Here are 100 books that So What Does It All Mean? fans have personally recommended if you like
So What Does It All Mean?.
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I have been passionate about animals all my life. I was raised on and currently help operate the family farm near Petersburg, Tennessee. I have a doctorate in animal science and joined Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) as a Professor of Animal Science and Department Chair on August 1, 2007, after retiring from a 25-year career with the Extension Service (University of Tennessee and University of Kentucky). I enjoy participating in community activities such as the Petersburg Community Cultural Coalition, Petersburg Lion’s Club, and serving as President of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture Retiree’s Association. I have written two books, Cane Creek Days and Princess of Horses.
E. O. Wilson, who recently died, has been a preeminent biologist for decades and this book is a gift for anyone who wants to truly understand the basis of modern biology.
I have tried for years to convince people to read Charles Darwin’s books, but I’ve had little or no success. Dr. Wilson has probably introduced more people to Darwin than anyone, except possibly Richard Dawkins.
This is a large book because it contains most of Darwin’s works, but Wilson’s arrangement and commentary make it a great read for anyone who wants to understand where we came from and how we got here.
Never before have the four great works of Charles Darwin-Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle (1845), The Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871), and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)-been collected under one cover. Undertaking this challenging endeavor 123 years after Darwin's death, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson has written an introductory essay for the occasion, while providing new, insightful introductions to each of the four volumes and an afterword that examines the fate of evolutionary theory in an era of religious resistance. In addition, Wilson has crafted a creative new index to…
My parents took my brother and me out of school on April Fool’s Day 1979 (when I was 13). We spent the next eight years sailing from the UK to the Americas. Our ‘boat-schooling’ was informed by the world around us: trying to plot our position with sextant taught me mathematics; squinting at a scooped bucket of seaweed taught me about biodiversity; hunkering down in horrendous storms made me realise my insignificance; and finding a way to communicate in local markets took away my fear of difference. April 1st is my most significant anniversary. I'm indebted to my courageous parents for helping me understand I'm a small part of of an incredible planet.
Becoming Animal changed the way I look at my habitat. I hope it does the same for you. In his philosophical musings, David Abram contemplates why nature is something we look at, not something we are. He suggests our calloused coldness and ordered separation from other species allows us to subdue the wild-ness, but it comes with a numbing feeling of solitude. I too believe our disconnect with natural systems fuels many human ailments (physical and psychological). I love Abram’s suggestion that we change the spelling of Earth to Eairth to acknowledge that we, and the air we breathe, are part of this planet, not separate from it.
David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order…
I have researched human origins professionally for almost decades by studying the trail of fossils that have survived millions of years. But, before then, and since I can remember, I’ve been a lover of adventure and science fiction stories in all formats: action movies (Indiana Jones, Back to the Future), TV shows (The X Files), novels (Jack London!), or anime and manga (Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Alita). So, I guess my mind constantly travels from the past to the future. I think this list will also work as a time machine for others.
Harari is better known by this book’s predecessor, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. However, I enjoyed this book much more. Why? I study human evolution, so even though I enjoyed how the author summarized human history in Sapiens, starting from prehistoric African times, I realized that some ideas are based on wrong or dated information.
However, this book builds on the last portion of Sapiens, the future of humankind. I love speculative hard science fiction, especially those that combine human evolution with dystopian futures. So, of course, I enjoyed this “non-fiction” book.
Sapiens showed us where we came from. In our increasingly uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we're going.
'Spellbinding' Guardian
The world-renowned historian and intellectual Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.
It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?
Green sketching opened my eyes to the beauty and joy in my life that I’d never noticed before, beauty and joy that cost nothing to me or the planet. It quietened my busy brain, reduced my anxiety, and made me much more resilient. I’m now trying to help others put down their phones and pick up a pencil. Because when we change what we look at, we can change how we feel. And I’m convinced that once we see and appreciate nature’s beauty with fresh eyes, we’ll start to love and take care of it again.
This book introduced me to the concept of joy spotting and changed the way I see the world. Well-researched and hugely engaging, I was fascinated to discover why I’m consistently drawn to certain color combinations, patterns, and environments. Full of ‘aha’ moments, I loved connecting the dots (in my case, multi-colored) and clarifying what and where truly brings me joy.
