I'm just a curious person. I have always been fascinated by literally everything. Everything is jaw-dropping: whether it's lying under a dark sky and marveling at the fact that what you see is the past (the time it takes for light from distant stars to reach your retina) or that your feelings for loved ones boil down to biochemistry, or thinking that intelligence is everywhere—from bacteria to plants and fungi, to Homo sapiens. As a university professor, I only understood later in life that I needed to leave that “ivory tower,” listen to non-academics, and read popular books that, in their apparent simplicity, can reach further and deeper.
I wrote...
Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence
My book is my first foray into popular science writing with the help of Natalie Lawrence! Our essay aims to make any reader understand (it’s written for my neighbor on the fifth floor or the corner shopkeeper, if you see what I mean) that when we say “Planta sapiens,” we mean the same as when we refer to ourselves as Homo sapiens. In other words, plants are intelligent and sentient beings. This is our working hypothesis. Importantly, we are not speaking metaphorically.
We draw on cutting-edge scientific literature from my laboratory and many other pioneering research centers to understand that humans are neither unique nor as special as we like to believe. We must train ourselves and educate others to avoid navel-gazing.
This book gave me the dose of reality I needed: a big slap in the face! Our way of feeling, suffering, and worrying about death is just one among many ways of facing it.
Put bluntly, we don’t have an exclusivity agreement with life or death; we are simply another form of life on planet Earth—a much-needed blow.
How animals conceive of death and dying-and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.
With humor and empathy, Susana Monso tells the stories of ants…
I just devoured it on a recent train trip. I found it fascinating, a little gem. OMG, it holds so much wisdom! Less is always more, and Saucier knows what she’s doing.
The way she plays with characters: the tiniest of things compared to the magnificence of a great historical fire. I find it incredible to think how the Earth’s own dynamics and the events that occur on it can shape our personalities and the narratives of what is to come in our lives: love, which we can all find where we least expect it, and death.
A CBC CANADA READS 2015 SELECTION! FINALIST FOR THE 2013 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FRENCH-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION Tom and Charlie have decided to live out the remainder of their lives on their own terms, hidden away in a remote forest, their only connection to the outside world a couple of pot growers who deliver whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But one summer two women arrive. One is a young photographer documenting a a series of catastrophic forest fires that swept Northern Ontario early in the century; she's on the trail of the recently deceased Ted Boychuck, a survivor…
I savored this book sip by sip, wishing that each chapter would have lasted a little longer, a little longer. I felt a “healthy envy” for anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Klein in high school.
It’s impossible not to fall in love with the cosmos while reading his work. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible and poetic manner is admirable.
Each chapter has given me an unforgettable early morning coffee, revealing at a pace the magic that science holds in every corner.
An eye-opening celebration of the marvels of space, time, the cosmos, and more
How to Love the Universe is a new kind of science writing by an author truly enamored of the world around him. In ten short chapters of lyrical prose―each one an ode to a breathtaking realm of discovery―Stefan Klein uses everyday objects and events as a springboard to meditate on the beauty of the underlying science.
Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence of all life; a day of stormy weather points to the world’s unpredictability; a marble conjures the birth of the cosmos. As…
Wow, what can I say about this little gem? It still makes me dizzy to think of myself as a sort of ‘intracellular organelle’ belonging to the great organism Gaia. Can more be said in fewer pages and with such humility from the master?
I recall the words of physicist Richard Feynman (which, incidentally, Klein quotes in my previous recommendation) when he says something like If you think you understand quantum mechanics, that can only mean that you don’t truly understand quantum mechanics.
Well, how can you not love Lovelock, who, after more than 50 years since he first proposed the Gaia hypothesis, admits that after the first decade or so, he still didn’t really understand it himself? There can’t be a more pedagogical pocketbook that you can read at a bus stop. Lovelock had to have come very far to explain it all so well and in so few words.
In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.
James Lovelock's We Belong to Gaia draws on decades of wisdom to lay out the history of our remarkable planet, to show that it is not ours to be exploited - and warns us that it is fighting back.
Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through…
I'll be frank: if you read a book at the beach and a year later you still have lasting memories that resonate within you, that must mean something.
I still remember how Wulf walked me through the revolutionary vision of Humboldt, how he could “see” what nobody else was capable of in his days, and to the naked eye: that everything is interconnected. I again felt dizzy, with a sense of myopia, when thinking about how shortsighted we are in 2024.
We keep missing the plot! If only there were more Humboldts and Wulfs to inspire us as she did!
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016
'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson
'Dazzling' Literary Review
'Brilliant' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist
'A superb biography' The Economist
'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart.
He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano exits his boyhood sooner than most, but with this sense of self intact and armed with a fuller understanding of the world, he is about to enter.
Controversial when it first came out, Ambidextrous was burned on the docks of London in 1989 by Her Majesty Inland Service and decried by many. This reprint, with a Foreword by the author, discusses its banned book history and how it has become a classic depiction used by professionals involved in modern childhood studies.
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood. Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old, possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart. He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
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