The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck by Jessica Riskin (Riverhead, March 24): Riskin, a historian of science at Stanford, knows how to tell a rousing story and analyze the shifting fate of Lamarck, whose insights, long maligned, have been reinvigorated by new research.
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses by Ian Hacking (Harvard Univ., 1998): Hacking’s story of and reflections on dissociative fugue in the 19th century offers a critique of psychiatric categories in general and how illnesses find “ecological niches” in various places and times.
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of Race Concept by W.E.B Du Bois (Routledge, 1940): Part autobiography, part philosophical essay, this brilliant book remains urgent and necessary reading.
Siri Hustvedt’s most recent book is Ghost Stories: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, May 5).
