Best books ... chosen by Natalie Angier

New York Times science writer Natalie Angier is the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography and The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. She served as co-editor

The Medical Detectives by Berton Roueché (Vol. I, Plume, $16; Vol. II, out of print). An old man collapses on the sidewalk, his nose, ears, lips, and fingers a startling shade of “sky blue.” A 6-year-old girl shows up at a Denver hospital, feverish, spasming—and with a painful bubo under her left arm, ominously suggestive of plague. Roueché virtually invented the medical mystery genre, and he remains its most dazzling practitioner.

Islands, The Universe, Home by Gretel Ehrlich (Penguin, $15). Ehrlich’s nature essays have the elegance and precision of calligraphy. “To find wildness, I must first offer myself up, accept all that comes before me,” she writes. “A bullfrog breathing hard on a rock … a cloud that looks like a clothespin; a seep of water from a high cirque, black on brown rock, draining down from the brain of the world.”

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