non-fiction
ENDEAVOUR
by Peter Moore (Vintage, $38) Peter Moore provides a fascinating new context for James Cook’s voyages by focusing on the story of the sturdy vessel he used for the first one. As the Earl of Pembroke, this ship helped power the industrial revolution by carrying coal to London’s factories. As the Endeavour, it helped usher in an era of amazing discoveries in geography, astronomy, botany, zoology, anthropology and more. As the Earl of Sandwich, it was present at the birth of the US. The life of the Endeavour is, as Moore points out, the perfect symbol of a remarkable period. It’s also a wonderful story. (JE)
LYING FOR MONEY
by Dan Davies (Profile Books, $40)
Like love and death, fraud will always be with us. This entertaining look at fraud covers the gamut, from the immortal Charles Ponzi, to the clever dodges of the Kray twins’ accountant, to the manipulation of interestrate indexes. Some of the perpetrators are obvious chancers (see the Krays’ accountant, above) while others are supposed pillars of the financial establishment (see interest-rate indexes). Some of their schemes are simple (step 1: run up debt; step 2: scarper) while others are sophisticated. And, assuming you’re not a victim, the fraudsters are as entertaining as their scams. (MF)
SEEDS OF SCIENCE
by Mark Lynas (Bloomsbury, $33)
This is the story of an environmentalist’s conversion — how Mark Lynas went from vandalising genetically modified crops in the dead of night to accepting GM foods as a potential solution for many of the world’s problems. Along the way, it’s also a primer on how GM works and the scientists who pioneered it. And it’s study of how a belief — GM bad, “natural” good — can be based on faith as much as logic. Persuasive, written with unusual honesty and likely to be challenging for anyone who cares about the environment. (MF)
PATHWAY OF THE BIRDS
by Andrew Crowe (Bateman, $50) An extraordinary, encyclopaedic account of the greatest maritime expansion in history: the migration of Polynesians from Asia across the vast Pacific to Easter Island in the east and New Zealand in the south. Andrew Crowe has assembled a stunning amount of evidence from archaeology, genetics, linguistics, meteorology, astronomy, zoology and tradition to show not only that the Polynesians knew how to navigate across the seemingly trackless waves but the paths they followed, their techniques for locating islands and how they adapted to so many different environments. Wonderfully informative and entertaining too. (JE)
BUZZ
by Thor Hanson (Icon Books, $33) Everyone knows honeybees. And bumblebees are hard to miss. But this is mostly about the other, lesser-known, bees — leafcutters, mason bees, diggers, carpenters and all the other 20,000-plus species. It’s about where they came from (basically from wasps that turned vegetarian), their extraordinary variety, their role in shaping the evolution of plants and their value to humanity — mostly as unpaid pollinators, rather than as honey producers. And because this is 2018, it’s also about the many threats facing the world’s bees. Full of enthusiasm and written by a gifted storyteller. (MF)