Five Pulitzer Science Books to Read This Summer

Carl Sagan's 1978 General Nonfiction Prize was a milestone in his turbulent and heterodox career. When he left Harvard without tenure in 1968, Sagan was the enfant terrible of planetary science, a figure who had secured his assistant professorship (instead of the offered lectureship) through deft negotiation skills and was prone to extemporizations on the potential facets of extraterrestrial life at the era's buttoned-down academic cocktail parties. Although his burgeoning efforts at science popularization were cited in the profession's scuttlebutt about the decision, relatively little of this work had materialized; a potential consultancy on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was blocked by the director, who told collaborator Arthur C. Clarke to "get rid of him" after a preliminary meeting at the director's Upper East Side penthouse. Yet Sagan persevered, moving to Cornell with tenure and authoring essays for lay audiences in The New Republic, Scientific American and other publications. The canonical Sagan emerged in these pieces (collected in 1979's "Broca's Brain"): an interpreter of cutting-edge science who cast doubt upon countervailing trends while indulging at times in a speculative dreaminess drawn from his boyhood love of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert A. Heinlein. In "The Dragons of Eden," Sagan took this approach to its apotheosis, blending accounts of the early neuroscientific models of Paul D. MacLean and future Nobel laureate Roger Wolcott Sperry with ruminations on rational and intuitive thought. He argued that the "pervasiveness of dragon myths in the folk legends of many cultures" and similar phenomena are nothing less than the manifestations of a potential "biological memory" embedded in the "genetic code." But while this "mishmash" (per the interdisciplinary biosocial journal Human Behavior) drew ire from some quarters, eminent Columbia physical anthropologist Ralph Holloway, Sagan's unique reconciliation of the "contradictory strands" of 1970s psychological thought brought "giddy" reviews from such prominent figures as two-time Pulitzer winner John Updike, according to biographer Keay Davidson. Even Nobelist Harold Urey, the physical chemist who had been Sagan's bête noire since serving as his undergraduate adviser at the University of Chicago, hailed his former student as a "man of many talents" in a congratulatory letter about the book. Indeed, the following two decades would define Urey's assertion: From his rapport with Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" to the "Cosmos" franchise and even in his beloved genre of science fiction (the 1985 novel "Contact," later adapted as a 1997 film by Robert Zemeckis), Sagan remained one of the most influential public intellectuals in America until his sudden death from complications of myelodysplasia at the age of 62 in 1996.

A lifelong resident of Princeton, N.J. who continues to teach at his alma mater as he nears his 90th birthday, John McPhee has written about such unlikely topics as a young Bill Bradley, New York City farmers' markets and the Swiss Army. However, he is perhaps best known for his New Yorker pieces that blend elements of the travelogue, the profile and science writing, brought together under the title, "Annals of the Former World." From 1981 to 1986, these pieces were collected piecemeal in three books, two of which were finalists for the General Nonfiction Prize. In 1998, the three books were published as an omnibus under the series title with a fourth part, earning McPhee the 1999 Nonfiction Prize. McPhee leaned into a rather obscure field: geology. Yet McPhee, who immersed himself in academic coursework on the subject, discerned that the field was in the midst of a renaissance (precipitated by the development of plate tectonics) akin to the early 20th century in physics. Upon summarizing his geological education and the effects of plate tectonics on California and Nevada in "Basin and Range," the collection hits its stride by "In Suspect Terrain." Here, McPhee and the reader are accompanied by Anita G. Harris, a member of the Paleontology & Stratigraphy Branch of the Geological Survey who graduated from Brooklyn College at 19 before toiling through decades of institutional sexism to become a leading proponent of the counterrevolutionary theory of continental glaciation, notably advanced a century earlier by the inscrutable Louis Agassiz. (As noted by McPhee, Harris also conducted early research into the feasibility of shale extraction in the Appalachian basin amid the era's energy crises.) "The plate tectonics boys move continents around like crazy," she confided to McPhee, alluding to the peremptory, gendered intangibles of scientific practice. "They publish papers every year revising their conclusions. They say that a continental landmass up against the eastern edge of North America produced the Appalachians. [...] I get all heated up when some sweet young thing with three geology courses tells me about global tectonics, never having gone on a field trip to look at a rock." In the ensuing adventure, McPhee and Harris hunt specimens that ballast her methodology while also exploring the remnants of her youth in New York and her professional struggles. ("In those days," McPhee reflects, "Princeton would not have admitted a woman had she been a direct descendent of Sir Charles Lyell offering the weight of her tuition in gems.") With inconclusive evidence that does suggest a degree of glacial effect, Harris is left with her convictions: "Plate tectonics has turned people on. It has brought a lot of new people into geology. You've always got to have devil's advocates, and with respect to plate tectonics I am a devil's advocate." One can say that McPhee did the same for a popular audience.

