Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks

House of Huawei

Eva Dou Abacus (2025)

Oddly echoing persistent allegations that telecommunications systems made by Chinese company Huawei are used to spy on other governments, in 1865 China’s leaders rejected a foreign government’s attempt to install an electric telegraph. They suspected it was a “tool of colonialism and surveillance”, writes US-based technology reporter Eva Dou. Her compelling book opens with the US government fraud charges in 2019 against Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, daughter of the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei.

Hope

Pope Francis Viking (2025)

“If you’re worried that people will laugh at you tomorrow, laugh at yourself today.” Pope Francis’s modesty captures the charm of his complex, at times moving autobiography — the first by a pope — from a childhood as Jorge Bergoglio in a working-class barrio in Argentina to priesthood in 1969 and papacy in the Vatican City from 2013. Having started adult life as a chemical technician, he remained interested in science, wondering whether artificial intelligence would generate a new opportunity for “destruction” or “development”.

Intrepid Women

Ed. Julia Nicholson Bodleian Library (2025)

In 2018–19, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, celebrated six pioneering anthropologists who did fieldwork, frowned upon for women, from 1910 to the late 1950s. Co-curator Julia Nicholson and five others explore their work in a stunningly illustrated book. One studied her own community, the Māori people of New Zealand; the others lived with Pueblo peoples in the United States, reindeer herders in Siberia, villagers in Papua New Guinea, textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala and Naga people in north-eastern Indian hills.