100 books like Everybody's Story

Astronomer Carl Sagan can be said to have launched the ecospiritual/religious naturalist trajectory with this book, upon which the TV series was based, later writing: “A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.”

Two seminal quotes: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

Annie Dillard joins Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as my favorite “nature writers.” Annie is pithy, often wry, insisting that we notice and guiding us with her own noticing.

A classic quote: “In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that… No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.”

Thomas Berry called himself a geologian, and wrote this book at the same time as Everybody’s Story, neither author aware of the other. An ordained Catholic priest, he later said that “the bible should be put on the shelf for 100 years” while we attend to planetary exigencies. Seminal quotes: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” “The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.”

Astronomer Chet Raymo wrote a weekly column for the Boston Globe called Science Musings, and is a masterful storyteller and delightful human being.

Here are some quotes about the nature of scientific inquiry. “Delight in the unexpected is part of the lifeblood of science. Almost alone among belief systems, science welcomes the disturbingly new.” “Science is a spider’s web. Confidence in any one strand of the web is maintained by the tension and resiliency of the entire web.” “Science, like the play of children, satisfies a deep-seated need for escape from the boredom of fixity and the trauma of chaos.”

Doctor Konner gives an intriguing anthropologist’s view of animal development, tracing the introduction of genders, illustrating examples of male and female dominance, and describing the impact of evolution on human behavior. While he gives many fascinating examples of normal and abnormal sex and gender behavior in the animal world, what interested me most was his coverage of the shift from millions of years as hunter/gatherers to today’s complex male-dominated society, with its attendant aggression.

One point made is that the very different male and female roles caused brain development variation which typically makes females more tuned to communication and cooperation. He suggests the salvation of human society ultimately requires a strong female role.

A cosmologist and particle physicist, Carroll shows us how starting from physics, everything else—including everything that matters to people, emerge through a small number of natural processes. Having paid his dues in basic physical science, Carrol provides an accessible pathway from the fundamental level of reality all the way to human values. No mystery mongering, and a Darwinian finish of course! 

Plotkin’s brilliant book is about the nature and evolution of human knowledge. How do people gain and develop useful knowledge in a complex, uncertain, and changing world? Behaviorist theories of stimulus and response are inadequate. The mind must be primed to deal with complexity and uncertainty. Models from behaviorist psychology are unable to account for the acquisition of knowledge in such circumstances. Darwinian evolutionary theory helps to explain how the mind uses inherited instincts and culturally acquired habits to guide and enhance intelligence. As with the earlier work of the Darwinian psychologist and pragmatist, William James, instinct and habit are the enablers of intelligence, not its impediments. Knowledge is an evolutionary adaptation. This great book reveals more explosive implications of Darwinism for social science.

When I was in the Galapagos, I volunteered to help scientists study the finches on Daphne Major Island. There were just two of us on an island surrounded by sharks. Every Darwin's finch had been ringed, and I had to observe what they ate. It was an experience that has left an indelible mark on my psyche.

The research was part of a project by Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spent twenty years following in Darwin's footsteps. Not only did they demonstrate the robustness of his theory, but they also showed that the process works in decades, not millennia.

Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch is a Pulitzer Prize-winning summary of Grant's work. He manages to eloquently summarise number-crunching academic work for the layman. It is a rare achievement to write an unputdownable book about science. 

A step more sophisticated than the picture books above, Life on Earth is targeted to children ages 9 to 12. The eye-catching format and succinct text cover the diversity of life on Earth, major evolutionary transitions, and nicely illustrates the process of natural selection through a succession of illustrations of frogs as the fittest individuals are selected by their environment. Engaging and packed with information.

I’m usually underwhelmed by massively popular series books, which tend to “phone it in,” but this entry in the long-running Magic School Bus series impressed me. It kicks off with a student who wants to fill out his “family tree” and gets more than he bargained for, with a speedy dash through all the major stages of evolution as well as visits to a string of early human ancestors. The fantasy story frame will appeal to many children, while others will gravitate toward the jam-packed facts. There’s plenty of everything in this one for children aged 6 to 9.