Here are 100 books that Humans fans have personally recommended if you like
Humans.
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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 find great pleasure in learning a little bit about a lot of things, and this book scratches that itch in a great way. Touring through big scientific concepts, Bryson delivers the potentially overwhelming (and boring) information in a fun way that made me understand space-time way more than any middle school physics class did.
It’s not a book that needs to be read in order or even be read in its entirety to enjoy, so it’s fun to have around to pick up a chapter here and there or read it straight through. The other day I went back and referred to it while having a conversation about space time and found an explanation that we both understood—and enjoyed.
The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, A Short History of Nearly Everything is the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century and has sold over 2 million copies.
'Possibly the best scientific primer ever published.' Economist 'Truly impressive...It's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science.' Guardian 'A travelogue of science, with a witty, engaging, and well-informed guide' The Times
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to…
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…
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.
I went to see Mary Roach in person at an event held in the town where I live, and the interview was nothing short of hilarious. Roach’s curiosity and zest for life are infectious, and her storytelling style made me feel like I was the one (or, often, wishing I was the one) in the wacky situations she seems to find herself.
For me, her book is no different; it covers a lot of the wild, captivating stories involved with space travel. It is just such a fun book about a fun topic.
Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can't walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set…
I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.
Salt, neither you nor I would be alive without this mundane, everyday product that we scarcely give a second thought to. Salt is essential for human life, explains Mark Kurlansky, and the ingenious ways in which it is harvested and utilised all around the world, from antiquity to now, is the subject of this fascinating book.
I traveled in this book from China to western Sicily, from the North Atlantic, where fishermen preserved their catch of cod in salt, to the Indian sub-continent, where salt marches were eventually to lead to the emancipation of a nation. The Chinese wrote about gathering salt 8000 years ago; methods were perfected by the Phoenicians and the Romans, and salt is still evaporated by the sun and wind alone, hand-harvested through evaporation with hand tools as it has been for millennia.
The story of salt is the story of human civilisation.
“Kurlansky finds the world in a grain of salt.” - New York Times Book Review
An unlikely world history from the bestselling author of Cod and The Basque History of the World
Best-selling author Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars,…
I’ve loved reading alternative visions of Britain since I read a Strontium Dog saga in ‘2000AD’ as a boy. What was science fiction then has become closer to reality now. The idea of one event, such as a meteor shower in Triffids or a virus in ‘Grass,’ causing havoc worldwide is gripping. I prefer the British stories because they are closer to home. Many of these were written close to the Second World War, and their authors describe deprivation in unflinching detail. Recent political events have turned my mind to how human actions can cause dystopian futures, as in Orwell’s 1984.
This is no cosy dystopia. I was shocked by the violence and ruthlessness of the protagonists. This is a prescient novel, written 64 years before COVID-19, about a virus that emerges from China and ravages the world. Instead of infecting humans, the virus kills all grass. Brutal decisions are made, and any sense of law and order disappears. We were a gnat’s whisker from this happening in the UK, and I was impressed with Priest’s vision. The book cracks along at a good pace, too.
A thought experiment in future-shock survivalism' Robert MacFarlane
'Gripping ... of all science fiction's apocalypses, this is one of the most haunting' Financial Times
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
A post-apocalyptic vision of the world pushed to the brink by famine, John Christopher's science fiction masterpiece The Death of Grass includes an introduction by Robert MacFarlane in Penguin Modern Classics.
At first the virus wiping out grass and crops is of little concern to John Custance. It has decimated Asia, causing mass starvation and riots, but Europe is safe and a counter-virus is expected any day. Except, it turns…
We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks.
We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.
For as long as they have existed, cities have been destroyed-sacked, shaken, burnt, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and pillaged-in almost every case they have risen again. Rarely in modern times has a city not been rebuilt following destruction, be it natural or man-made. The Resilient City explores urban disasters from around the globe and the ongoing restoration of urban life. It examines why cities are rebuilt, how a vision for the future gets incorporated into a new urban landscape, and how disasters have been interpreted and commemorated in built form. An international cast of historians, architects, and urban studies experts…
I practised risk, resilience, and protection of infrastructure systems for 35 years. Mid-career, I became frustrated that we could deliver highly successful projects yet didn't deliver their ultimate purpose. This difference is particularly pronounced in war zones and the developing world, where most of my work has been. My research at the University challenged what I knew: it was as if someone had taken my heuristic understanding and cast the components like a pack of cards into the wind. I have shared some highlights in my journey to gather the cards. I hope you like them.
Judith Rodin is one of the more extraordinary influencers of resilience thought and practice. As President of the Rockefeller Foundation, she oversaw the 100 Resilient Cities initiative. The initiative may not have been as "sticky" as many hoped, but the lessons from this experience continue to inform and spur action in cities worldwide. This book gives us a sense of her thinking and vision in driving the initiative. It does not hold all the answers, and many take issue with her perspective. Nonetheless, it is a must-read for anyone thinking about protecting our cities. In an ideal world, I'd love to see Judith Rodin write the next book with Juliette Kayyem, former US Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, drawing on all that we've experienced over the last tumultuous decade.
