Human Anatomy: A Visual History from the Renaissance to the Digital Age
by Benjamin A. Rifkin and Michael J. Ackerman.
Biographies by Judith Folkenberg. Abrams, 2011

From Leonardo da Vinci’s exquisite pen-and-ink drawings of the human skeleton to the digital Visible Human Project in its three-dimensional glory, this fascinating book, now in paperback, documents more than 500 years of anatomical illustration in living color.

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
by Nicholas de Monchaux. MIT Press, 2011
Talk about haute couture. In 1968 Playtex, the bra and girdle manufacturer, beat out a slew of military-industrial companies to win the contract to design and hand-sew the space suit for the 1969 Apollo mission to the moon. Nicholas de Monchaux of the University of California, Berkeley, delves into the history and enduring impact of the 21-layer garment in this well-illustrated volume.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement
by David Brooks. Random House, 2011
New York Times columnist David Brooks invents two characters, Harold and Erica, to illustrate recent scientific discoveries about human nature and the quest for success, following their paths from birth to old age.

The Moral Lives of Animals
by Dale Peterson. Bloomsbury Press, 2011
Cooperative hyenas, scorekeeping impalas, heroic rats—humans are not the only creatures with a code of ethics. Dale Peterson of Tufts University argues that animals across many species exhibit behaviors that reveal evolutionary continuity between us and them. The rules and values Homo sapiens shares with other species provide a basis for Peterson to speculate about the future of our relationship with our fellow fauna.

Also Notable
Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth,
by Curt Stager. St. Martin’s Press, 2011

Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel,
by Michael Hoskin. Princeton University Press, 2011

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,
by Sherry Turkle. Basic Books, 2011

Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution,
by Holly Tucker. W. W. Norton, 2011

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind,
by Robin Fox. Harvard University Press, 2011 ($29.95)

The Ragged Edge of the World: Encounters at the Frontier Where Modernity, Wildlands, and Indigenous Peoples Meet,
by Eugene Linden. Viking, 2011

Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us about the Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals,
by Sharon Levy. Oxford University Press, 2011

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,
by Joshua Foer. Penguin Press, 2011

Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema,
by David A. Kirby. MIT Press, 2011

The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom,
by Douglas Brinkley. HarperCollins, 2011

This article was originally published with the title Recommended.

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