Here are 71 books that Deadly Doses fans have personally recommended if you like
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For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Here’s another great resource for the armchair novelist.
This military handbook has all the information a character might need to survive in many different terrains. From shelter to food, wound dressing to vehicle maintenance, it covers a vast array of subjects and even has sections on urban survival and terrorism added to the later editions.
It’s a great reference for designing characters who understand the challenges of survival, as well as ignorant ones who don’t have a clue, and is full of wonderful setting details and story ideas to inspire a writer.
"A classic outdoor manual [that] addresses every conceivable disaster scenario. Don’t leave home without it”--Outside magazine
The ultimate guide to surviving anywhere, now updated with more than 100 pages of additional material, including a new chapter on urban survival
Revised to reflect the latest in survival knowledge and technology, and covering new topics such as urban survival and terrorism, the multimillion-copy worldwide bestseller SAS Survival Handbook by John "Lofty" Wiseman is the definitive resource for all campers, hikers, and outdoor adventurers. From basic campcraft and navigation to fear management and strategies for coping with any type of disaster, this complete…
For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Need to design an alien species? If so, you won’t find a better resource than this one.
Kershenbaum does nothing less than attempt to identify universal principles governing all biological organisms and does a damned impressive job of it. Beginning with the question of whether the human concept of “evolution” would even exist on an alien world, he works his way up to detailed and insightful analyses of what types of life forms would likely evolve in different environments and how they might communicate and socialize.
This is pure brain food for any lover of science or science fiction, an intellectual exploration you won’t be able to put down. It’s in my top 10 list for books of any kind.
DISCOVER HOW LIFE REALLY WORKS - ON EARTH AND IN SPACE
'I love The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy. Although it sets out to be (and is) about alien life, what emerges is a wonderfully insightful sidelong look at Earthly biology' Richard Dawkins, via Twitter
'Crawls with curious facts' The Sunday Times
We are unprepared for the greatest discovery of modern science. Scientists are confident that there is alien life across the universe yet we have not moved beyond our perception of 'aliens'…
For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
How do you write violent scenes in a compelling way when you have no personal experience in that arena?
Drawing on a lifetime of experience with violent individuals and institutions, Miller explores the concept of how violence works: not only the act itself but how human beings respond to it. The text covers many different weapons and situations, all with an eye toward providing the kind of information that will help make a writer’s violent scenes ring true.
It’s a dark read, to be sure, but a fascinating one, and its value can’t be overstated, especially to those of us whose most physically stressful experience is struggling to get the lid off a can of coffee creamer.
Violence: A Writer's Guide (Second Edition) introduces writers to a world of terror, pain and blood.A world where lives are changed forever in a few desperate seconds.A world where innocent people, heroes, and the most depraved criminals live, thrive, suffer and die in a constant struggle for survival.This is your world. It's the real world.Bad things happen in the real world.This book is for writers who write about assault, fighting, war, and other conflict. For writers who write about violence.
For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Need some monsters to inspire you? A bizarre creature from primitive folklore, perhaps, or a quirky gatekeeper from the 13th level of hell?
Though the market abounds with books on the subject, this is my favorite. Bane presents nearly 3,000 descriptions of supernatural creatures from the “real world” (no gaming monsters), drawn from a stunningly diverse array of time periods and cultures as well as biblical tradition. Each entry details the name, appearance, powers, and proclivities of a given entity, as well as instructions for how to deal with it. Source material is noted so you can follow up on your own, and an index and bibliography are provided.
While there are many books on the market that feature lists of monsters, this is a serious research book with a wealth of well-organized inspiration for writers of fantasy, horror, and supernatural fiction.
This exhaustive volume catalogs nearly three thousand demons in the mythologies and lore of virtually every ancient society and most religions. From Aamon, the demon of life and reproduction with the head of a serpent and the body of a wolf in Christian demonology, to Zu, the half-man, half-bird personification of the southern wind and thunder clouds in Sumero-Akkadian mythology, entries offer descriptions each demon's origins, appearance, and cultural significance. Also included are descriptions of the demonic and diabolical members making up the hierarchy of Hell and the numerous species of demons that, according to various folklores, mythologies, and religions,…
I adore non-fiction books that read like novels. After ten years of working in research labs, my master’s degree in biology led me to a new career in science writing. I recently dove into the worlds of narrative non-fiction and history when I wrote Radiant, the Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light. Immersing myself in Belle Époque Paris to research and intertwine the stories of Marie Curie and the inventor/dancer Loie Fuller helped me discover a passion for telling the stories of important figures forgotten by history.