Building resilience,the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively,is an urgent social and economic issue. Our interconnected world is susceptible to sudden and dramatic shocks and stresses: a cyber-attack, a new strain of virus, a structural failure, a violent storm, a civil disturbance, an economic blow. Through an astonishing range of stories, Judith Rodin shows how people, organizations, businesses, communities, and cities have developed resilience in the face of otherwise catastrophic challenges: Medellin, Colombia, was once the drug and murder capital of South America. Now it's host to international conferences and an emerging vacation destination. Tulsa, Oklahoma, cracked the…
I received my Ph.D. and J.D. at Berkeley, and my next book Your Call is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood, is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield. My research into literary and legal history made me fascinated with how people project hopes and fears onto the social construct of nature. How does one explain the contradictory ways white men imagined they could transcend painful isolation by merging into a nature coded as non-white and female? These fantasies play out in popular culture, e.g. in Avatar, in which men seek the unobtanium they lack: a nature that was always lost/a retroactively-constructed fantasy, and a cover for what it seemed to oppose—finally the corporation.
Pynchon’sAgainst the Day stages a form of pantheism in which everything bears some form of consciousness, which, like nature, has no border. Cyprian considers that “the earth [might be] alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness”; and it is “as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice.” Pynchon’s characters live in a pantheistic universe in which everything is part of nature and alive—where the wind tries to wake them and the world has a consciousness. Pynchon updates Melville in Mardi, in which, e.g., a character asks, “Think you there is no sensation in being a tree? Think you it is nothing to be a world? [The world of] Mardi is alive to its axis.” In ATD, “the steel webwork was a living organism”; even an “egg yolk [can be] perhaps regarded as a conscious entity.” Consciousness can’t be confined to people: all entities have the potential…
"Rich and sweeping, wild and thrilling." -The Boston Globe
The inimitable Thomas Pynchon has done it again. Hailed as "a major work of art" by The Wall Street Journal, his first novel in almost ten years spans the era between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I and moves among locations across the globe (and to a few places not strictly speaking on the map at all). With a phantasmagoria of characters and…
Sometimes you need to search for the next roads to take in your life; other times these roads approach you. I was looking for new ways to use my long-term communication and mental health advocacy skills and then, sadly, the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. I immediately wanted to help community members ease their pain and assist cities nationwide to greatly improve their disaster mental health response. I never expected a pandemic would arrive only two months after I published, making my book all the more important. Now climate change is exacerbating our already stressful times, and we must act to stem mental health issues before they become out of hand.
This classic award-winning book is a must-read for anyone interested in traumatic events. Sociologist Kai Erikson was the first to equate a major disaster with individual and community upheaval, based on the 1976 Buffalo Creek dam flood. He details how this event traumatized individuals and caused a breakdown of community relationships and a rise in crime, unethical behavior, and major out-migration. Many of the emotional and social effects of disasters had not been discussed or treated when this book was written. Much has been learned since. However, Erikson stresses that many of the psychological and sociological problems continue to exist when calamities occur today and must be resolved.
The 1977 Sorokin Award–winning story of Buffalo Creek in the aftermath of a devastating flood.
On February 26, 1972, 132-million gallons of debris-filled muddy water burst through a makeshift mining-company dam and roared through Buffalo Creek, a narrow mountain hollow in West Virginia. Following the flood, survivors from a previously tightly knit community were crowded into trailer homes with no concern for former neighborhoods. The result was a collective trauma that lasted longer than the individual traumas caused by the original disaster.
Making extensive use of the words of the people themselves, Erikson details the conflicting tensions of mountain life…
The books on this list have inspired me to expand the horizons of my imagination and to think boldly about the future. So often, it feels like we’re stuck living with our forebears’ bad choices and our leaders’ cynical and self-serving constructions of reality. In defiance, I write books for people who have struggled to fit in, who look around at our world and imagine how things could be better, and who want to read about realistic but optimistic futures. I write alternative history and cyberpunk to highlight how our cultural, technological, and political choices affect our future and how creating change starts with imagining it.
I was hesitant to pick up this book. Previously, I had enjoyed several of Neal Stephenson’s novels while finding others a bit of a slog. I was skeptical of the premise of Seveneves (the Moon is mysteriously destroyed with disastrous consequences for Earth) because it seemed too simplistic and apocalyptic. Oh boy, was I wrong!
This book delves into the politics of hard choices, the costs of survival, and the small and large-scale tragedies that come during the unrest. The science in this book is astounding: orbital mechanics, genetic engineering, space construction, geophysics and biology, and on and on. But the humans at the heart of the story will win you over. This book stayed with me for a LONG TIME. Unforgettable.
The astounding new novel from the master of science fiction. President Barack Obama's summer reading choice and recently optioned by Ron Howard and IMAGINE to be made into a major motion picture.
What would happen if the world were ending?
When a catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb, it triggers a feverish race against the inevitable. An ambitious plan is devised to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere. But unforeseen dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain...
Five thousand years later, their progeny - seven distinct races now three…
