House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox

  • William H. Foege
University of California Press 240 pp. $29.95 (2011)

Adding to the series of California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public, this part-memoir, part-history by epidemiologist William Foege recounts his involvement in the global vaccination programmes that eradicated smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s. Foege, now a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, reflects on the strategies that led to wide uptake of the vaccines across Africa and India and discusses their successes and vulnerabilities.

A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change

  • Stephen M. Gardiner
Oxford University Press 512 pp. £22.50 (2011)

Inaction on climate change is more than a political or explanatory bungle — it is a moral failure, declares philosopher Stephen Gardiner. He identifies three reasons for this: the global imbalance of power, such that rich nations dominate poor ones; intergenerational factors, such that present generations dictate the world that future ones will inhabit; and our inability to make predictions using current scientific knowledge. A 'perfect storm' of these three factors creates an ethical headache, Gardiner contends.

Redesigning Leadership: Design, Technology, Business, Life

John Maeda with Becky Bermont. MIT Press 104 pp. $18 (2011)

Celebrated designer and computer scientist John Maeda shares his thoughts on leadership in this concise volume. Interspersing his musings with philosophical tweets, he reflects on how he has sought out imaginative ways to run teams and organizations, from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He describes how to make meetings run faster and be more fun, the team-building benefits of free food and how to harness conflicting opinions within a group of creatives.

An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science

  • Edward J. Larson
Yale University Press 360 pp. £18.99 (2011)

Looking at the broader context of the race to be first to reach the South Pole in the early twentieth century, historian Edward Larson celebrates the centenary of these explorers' achievements. It was the greater scientific ambition of the British Antarctic expeditions, he argues, that caused Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton to be slower than their more narrowly focused Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, who made it to the South Pole 35 days before Scott and his ill-fated team.

Engineering Animals: How Life Works

Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press 400 pp. $35 (2011)

From soaring albatrosses to croaking bullfrogs, different creatures exploit various aspects of engineering to help them fly, hunt or communicate. In a clear and well-illustrated account, former aerospace engineers Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean describe the principles of physics that underlie animals' sense of smell, their use of sonar, and how they flock, signal to each other and consume energy.