Here are 100 books that A Short History of Nearly Everything fans have personally recommended if you like
A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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When I first crossed the American West nearly 4 decades ago in my ’67 Chevy, it changed my life. I had never imagined mountains built of contorted rock shoved miles into the sky, faults slashing like fresh scars across the landscape, and starkly beautiful deserts where people seemed an afterthought. After many happy years of researching and exploring the West with my geology students, I knew I wanted to tell the story to a larger audience. The result has been three books: Hard Road West, Rough-Hewn Land, and Surf, Sand, and Stone.
Written with the clarity and zest of Bryson and McPhee, but with the added benefit that Hazen is a professional geologist. I like this book because of how Hazen takes the reader into the process of how a geologist works and thinks. Hazen’s specialty is mineralogy, and his main thesis—that living organisms and minerals evolved together with each shaping the other’s future—makes for a unique and thought-provoking take on the history of our planet.
Hailed by The New York Times for writing "with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along," nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet's living and nonliving spheres. With an astrobiologist's imagination, a historian's perspective, and a naturalist's eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth's many iterations in vivid detail-from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath…
I am a college professor and paleoanthropologist–I study human fossils and the evolution of the human lineage. My field site is in the Afar region of Ethiopia, and I regularly spend a month or so wandering across the desert, picking up fossils. I view myself very much as a scientist and believe that the scientific view is the most reliable in some important ways. However, I came to science fairly late in life–I was an undergraduate philosophy and English literature student and didn’t go to graduate school until I was 30. Because of my liberal arts background, I have always felt it was important to bridge the science-humanities divide.
Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.
In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.
McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is simply a visceral pleasure to read–I recommend you find a hammock and a few days.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
I’ve been fascinated by science since I was a small child. I used to try to drag my parents up to London’s Natural History Museum to gawk at dinosaurs every other Sunday and remember the delight of seeing Saturn and its rings through a telescope from our back garden. I started reading popular science books as a teenager and they were a large part of what inspired me to ultimately become a physicist. I hope the books on this list will bring a bit of awe and wonder into your life!
I didn’t so much read this book as inhale it. Rovelli’s writing is always highly readable, and this one is no exception. The book tells the dramatic story of the origin of quantum mechanics, beginning with a holiday spent on the windswept island of Helgoland by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s.
Rovelli introduces the history of the core ideas of quantum mechanics with great clarity and provides an interesting new way of interpreting quantum weirdness that I found fascinating.
Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian
“Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator… This is the place where science comes to life.” ―Neil Gaiman
“One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book” ―John Banville, The Wall Street Journal
A startling new look at quantum theory, from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Anaximander.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
I have for 28 years helped organizations around the world scale their business. I'm a dedicated innovator and thought leader in artificial intelligence and digital commerce. My passion for innovation thrives in exploring how AI can transform businesses and improve lives. I've authored 10 books and shared my insights as a professional speaker to educate, inspire, and motivate others. I love delving into the future of AI and innovation, which drives me to constantly learn and share knowledge. This list reflects the books that have significantly influenced my journey. My life is about pushing forward, always looking for alternatives to understand where those paths might lead us.
Yuval Noah Harari connects the dots between our past and the future, providing insights into how we've shaped and been shaped by innovation.
This book inspired me to think about the broader implications of AI and technology on our species. It fuels my passion for leveraging innovation to make a positive impact on society.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
I have for 28 years helped organizations around the world scale their business. I'm a dedicated innovator and thought leader in artificial intelligence and digital commerce. My passion for innovation thrives in exploring how AI can transform businesses and improve lives. I've authored 10 books and shared my insights as a professional speaker to educate, inspire, and motivate others. I love delving into the future of AI and innovation, which drives me to constantly learn and share knowledge. This list reflects the books that have significantly influenced my journey. My life is about pushing forward, always looking for alternatives to understand where those paths might lead us.
This book transformed my understanding of human cognition. I love how Daniel Kahneman delves into the dual systems that drive our thoughts—intuitive and deliberate.
This book helped me recognize cognitive biases and informed how I develop AI technologies that align with human behavior. It reinforced the importance of designing AI that complements our natural thinking patterns.
The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions
'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times
Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast,…
I have been intrigued by the stranger, lesser-known parts of the natural world for as long as I can remember and have been continuing to explore those themes in my own work. I love that humans haven’t learned all there is to know about the natural forces that have ruled this planet for longer than we’ve been here. I enjoy books that peel back a layer into these mysteries by writers who have an appreciation for their existence, their ingenuity, and their importance. I have dedicated much of my career to synthesizing big topics into accessible, engaging, and fun information that creates curiosity and a desire to understand the world around us.
