Best Science Books 2016: The Washington Post [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

And so it begins.

As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I’ve done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,2014 and 2015.

And here we are in 2016!

As in previous years, my definition of “science books” is pretty inclusive, including books on technology, engineering, nature, the environment, science policy, history & philosophy of science, geek culture and whatever else seems to be relevant in my opinion.

Today’s list is The Washington Post Best Books, Nonfiction, Memoirs.

• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age by Dan Zak
• Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union by Stephen Budiansky
• The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams
• The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner
• In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

And check out my previous 2016 lists here!

Many of the lists I use are sourced via the Largehearted Boy master list.

(Astute readers will notice that I kind of petered out on this project a couple of years ago and never got around to the end of year summary since then. Before loosing steam, I ended up featuring dozens and dozens of lists, virtually every list I could find that had science books on it. While it was kind of cool to be so comprehensive, not to mention that it gave the summary posts a certain statistical weight, it was also way more work than I had really envisioned way back in 2008 or so when I started doing this. As a result, I’m only going to highlight particularly large or noteworthy lists this year and forgo any kind of end of year summary. Basically, all the fun but not so much of the drudgery.)