16 books like Hot Carbon

The multitudes of this book are not the ones envisioned by Walt Whitman. Rather, they are bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other microbes that each of us carries. The human body is more microbial than human, with bacteria alone outnumbering human cells by almost 10 times.

As Yong puts it, “We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.” Not just the lives of animals, but of plants too, as this book makes clear.

With advanced degrees in biochemistry and an award-winning stint as a writer at The Atlantic, Yong has the chops to get the science right and the skills of a journalist to weave the science and sketches of scientists together into compelling stories. The book’s subtitle is a nod to Darwin (“There is grandeur in this view of life”) and gets at the big-picture perspective gained by looking at… show more.

As a microbial ecologist, I didn’t need to be convinced that microbes make all life on Earth possible. I knew that Falkowski, a preeminent biological oceanographer, would be a trustworthy guide in the microbial world. What makes this book so much fun to read is how Falkowski mixes science with snippets of history, both his own and of early scientists.  

Yet, the science is the main story here and is fascinating. Microbes, specifically cyanobacteria, are the engines that first put oxygen in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, which set the stage for the evolution of more complicated lifeforms, including, eventually, Homo sapiens.  Microbes are also the ancestral source of what Falkowski calls nanomachines, which continue to power all organisms today. Falkowski convincingly argues that microbes are what make life on Earth possible. 

Coastal redwoods and Douglas firs are among the biggest organisms on the planet, yet these and other trees can only reach such spectacular heights thanks to the smallest organisms, the microbes. In fact, nearly all plants have symbiotic fungi that act as surrogate roots to obtain nutrients essential for their growth and survival.

Simard, a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia, has taken this idea further and gathered evidence showing that unrelated trees exchange not only nutrients but also defense signals and other chemical information via their fungal network. But the real protagonist here is the author. As much as I like reading about microbes, what captivated me was Simard recounting her personal journey as a scientist and woman.

How can you not love a book that argues that, despite being mostly microbial, “the plankton form the bulk of the living fabric of the ocean, the web of life that is an integral part of the blue machine.”

Czerski’s prose is as vivid as describing other, larger parts of the blue machine, such as Greenland sharks, which live for hundreds of years, and whales whose earwax records the stress caused by global warming. Equally entertaining and captivating are her accounts of canoeing off Maui, fieldwork in the Arctic, and everyday life on an oceanographic ship.

Although the writing is always light and the metaphors evocative, Czerski makes several serious points about the ocean and climate change. If not for the ocean, atmospheric levels of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would be even higher and global warming worse.

The first edition of this charming book was published in 2011 under the title How Bad are Bananas? For Mike Berners-Lee, this question is about the carbon footprint of bananas, but for me, it evokes the memory of some awful days I once spent on a riverboat on the Amazon with nothing to eat but bananas.

The book is a genuine delight, full of interesting carbon footprints arranged from small to large. Here are a few samples: short e-mail is 0.0004 kg CO2, Google search is 0.0006, grocery paper bag is 0.012, apple is 0.032, banana is 0.110, ice cream is 0.500, driving a midsize car 1 mile is 0.630, energy of 1 kW-hr taken from US electric grid is 0.650… The largest human carbon footprint listed is 56 trillion for all worldwide activity in a year.  

I found this book just about the most dazzling and gripping book I had ever come across about science. It kept on opening up new vistas as I read on. Full of surprises and unexpected dramas, it cast a vivid light on a wide range of issues. I finished it breathless with admiration.

It is about photosynthesis, the process whereby plants “eat” sunlight to form oxygen and sugar from carbon dioxide and water. This process is basic to almost all life on Earth. The book is about the development of photosynthesis on Earth and also about the development of our scientific knowledge about it.

Combining some of the greatest conspiracy subjects ever put forth, this book offers a fresh take on the familiar, compelling secret history of what might have been, rivaling even Dan Brown in the process. How might the Templars have interacted with the Shroud? What might they have done with it? What are the secrets of Freemasonry that were known to so many of America’s Founding Fathers, and why is the world still interested? This is a book that made me think. And, more importantly, wonder! 

This is a detailed, reliable account of the Templars’ history from their beginning to their end.

There’s no imaginative speculation or flights of fancy: it’s all based on written and archaeological evidence from the time of the events described. Barber drew on a vast range of primary sources from across medieval Christendom and the Middle East, his own lifetime’s research into the Templars, and the work of other expert historians to produce this comprehensive history.

When it was first published, back in 1994, this was the first comprehensive, authoritative, up-to-date history of the Templars available in English. Many researchers have since written good shorter studies of various aspects of Templar history, but this remains the best all-encompassing scholarly study.

It’s a must-read for all serious scholars of the Templars. 

Yew is packed with fascinating information about these mysterious, exceptionally long-lived trees.

Fred Hageneder has spent years studying every aspect of the yew and his book presents that knowledge in a compact, highly readable form. The botany, ecological interactions, and extraordinary longevity of yew trees are examined, as well as their unique uses, past and present, including the historic supply of timber for longbows and, more recently alkaloids for modern medicine. The tree's symbolism, sacred status, and spiritual significance to people since the prehistoric past are also described.

Richly illustrated throughout and meticulously referenced, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural and natural history of the yew tree.

Surprisingly enough, our planet has been home to horse-shoe crabs for longer than it has had fire. After all, you cannot have fire without atmospheric oxygen (a product of photosynthesis), and until the evolution of land plants, there was no fuel for lightning sparks to ignite. As Stephen J. Pyne eloquently describes, humanity’s exceptional relationship to fire has literally shaped our world, from the development of small guts and big heads through cooking food, to climbing the food chain by cooking landscapes, to harnessing the world-changing fire-power of fossil fuels. This insightful overview of human history puts forward the compelling idea that human actions (including prehistoric actions) have moved our planet from an ice age to a fire age.