I found this bookto be a fascinating journey into realms of the world below the surface I had never thought about or even known existed. Cave diving is my worst nightmare, so one particular section stands out about the wild, terrifying, and utterly unrelatable passion of cave divers and the perils one faces when stuck very, very underground.
The mixture of purely natural environments and human-created ones, such as underground tunnels and cities, all held my attention as pieces of information I had read very little about in the past, all collected into one unifying theme. Having such a broad but specific topic all in one read was a fun, dynamic journey.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time-from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come-Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present…
For most of my career as an oil explorationist I have worked with geologists, an exceptional group of men and women who, from observing earth’s surface as it is configured today, can decipher earth’s history. By understanding how rocks were originally formed and how in subsequent millennia rocks have been buried, transported warped, eroded, re-deposited, and altered by high pressures, high temperatures, hot water, and all the tectonic forces of nature that have formed the surface as we see it today, they believe, really believe, that they can visualize the subsurface. It’s a fascinating four-dimensional detective story.
Meldahl’s book describes more than 100 million years of North America’s history. For laymen, it is the best geologic field guide to understanding the tectonic forces and subsequent erosion which formed the western United States. The photos, maps, and illustrations depict how the rivers, mountains, and plains are where they are and why. Anyone who drives from California to the Great Plains, or in reverse, should carry this book in your car. Even though millions of people love history, few understand earth’s history, which stares in the face of all of us and, for those who are curious, reveals “the hidden poetry of our mutable earth” (Richard Fortey).
"Unfold a map of North America," Keith Heyer Meldahl writes, "and the first thing to grab your eye is the bold shift between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains." In this absorbing book, Meldahl takes readers on a 1000-mile-long field trip back through more than 100 million years of deep time to explore America's most spectacular and scientifically intriguing landscapes. He places us on the outcrops, rock hammer in hand, to examine the evidence for how these rough-hewn lands came to be. We see California and its gold assembled from pieces of old ocean floor and the relentless movements…
I’ve been mad about dinosaurs and ancient life since I was seven. I have been amazingly lucky to be able to develop a career as a professional palaeontologist and to be able to research and talk about the subject. We were first to show the original colours of dinosaur feathers, and this discovery provides a perfect way to open the discussion about how palaeontologists know what they say they know. In my books, I seek to amaze, amuse and inform. I have written many books, including pop science, textbooks, technical-scientific works, and books for children, and every year brings new discoveries to be transmitted to the world.
The best seller of all time, a lively romp through dinosaur research (and researchers).
This is for all readers, and you’ll be hooked by the lively, pacy text by Steve, as he hurtles from continent to continent, digging up bones from China to Poland, working on Tyrannosaurus rex and other great beasts in the basements of the world’s museums, and sharing with readers what it’s like to be a working paleontologist.
For aspiring young bone-diggers, this is an inspiration, although it’s not like this all the time: paleontologists also sometimes have to mark student essays and fight with university systems to get their field trip costs refunded!
The Times Science Book of the Year. A Sunday Times Bestseller.
66 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years.
The world of the dinosaurs has fascinated on book and screen for decades - from early science fiction classics like The Lost World, to Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Tokyo, and the monsters of Jurassic Park. But…
When I first crossed the American West nearly 4 decades ago in my ’67 Chevy, it changed my life. I had never imagined mountains built of contorted rock shoved miles into the sky, faults slashing like fresh scars across the landscape, and starkly beautiful deserts where people seemed an afterthought. After many happy years of researching and exploring the West with my geology students, I knew I wanted to tell the story to a larger audience. The result has been three books: Hard Road West, Rough-Hewn Land, and Surf, Sand, and Stone.
The title is a bit misleading. This book is more of a history of thinking and discovery about seismology—the study of earthquakes—with a focus on the San Andreas fault. What I like best is how Dvorak weaves the personal stories of scientists into the geologic story. Too often in textbooks and general-audience books, scientists don’t exist as human beings with foibles, preconceptions, and occasional bursts of insight. I wish that other books presented the human side of science as effectively as Dvorak.
I didn’t know anything at all about meteorites (or, really, space in general) until I took a cosmochemistry class during my first semester of a PhD program in geology. As soon as I learned that meteorites captured information about the start of the Solar System – the material we started with, hints about how planets evolve, and how meteorites changed the course of Earth – I was hooked. At the end of that class in 2007, I switched the main topic of my PhD research to studying meteorites and what they can tell us about the past, and I have been doing it ever since.
Like many folks, I am fascinated with the “where we came from” question. And for me, this is the quintessential book to dive into this topic from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Correct or not, I fancy myself someone that knows a decent amount about evolution and the human body, but I was captivated by the parts of the human body that have endured, for good or for bad, the long journey of us crawling out of the ocean and eventually into the office cubicle.
This book isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some others I generally like, but it really is a great book, and I had a hard time putting it down.
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).
By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible…
