John Freely, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe, Overlook Duckworth: London, 2012.

Very good book. Heavily relies on Crombie.

Emergence of the modern science, which characterized XVI-XVII centuries (Copernicus. Tartaglia, Cardano, Galileo, Kepler, Ortolanus, etc.) could have happened two centuries before. Yet, the lights of the XIII-XIV century Oxford-Paris school (Bradwardine, Buridan, etc.) who could lead to mechanics, geometrical optics, geocentric theory in astronomy and even calculus, were prematurely extinguished. After the Great Plague, this unique international collaboration lost its significance.

My argument with Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins presumes, as do many other outspoken atheists, that the decline of religion would usher in the triumph of secular humanism. But this is not so. The retreat of organized Abrahamic religions is filled with (beginning with the least harmful)

• unrestrained consumerism and narcisisstic hedonism, threatening economic well-being of nations and the quality of the global environment; 
• the return to the heterodox pre-Christian paganism typical of the late Roman era, particularly in the guises of the New Age and American "Biblical Christianity": the glorification of militaristic state as an apex of male-centric nuclear families; and
• aggressive nationalism.

None of the intellectual/social currents superseding the organized religion is particularly better or humane than the religious bigotry they are assumed to replace.

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.