The year is very young, but author Sheril Kirshenbaum is already way ahead of the pack for brilliant nonfiction book moves of 2011. As a science writer, Kirshenbaum has penned thoughtful and engaging articles about science literacy, environmental science, and education for the likes of Salon, The Huffington Post, and Mother Jones. As a research associate at the University of Texas’ Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy, she works to enhance public understanding of energy issues. She is an adviser to NPR’s Science Friday and co-hosts the Discover magazine blog The Intersection. But for all her accomplishments and accolades, her latest project borders on the super genius. For the past two years she has been investigating the biology, anthropology, psychology, and cultural history of osculation. It’s called embrasser in French, besar in Spanish; any online translator can offer you the appropriate character translations in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and Pashto. You’ve probably known it since childhood simply as kissing. That’s right: A little more than a month before Valentine’s Day and a few months before spring begins its flirtatious winter thaw, Kirshenbaum’s The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us (Grand Central) hits bookshelves. Which means at some point in the very near future some member of the print, online, or TV press is going to identify Kirshenbaum as a “kissing expert.” It’s amazing somebody hasn’t written this book already.

Given how breezily readable Kirshenbaum’s prose is, chances are Kissing is going to find a few fans. In this book, Kirshenbaum approaches science writing not as the highly educated expert talking down to a layperson—though she holds two masters of science degrees—but rather as a learned peer having a casual conversation about something. Think of talking to your friend’s cooler, older sister about all those bands and records she heard that you didn’t. Only in this case, Kirshenbaum is schooling you on the intimacy of bonobos, that most amorous great ape.

Lighthearted is the appropriate tone. As Kirshenbaum recounts in her introduction, kissing is a subject that everybody feels they know at least something about and specific scientific disciplines have produced their own take on the practice, but science at large hasn’t tried to aggregate that knowledge into any kind of overarching theory on this common, worldwide, and in some cases trans-species practice. She writes, “Microbiologists will tell you that it is a means for two people to swap mucus, bacteria, and who knows what else,” but also wonders, “Why would this mode of transferring germs evolve? And why is it so enjoyable when the chemistry is right?”

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