Mario Livio, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved, Simon and Schuster, 2006.

M. Livio's “The equation that couldn't be solved” is a work of great erudition and love of the subject. Unlike many popular scientific books, the good, the bad and the ugly, it does not promote his own scientific work or philosophical views. Even now, with the abundance of good popular science writing, his book is outstanding.  

J.-P. Changeux, L. Garey, The Good, the True and the Beautiful, Yale University Press, 2012.

Chaotic narrative, from which I cannot claim to understand more than 25%, polyannish philosophy in the end but absolutely brilliant. It is based on the author's, famed neurobiologist, lectures in College de France, which can partly explain the book's disjointed character as lecture notes. These lectures describe the connection of psychological/behavioral and biological in human mind.

Thomas F. Madden, Venice, a New History. Viking Adult, 2012.

This book is very nicely written and is counted to be quickly swallowed. Yet, it is a piece of Catholic propaganda. I.e. events, which are usually presented as manifestations of power struggles, palace coups, greed, bigotry and territorial rapacity are instead explained by Catholic piety and Christian endurance is the face of the infidels. Ugliness, such as Inquisition, extradition of Giordano Bruno to Rome, assassination attempts on Paolo Sarpi and ghettoization of the Jews are either omitted or glossed over. Thomas Madden stoops to accuse historians imputing economic motives in Venetian subversion of the crusade to attack Constantinople as rank Marxists, yet in other places he himself is not above assuming economic drives of politics. On the whole, it is revisionist history, insidious because it is written so well.