Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks

When the Earth Was Green

Riley Black St Martin’s Press (2025)

Science journalist and dinosaur enthusiast Riley Black turns her attention to plants. Applying her rock hammer to a sheet of limestone from the Cretaceous (some 100 million years ago) on a Montana mountainside hoping to find Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, she instead spots a leaf with minute branching veins exquisitely preserved in stone. Its beauty inspired this “series of unfolding vignettes that speak to how animals and plant life have changed each other through the ages”. Her book travels from 1.2 billion to 15,000 years ago.

What’s Real About Race?

Rina Bliss W. W. Norton (2025)

“There’s nothing biological or scientific about race,” notes sociologist Rina Bliss. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, proved that all humans are 99.9% the same, genetically speaking. In her thoughtful book, she argues that race is not just a “social construct” but a “social reality”. The daughter of an Indonesian mother and a New York-born father from an Ashkenazi Jewish family, she experienced this reality in how she was treated both at school in California and, in a different way, by some relatives in Indonesia.

American Poison

Daniel Stone Dutton (2025)

Leaded petrol’s toxicity is well known today. Less so is the complex battle against it that started in 1924. In 2021, Algeria was the last nation to ban the fuel. Journalist Daniel Stone captures this dramatic and disturbing story by focusing on engineer Thomas Midgley, who developed tetraethyl lead as a fuel in 1921 and was poisoned, and physician Alice Hamilton, who publicized its toxicity and fought courageously against its use. Sadly, “the more Hamilton was proven right”, Stone notes, “the further she seemed to fade from public view”.