Anthropology, Art and Architecture, Biography, Black Studies, Books for the News, Fiction, History and Philosophy of Science, Literature, Music, Poetry, Politics and Current Events, Sociology

2012: A Year in Books

In wrapping of the year’s best-of-2012 lists, we couldn’t help but single out the University of Chicago Press titles that made the cut as reads worth remembering. With that in mind, here’s a list of our books that earned praise as cream of the crop here and abroad, from scholarly journals, literary blogs, metropolitan newspapers, and the like. If you’re looking, might we (and others) recommend—

        

A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

***

A World in One Cubic Foot: Portraits of Biodiversity by David Liittschwager            

***

Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov by Kirin Narayan

***

And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen by Charles Molesworth

***

The Art of Medicine: 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination by Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes, and Emma Shackleton

***

Bewilderment by David Ferry

***

Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper

 ***

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure by Arthur Conan Doyle

  • named one of the best books of the year by Philip Hoare at the Sunday Telegraph

 ***

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis

***

The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives by Jessica Pierce

***

Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art by Leo Steinberg

  • announced as a book of the year by the Art Newspaper (originally published in 2007: TIME WARP)

***

The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon by John Tresch

***

The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century by D. Graham Burnett

***

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition by Thomas S. Kuhn

  • made Nature magazine’s Top Twelve of 2012 list

***

The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (And Do Not) Matter by Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezian

***

Vegetables: A Biography by Evelyne Bloch-Dano

included as one of the best books of 2012 by Audubon magazine

***

You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band by Bob Gluck