Thank goodness Jennifer Doudna didn’t listen to her high school guidance counselor, who told her that girls don’t do science. Instead, Doudna followed her passion and pursued biochemistry, inspired by her childhood explorations of beaches, meadows and lava flow caves in her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii. When Doudna read James Watson’s book The Double Helix as a sixth grader, she realized that “science can be very exciting, like being on a trail of a cool mystery and you’re getting a clue here and a clue there. And then you put the pieces together.”

That’s exactly the feeling you’ll have while reading Walter Isaacson’s marvelous biography The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. It’s a hefty but inspiring book that chronicles Doudna’s and others’ development of the gene-editing tool CRISPR. With his dynamic and formidable style, Isaacson explains the long scientific journey that led to this tool’s discovery and the exciting developments that have followed, noting, “In the history of science, there are few real eureka moments, but this came pretty close.”

Like Lab Girl on steroids, The Code Breaker paints a detailed picture of how scientists work. As Doudna interacts with a variety of talented colleagues over the years (color photos are included), she experiences excitement, uncertainty, rivalry, betrayal and more. At one moment she’s joyfully stirring spaghetti while explaining CRISPR to her 9-year-old son; during another, she’s standing in her backyard in the middle of a rainy night, reeling from the realization that leaving her academic post at the University of California, Berkeley to work in the genetics industry was a huge mistake.

The timing of Isaacson’s book could hardly be better. He was well into his research and writing when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and while many of us were baking bread and worrying about toilet paper, Doudna headed to Berkeley to lead one of the teams developing diagnostic tests and messenger RNA (or mRNA) vaccines, catapulting CRISPR into the global spotlight as a lifesaving tool. The Code Breaker includes a lengthy section about these recent events, culminating in Doudna winning a Nobel Prize in October 2020. As the Moderna chairperson put it when he saw the promising clinical trial results of the company’s vaccine, “It was a bad day for viruses. . . . We may never have a pandemic again.”

In addition to being an accomplished historian of science and technology, Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and former editor of Time magazine. His previous biography subjects include Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs—all united by their creative intellect and natural curiosity. As a biographer, Isaacson is truly an immersive tour guide, combining the energy of a TED Talk with the intimacy of a series of fireside chats. For this book, he tried his hand at gene editing and enrolled in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. He takes a big-picture approach to CRISPR’s significance and legacy as well, discussing its many uses for treating diseases such as sickle cell anemia, while also considering the myriad complicated moral issues surrounding CRISPR’s use.

For readers seeking to understand the many twists, turns and nuances of the biotechnology revolution, there’s no better place to turn than The Code Breaker.

Generations of children, and more than few adults, have embraced the antics of Harriet the Spy and its singular heroine since it was published in 1964. As Leslie Brody reports in Sometimes You Have to Lie, her absorbing biography of the elusive author Louise Fitzhugh, the classic middle grade novel sold around 2.5 million copies in its first five years, a number that is now approaching 5 million worldwide. Fitzhugh, who died at age 46 in 1974, was publicity-shy even by the more genteel standards of her day, and her literary executors have remained guarded about releasing her private papers. Faced with this estimable hurdle, Brody has succeeded admirably in reconstructing Fitzhugh’s complicated, often troubled life.

Fitzhugh was born into a well-heeled family in Memphis, Tennessee, but from the beginning she pushed against the constraints of propriety. Her ill-matched parents separated and divorced (in a scandalous trial that the local public devoured) while Fitzhugh was still an infant, and for years her imperious father told his daughter that her mother was dead. Though she eventually reunited with her mother, Fitzhugh had lifelong issues with both of her parents, and the querulous, outlier spirit that defines her most famous character would also come to drive the author herself. From puberty, young Fitzhugh knew that she was a lesbian, and by the time she dropped out of Bard College and moved to New York City to make her mark, she was already completely comfortable in her own skin.

Fitzhugh viewed herself first and foremost as a visual artist, and for much of her life she focused on her painting. She was fully immersed in the downtown New York art scene of the 1950s and early ’60s, and her bohemian lifestyle was made all the more colorful by her central place in the lesbian subculture. Fitzhugh’s circle of friends and lovers was a group of smart, talented women who largely kept their sexual orientation on the Q.T. She was less concerned with midcentury decorum than many of her peers, dressing mostly in men’s clothing, and it seems few blinked twice at her out-of-the-closet ways. When Harriet the Spy was published and became a widespread success, however, Fitzhugh’s publisher capitalized on her natural shyness to try and keep the truth of her sexuality from readers.

Harriet the Spy, with its ill-behaved, uncompromising and inquisitive heroine, is a subversive work and, in retrospect, might be read as a coded version of a gay adolescent’s experience of being different, wrestling with a reality that doesn’t match up to the norm. As the world becomes a more affirming place for members of the LGBTQ community, perhaps it will also finally catch up with the nonconforming, unsentimental, trailblazing Louise Fitzhugh.

“Books bring us closer together. They’re a bridge between us,” Hussan Ayash tells journalist Delphine Minoui over Skype. Ayash belongs to a group of rebels in Syria who spent four years, from 2012 to 2016, under siege in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. In 2013, they discovered a cache of books in the ruins of a bombed house and decided to rescue them. They dug through the wreckage of other buildings as well, salvaging 6,000 books in one week, and created a secret library in the basement of an abandoned building. In precise yet passionate prose, Minoui tells this remarkable story in The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War.

With a French mother, an Iranian father and a home base in Istanbul, Minoui understands the region well and has won awards for her reporting on the Middle East. When she saw a photo of the library bunker, her first instinct was to travel to Daraya and start interviewing these unusual librarians. That journey would be impossible, however, so she began communicating with several of the young men online and formed an unusual relationship with them, worrying constantly about their safety. This personal connection forms the heart of the book, deepening the story while laying bare the sacrifice and deprivation of the rebels. For those four years, Daraya was besieged by bombs and poison gas, food was scarce, and there was no running water or electricity. As she communicated via video chat, Minoui remained careful to keep her coffee and snacks out of the camera’s view.

“The library is their hidden fortress against the bombs,” Minoui writes. “Books are their weapons of mass instruction.” Although a good many of the library’s founders hadn’t grown up as readers, they became book lovers during the long siege. The library’s most popular titles form an eclectic mix: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, The Little Prince, Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell, Les Misérables and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Book Collectors is a phenomenal story of hope in the midst of complete devastation. As 23-year-old Abu el-Ezz told Minoui in 2015, “Reading helps me think positively, chase away negative ideas. And that’s what we need most right now.”