Few books have impacted my life and creativity so much and on such an ongoing basis. But since reading this book, I’ve embraced my love of color throughout my home, garden, and wardrobe and embedded the concept of joy spotting at the heart of my work. I highly recommend it!
Make small changes to your surroundings and create extraordinary happiness in your life with groundbreaking research from designer and TED star Ingrid Fetell Lee.
Next Big Idea Club selection—chosen by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, and Adam Grant as one of the "two most groundbreaking new nonfiction reads of the season!"
"This book has the power to change everything! Writing with depth, wit, and insight, Ingrid Fetell Lee shares all you need to know in order to create external environments that give rise to inner joy." —Susan Cain, author of Quiet and founder of Quiet Revolution
I was born into a family with an Eastern European heritage, and lived and studied in the region for some years – including during the period of the collapse of the communist regimes. I am comfortable in Polish and Hungarian, and more vaguely functional in Russian and German – with Bulgarian a distant last. My undergraduate degree in history included an Eastern European specialization (including a paper co-administered between American and Hungarian institutions), and my graduate degree in economics included a focus on emerging economies. In my “day job” as a business analyst, I deal frequently with the business landscape in the region. I am married to a Pole, and have family in Poland.
Barry Cunliffe is a celebrated British archaeologist who specializes in both Europe’s and Britain’s origins.
Admittedly, Barry gets into the weeds a bit which can be challenging for those just looking for an introduction, but what he does better than most is connect the dots that bind Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa together.
Most histories of Europe pretend that Europe is an island, separate from Asia and everything else, as if it developed in a vacuum – but Barry reminds us that Charlemagne and Columbus are only part of the full European story.
Barry is a great place to start to understand the Eastern European, Asian, and Middle Eastern side of your British or Irish heritage – and yes, they are connected in some very direct ways.
By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean is nothing less than the story of how humans first started building the globalized world we know today. Set on a huge continental stage, from Europe to China, it is a tale covering over 10,000 years, from the origins of farming around 9000 BC to the expansion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century AD.
An unashamedly 'big history', it charts the development of European, Near Eastern, and Chinese civilizations and the growing links between them by way of the Indian Ocean, the silk Roads, and the great steppe corridor (which crucially allowed horse riders…
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
In 256 pages Manning tells you about what he calls the “human system.” Nearly half the book is dedicated to the Paleolithic, before farming, cities, and writing, a very unusual feature. Manning is trained as a historian of Africa, and that shines through at many points. He pays lots of attention to migration, languages, and labor history. Unlike most historians, he considers evidence from archeology, linguistics, and genetics as well as written sources. The only drawback to this one is that it is not written in the most accessible or entertaining prose.
Humanity today functions as a gigantic, world-encompassing system. Renowned world historian, Patrick Manning traces how this human system evolved from Homo Sapiens' beginnings over 200,000 years ago right up to the present day. He focuses on three great shifts in the scale of social organization - the rise of syntactical language, of agricultural society, and today's newly global social discourse - and links processes of social evolution to the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution. Throughout each of these shifts, migration and social diversity have been central, and social institutions have existed in a delicate balance, serving not just their…
Nature has been a source of play, exploration, community, and solace for me since I was very young – as an adult, I find myself fascinated and alarmed by our species’ relations with the living world. Nature writing gives me a way of bringing my attention to this relationship and exploring it in a very close way. I often think of that well-worn phrase: We cannot protect what we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know. Literature, it seems to me, offers one route to better knowing and loving the world.
It’s no understatement to say that this book changed my life. I read it when I was living in London, and feeling very far from my rural, outdoorsy roots. Richard Mabey is considered one of Britain’s greatest living nature writers, and I think the label is absolutely accurate. In this book, he describes an episode of depression and how he slowly rediscovered a living connection with his surroundings.
This book showed me how literature can sometimes bring us closer to the natural world, helping us to articulate and explore our relationship with living things. It made me want to write!
To celebrate Richard Mabey's 80th birthday, a reissue of the seminal Nature Cure, originally published in 2005 to great acclaim.
