Wayfinding Michael Bond Picador (2020)

This rewarding meditation on “how we find and lose our way” might have been called “Am I here?” — the tragic refrain of science writer Michael Bond’s grandmother after she developed dementia. The book astonishes as it ranges from the neuroscience of meandering rats to the deleterious effects of satellite navigation. A desert ant, we learn, can forage at least 100 metres from its nest, then scurry back in a straight line — equivalent to a human wandering for a day and a night, then heading straight home without help from GPS.

The World According to Physics Jim Al-Khalili Princeton Univ. Press (2020)

Quantum physicist, historian and science broadcaster, Jim Al-Khalili is well placed to summarize the past, present and future of physics for a lay audience, without using mathematics. After a tantalizing chapter on scale, he analyses space, time, energy, matter, quanta, thermodynamics and various attempts to unify the general theory of relativity with quantum field theory — although he never defines a black hole. On the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, Al-Khalili sides with Einstein, who believed in an objective reality.

Kingdom of Frost Bjørn Vassnes (transl. Lucy Moffatt) Greystone (2020)

Science journalist Bjørn Vassnes’s brief book demonstrates how “life’s different revolutions have been intertwined with the history of the cryosphere”. He includes memories of digging tunnels to his house in the Norwegian Arctic during snowy 1970s winters, and experience of Bangladesh, which never sees snow yet survives on river water from threatened Himalayan glaciers. Vassnes discusses how reindeer grazing eradicates vegetation that reduces the Arctic’s heat-deflecting albedo effect; perhaps it could aid the fight against global warming?

A Naturalist in the Amazon Henry Walter Bates Natural History Museum (2020)

“The best book of Natural History Travels ever published in England,” said Charles Darwin of entomologist Henry Walter Bates’s 1863 The Naturalist on the River Amazons, an 11-year journal inspired partly by Darwin’s diary of his 1831–36 journey on the HMS Beagle. This enchanting part-facsimile justifies his words. Bates writes grippingly on anacondas, bird-killing spiders and blowpipes. Although little-known now, his name endures in ‘Batesian mimicry’: a survival strategy based on apeing harmful species, which he observed in butterflies.

Lucean Arthur Headen Jill D. Snider Univ. North Carolina Press (2020)

There are no references to Lucean Arthur Headen on Wikipedia; nor did he leave behind significant personal papers. Yet this black inventor and entrepreneur, born in racially segregated North Carolina in 1879 among formerly enslaved artisans, deserves study. Local historian Jill Snyder’s biography reconstructs him. By his death in 1957, 26 years after moving to Britain, Headen had spent almost 4 decades running US and UK companies making cars and products based on his patents — some of which are still cited.