100 books like The Vital Question

This is a pie-in-the-sky 30-year plan for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by joint worldwide implementation of 80 “solutions.” For each of these, the book proposes a number of giga-tons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and the resulting dollar cost and savings.

I admire Hawken for his quantitative approach and his imaginative list of “solutions.” The numbers reveal the enormity of the drawdown enterprise. Some “solutions” are merely the usual renewables. Some came as a nice surprise to me, such as LED lanterns with batteries and small solar panels for residents in off-the-grid regions.

But I fear many of the solutions will never be rigorously implemented and would have a high policing cost to ensure compliance. For instance, the first solution involves the collection of refrigerant gases from expiring air conditioners. Who will voluntarily pay for this?

Best recent book examining human morality from a scientific, psychological point of view.

Darwinians used to think humans had to be selfish and immoral. Contemporary evolution argues the opposite, that humans evolved moral limits on our selfishness in order to live together. Haidt’s is the best book presenting this new evolutionary psychology.

But it goes further to connect those scientific issues with contemporary politics, explaining why people from “red” and “blue” states cannot understand each other: they each embody a short list of human moral values, but different ones. This is a great book for thinking carefully about human morality and contemporary politics. Students love it, and so do I. 

This book came out just as I was starting grad school and caused quite a bit of academic consternation. Diamond, a Harvard anthropologist, steps way outside the normal academic lanes to link geography, biology, technology, and history to answer one of the big academic questions: why was Europe able to conquer Africa and South Africa in the 16th-19th centuries? Even asking the question is to face challenges to morality, politics, and identity issues that are still radioactively hot topics in the modern political and academic world.

His mechanistic explanation of the advantages of climate and geography enraged many academics who specialized in narrow aspects of the question because it seemingly rendered them, at worst, irrelevant or, at best–simple foot soldiers providing data for Wrangam’s deeper, yet broader, causal explanations.

Historians detested his deterministic and scientifically amoral approach to a historical question. Yet his essential thesis has held up, and no… show more.

This book is a classic—the book that launched the modern environmental movement in 1962. Rachel Carson’s 1962 warning about the dystopian future we faced from inappropriate use of chemical pesticides (such as DDT) and herbicides was groundbreaking, as the public had been told these substances were safe.

I love it because it is an intricate and beautifully woven tale about humanity’s relationship with nature and our own hubris. It shattered commonly held views and created a new way of viewing the world and our role in it.

I love this book because of the author’s infectious passion for fossils and geology. 

The book reads like a detective story, with the innermost secrets of long-extinct animal groups unveiled bit by bit by a master of forensic paleontology.

When I was an undergraduate student over 40 years ago, Richard showed us behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum in London. What I remember most was him describing how long it took his team to reveal just one trilobite eye. Only after many months of painstaking attention to detail were they finally able to work out how a trilobite saw the world 500 million years ago.

The new science of DNA reveals a lot about how we think about identity.

Humans are a migratory species and our stories are complicated. Ancient DNA don't always match people's stories about their ancestors. Rather than being in a place for thousands of years, sometimes we replaced those who were there before or only the males of the group.

Sometimes we completely replaced the group that was there before but the original group's culture persisted or even replaced the invading culture. The book complicates our understanding of indigeneity and belonging.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-understand and entertaining introduction to the basics of how your brain works, The Brain is a great choice.

The author, David Eagleman, is an accomplished neuroscientist who has both a deep understanding of brain function and a talent for explaining those functions in a clear and engaging style.

The book also explores how neuroscience might influence some profound philosophical questions about free will, consciousness, and more—so you’ll get a dose of deep thinking along with some fundamental neuroscience knowledge.

Imagine for a moment that we found life on Mars.

That discovery would shake our world, change our outlook on the universe, and answer the question of whether we’re alone.

Sarah Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist, has spent her life thinking about this possibility and delves into both her and our obsession with the Red Planet in this beautifully written book. Part memoir, part historical account, and part scientific exploration, this book made me want to ditch a career in journalism and take up astrobiology. You’ll never look at Mars the same way again. 

For me, the most enthralling revelation of recent biology has been that living cells really do contain engines: protein structures more complex than a petrol engine, with moving parts. One is even a nano electric motor with a rotor. This is known in exquisite detail thanks to the miracles of modern imaging and gene and protein sequencing. This nano machinery developed billions of years ago in bacteria and is little changed today in all living cells. Falkowski updates Margulis’s work from 20 years earlier with these modern marvels. These nano engines run photosynthesis in bacteria and plants and give all living things their energy.

The relevance of the bacterial nano engines for the environment rests in their role in modulating the great cycles of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few others as they pass through the soil and rocks, the oceans, living things, and the air. Life’s Engines… show more.

In this book, Margulis offers a thrilling radical history of the earth and our role in it. She is famous as the protagonist of the theory of the origin of complex life that involved one bacterium engulfing another: one which, heretical in its day, has now been proven to the satisfaction of all biologists. It is a human bias to care only about what we can see with the naked eye, but Margulis’s passionate vision reveals how throughout earth history bacteria have been the vital organisms that hold the web of life together. Microcosm is a rich guide to the astonishing 4 billion year history of the earth and a necessary corrective to the sapiocentric hubris that believes our species to have the right to planetary dominion.