Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks

Hiroshima

M. G. Sheftall Dutton (2024)

Born and educated in the United States, M. G. Sheftall settled in Japan in 1987 to teach modern Japanese cultural history at university. His detailed book on the 1945 US atomic bombing of Hiroshima skilfully integrates science and technology with the human aspects of this horrific event. It stands out because of its interviews with the survivors, most of whom are now over 90 years old. They found a way “to compartmentalize and process their fear, anger, sense of helplessness, and despair” that was not self-destructive.

Beautiful New Sky

Ines Geipel Polity (2024)

As an athlete in East Germany, Ines Geipel was subject to covert doping with performance-enhancing drugs by the Communist regime. She’s now a literary academic, and her deeply researched book investigates the regime’s use of covert doping in medicine and in the Soviet space programme to test cosmonauts’ reactions to weightlessness. Through once-confidential military archives and interviews, she reveals that some participating scientists had served under the Nazis, perhaps explaining the programme’s immorality.

The Future Loves You

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston Allen Lane (2024)

In 1773, US polymath Benjamin Franklin argued that scientists should try to invent a method of embalming such that a human could be revived in the future. He admitted “a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence”. Neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston thinks that such brain preservation and revival could well become feasible. But his complex book acknowledges this proposition as “scary and disquieting” — requiring us to scrutinize our own mortality, “a deeply unpleasant task”.