thomas Pynchon on compelling form in a tale of big data and bigger conspiracies.

Leonid Gokhberg and Dirk Meissner compare accounts on the trajectory of innovation in two towering economies.

Marianne de Laet enjoys a sociological analysis of how a select group of physicists works.

Alison Abbott sees the science and poetry in a penetrating study of reminiscence in the elderly.

Robert P. Crease weighs up two takes on Stephen Hawking — including the theoretical physicist's own.

Eugenie C. Scott revels in the first volume of Richard Dawkins's frank new memoir.

Hania Zlotnik assesses two polarized takes on population growth and planetary capacity.

A celebration of uncrewed space missions is less than international in scope, finds John Zarnecki.

For the 125th anniversary of the Geological Society of America, the Colorado-based musician Jeffrey Nytch has composed a symphony celebrating the geology of the American Rocky Mountains. He talks about Formations, which will be premiered by the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra on 7 September.

Douglas Repetto explores the multilayered aesthetic of sound as art at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Paul McEuen relishes the final instalment of Margaret Atwood's sweeping trilogy about a dystopian world devastated by a 'hot bioform'.

Jon Christensen unpacks the fraught story of a biologist, an economist, and the polarization of US environmental policy.