While I knew that Rachel Carson was involved in starting the environmental movement with her revolutionary book Silent Spring, I had no idea that she was also a best-selling popular science author who wrote lyrical books about the ocean. It was fascinating to learn about her life and the challenges that she faced in while standing up to big chemical companies, whose profits were threatened by her writing.
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental movement
She loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international bestseller The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world.
Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a Nobel…
I have lived in Florida since 1969, attended public school here, and received my Master’s degree from a state college. My husband, Bob Randall, a photographer and an entrepreneur, and I have written six nonfiction books about Florida. An Ocklawaha River Odyssey is our favorite. Kayaking the 56 miles of winding waterways became less of a research expedition and more of a spiritual journey as the ancient river cast its spell on us. From wildlife, including manatees and monkeys, to wild orchids and pickerelweed, the Ocklawaha provides more than exercise and recreation; it also touches your soul. I hope my writing and Bob’s photography provide that experience for our readers.
Carson’s Silent Spring is full of unsettling environmental details, including the poisoning of species of birds by insecticides and politicians' proposals to use a nuclear bomb to form a dam. Although it was published in 1962, the book is even more relevant today, and I love that it is easy to read and gives environmentalists the facts they need to counter those who would poison and destroy wildlife and, ultimately, the environment.
First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters" (Peter Matthiessen, for Time"s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson"s watershed…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
In my next pick, Romero draws on previously unexplored archives to tell stories of pesticides never told before, most notably how industrial waste was utilized to make chemicals that could kill all that got in agriculture’s way.
I love how he renders ironic the closed-looped systems so championed by environmentalists—or the use of warfare chemicals on fields that grow our foods. It is indeed strange that we use chemicals designed to kill the food that we eat to live.
The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology…
When I was studying plant science in graduate school, I realized that what I really wanted to do was not lab research but to help people understand plants better so they could grow more beautiful and bountiful gardens. To this end, I have written several books, founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), taught horticulture at City College of San Francisco for several decades, and, since 2006, written a column on gardening for the SF Chronicle. My list of books about gardening know-how will painlessly prepare you to grow plants well.
This
little book, part of a series put out by the Garden, will show you the best
ways to offset climate change in your gardening and landscaping. It includes
tips on materials, energy efficiency, and increasing carbon sequestration. A
chapter by Amanda Knaul and Susan K. Pell covers the climate footprint of
homegrown food.
This technique can save the earth—while resulting in a beautiful garden, too!
Climate Conscious Gardener picks up where Brooklyn Botanic Gardening’s groundbreaking Environmental Gardener left off, giving homeowners, landscapers, and public park managers practical strategies for greening the planet through sustainable and organic gardening. In simple terms, an introductory section explains what happens when the balance of carbon and nitrogen in the atmosphere goes awry, and how plants, soil, and synthetic gardening aids (such as fertilizer and pesticides) affect climate change. Most important, readers will learn how to calculate their garden’s carbon footprint—and what they can do to decrease it…
Writing my first book, I found out how dependent my thinking about the world beyond my doorstep was on language made up by engineers (“Please don’t block the driveway”). Engineering language defined how I saw the street. It was a shock to realize how severely this had limited my thinking about public space but also a liberation to become aware of this: now I could perceive streets in completely new and different ways. The books I recommend all have made me perceive the world differently. I hope they do the same for you. Also, see the recommendations by my co-author, Marco te Brömmelstroet.
Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.
Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.
Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster.
To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need…
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our species’ survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and it’s exactly what we evolved to do as humans.
Nicole’s comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if it’s not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.
When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly – nobody wants to end up like Into the Wild’s Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!
319 color pages, 400 wild foods, plant localization maps for each plant (400 maps), paperback, great print quality, superior plant identification guidelines, recipes for each plant, full page photos of the plants, at least 3 pictures for each plant, medicinal uses.
The Forager’s Guide to Wild Foods is probably the most important thing you want to have by your side when you go out foraging. Maybe there are times when you're still not sure about a certain plant and you need to consult the book, despite your vast experience. Or maybe you don’t have experience at all and just want…
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