New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert received the 2015 General Nonfiction Prize for this work, cited by the Board as "an exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behavior to a world of astonishing diversity." From a fungus affecting Panamanian frogs to the extinction of the mastodon in an earlier era and the alarming aragonite saturation state of coral reefs, Kolbert draws connections between our past evolution and a precarious future. Although she invokes Jonathan Schell's assertion that "futurology has never been a very respectable field of inquiry," a visit to a "frozen zoo" of preserved specimens in San Diego reminds Kolbert of "how many little plastic vials and vats of liquid nitrogen would be required to store cultures of all of the frogs threatened by chytrid and the corals threatened by acidification and the pachyderms threatened by poaching, and the multitudinous species threatened by warming and invasives and fragmentation, and soon I give up; there are too many numbers to keep in my head." Citing the brief vogue of environmentalism that was precipitated by the release of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in 1964 and culminated in the implementation of the Endangered Species Act a decade later, she added: "Wouldn’t it be better, practically and ethically, to focus on what can be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate gloomily about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic vials? The director of a conservation group in Alaska once put it to me this way: 'People have to have hope. I have to have hope. It’s what keeps us going.'"

A finalist for the 1984 Biography Prize, this book describes the life of Ernest Everett Just, a Black polymath who made his greatest scholarly impact in the fields of marine and cell biology. Raised by a single mother who worked as a schoolteacher and phosphate miner in Charleston, the young Just managed to regain his faculties after a debilitating bout of typhoid fever and spent three years at the predecessor institution to South Carolina State University before attending a New Hampshire boarding school at the instigation of his mother, who died when he was away. Remaining in the Granite State to attend Dartmouth, he specialized in Greek philology before being introduced to biology, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in zoology, botany, history and sociology. Yet he was not chosen to give a commencement address because of his race, and his ensuing academic career would be continually delineated by systemic discrimination, even as he succeeded in earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago, forming a zoology department at Howard University and securing a part-time research position at Chicago's prestigious Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. Manning, a fellow South Carolinian and a professor of rhetoric and of the history of science at MIT, details the vicissitudes of Just's life (including marital difficulties stemming from de facto segregation at Woods Hole, the dissolution of his collaboration with physiologist Jacques Loeb and his late-in-life academic celebrity as an affiliate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Germany) in an understated manner that amplifies its subject's difficult career. Indeed, almost immediately after publishing an important book that would prefigure later developments in biophysics and on the brink of permanently relocating to France, Just was forced to return to Washington following the outbreak of World War II, where he would die from pancreatic cancer in 1941. "For Just to get his paycheck, he had to go in to the university to work," Manning writes of these final days, when Just was nearly bed-ridden. "Directives came from [...] university officials ordering him to go into the classroom. He could not muster the strength even to answer; he simply did not have the will to fight his last battle." Although his anti-genetic stance would be repudiated by later researchers, Manning carves a portrait of an important and largely unheralded voice in American scientific discourse. 

The American space program marked the postwar maturation of American, spurring advances in fields ranging from medicine to mechanical engineering. Yet it also constituted a precarious balance between research for its own sake and the political undercurrents of the era, including the patriation of erstwhile Nazi engineers under the aegis of Werner von Braun (detailed by 2015 History finalist Annie Jacobsen in "Operation Paperclip") and a arrangement (primarily brokered by Lyndon Johnson) that situated NASA's primary administrative, launch and engineering research facilities in three different states. Moreover, the political pageantry of NASA's manned program was complemented by a classified, Air Force-dominated effort that was so successful in its efforts that a planned human component was ultimately rendered obsolescent. A milestone in space history published on the cusp of the imminent democratization of spaceflight (a dream shattered following the Challenger disaster of 1986 and only reclaimed following the successful launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 by NASA this year), McDougall's work is a comparative study that situates the United States' advances (both public and classified) against the contemporaneous effort of the Soviet Union and sheds light on the hitherto unknown Air Force program. His account of the machinations surrounding the abandoned Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar space plane demonstrates the oft-painful relationship between engineering ambition and political determinism.