- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life Of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius - Graham Farmelo
OK, I'm trying not to gush about this book but it is hard to exaggerate the brilliance of this book. It is the incredibly well-researched biography of Paul Dirac, quantum physicist who has pioneered this field with Bohr, Oppenheimer, Einstein, and a few select others. He was no doubt autistic, and his many anecdotes in this book sound quite unreal at times (my personal favourite is Dirac answering a romantic letter from his future wife where she complains "You haven't answered my questions" with a tabulated response, showing in different columns (1) number of the letter (2) question (3) his robotic answer. For example, "What makes me so sad?" is answered by "You have not enough interests" and "Whom else could I love?" gets "You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I tried". All very Mr Spock 
)
Dirac was clearly a single-minded genius, who for several decades did practically nothing but theoretical physics, eat, sleep, and take long walks. He deduced the existence of anti-matter through mathematical equations a long time before it became possible to test for and observe it. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics and was the second-youngest Lucasian Professor of Mathematics of Cambridge University after Isaac Newton. However, this book isn't just about Dirac, but also about the pivotal era he worked in - a handful of scientists rushing to uncover the counter-intuitive reality of subatomic particles, the fabric of our universe. Rise of the Nazis in Europe. Stalinist repression in Russia. WWII and the race for the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Farmi, Schröder, Heisenberg - all of these characters come alive in this book.
The singular achievement of this biography is that it manages to talk about the discoveries of quantum physics in words that an interested layman can comprehend and (sort of!) follow. As Dirac is quoted as saying, these discoveries "cannot be explained in words at all" and are almost entirely reached through mathematical derivations, but Graham Farmelo does an excellent job in drawing the reader into this world of geniuses solving problems the definitions of which make normal people reel.
If anyone is interested, this book has won the Biography Award at the 2009 Costa Book Awards and the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.