At the height of his career, having recently published Flora Britannica, the author and naturalist fell in to a deep and all consuming depression. Unable to rise from his bed, his face turned to the wall, Richard Mabey found that the touchstones of his life - his love for nature and the land - could no longer offer him solace. But over time, with help from friends and a move to East Anglia, he slowly recovered, finding a new partner,…
I have always been astounded by the mysteries of life and the cosmos. I soon realized that religion did not provide a satisfactory answer to these mysteries. Majoring in philosophy in college, I studied the world’s great thinkers and began an ongoing exploration of scientific theories purporting to explain the world we live in. These theories, based on scientific materialism, also proved unsatisfying, though for different reasons than religion. Consequently, I devoted 35 years–during a legal career–to researching and writing my book, intended to go beyond science and religion in the quest to explain the mysteries of the cosmos.
I love this book because it is a science and philosophy education bound together between two covers.
The book is thick, and its title is intimidating, but once I started reading it, I became engrossed in the story it tells. The mystery of the fine-tuning of the cosmos is the same mystery encountered by thinkers throughout the ages.
In recent decades, this mystery has evolved into the anthropic principle, the notion that because we are participants in this finely tuned universe, the properties of the universe must, in some way, be geared to allow us to exist.
Last, I enjoyed this book because it combines insights and ideas from science, philosophy, and even visionaries, like Pierre de Teilhard Chardin, as it ends with the thought that life evolves to the Omega Point, where life finally gains control of the inner workings of the universe.
Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way? This book shows that there is. In their classic work, John Barrow and Frank Tipler examine the question of Mankind's place in the Universe, taking the reader on a tour of many scientific disciplines and offering fascinating insights into issues such as the nature of life, the serach for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the past history and fate of our universe.
As a child, I felt profoundly dissatisfied by the pat and cardboard cutout explanations that some teachers offered for life and the universe: there had to be more! I decided to go into science. The explanatory power of science is 'next level,' to use a contemporary phrase, and unless and until we explore it, we'll miss the beauty and sheer wonder of the universe. Neither should we overly specialize: science is not compartmentalized, but vastly different fields of science feed into and reinforce one another. Popular science has an essential role to play: irrespective of how arcane hard science may appear to be, its story can always be told in everyday words.
This book is the first pop science book I would ever recommend to anyone, and certainly to anyone who could only ever read one science book in their lives. It tackles the issue of why our universe is so extremely fine-tuned for life but ends up being much more than that, as the search for answers leads the author to a thrilling exploration of many deep questions at the forefront of physics and of life itself.
Cosmic Jackpot is Paul Davies’s eagerly awaited return to cosmology, the successor to his critically acclaimed bestseller The Mind of God. Here he tackles all the "big questions," including the biggest of them all: Why does the universe seem so well adapted for life?
In his characteristically clear and elegant style, Davies shows how recent scientific discoveries point to a perplexing fact: many different aspects of the cosmos, from the properties of the humble carbon atom to the speed of light, seem tailor-made to produce life. A radical new theory says it’s because our universe is just one of an…
I remember, as a very young child, clandestinely sneaking out of the house on humid Houston nights to gather toads. How my parents never caught me in the act, I do not know. I only know holding these amphibians in my hands felt special, magical even. This compulsion toward other creatures speaks to the unfolding of my lifelong learnings, a path that led me to a PhD in Religion and Nature and then to work for the Center for Humans and Nature. I’ve never stopped reflecting on how humans might better care for our earthling kin, and I don’t suspect I’ll ever cease marveling at the earth’s wild generativity.
Hailed as a “new genre of nature writing,” Mueller’s book is species-specific, dwelling upon the lives and deaths of salmon, yet the subject matter could apply to any creature that has become a commodity within late-stage capitalism.Mueller contrasts the Norwegian farmed-salmon industry and the increasing mechanization and reduction of living beings to things with wild salmon populations and Native people’s perspectives from the Pacific Northwest. Critically, he dares to take on the perspective of salmon, sprinkling memorable and moving vignettes throughout the book, helping readers imagine the world from a salmon’s-eye-view. This work of interspecies empathy is a rare and welcome contribution to thinking about personhood through a lens that is other-than-human.
Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment
In search of a new story for our place on earth
Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture's tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon-weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest.
Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully…
