Here are 100 books that We Belong to Gaia fans have personally recommended if you like
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As an engineer, scientist, and historian, I’ve always been fascinated by how science has always served the political goals of nations and empires. Today, we look at the Space Race to land a person on the Moon as a part of the Cold War effort to establish the intellectual and cultural dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union, even as it created new technologies and completely changed our understanding of the world. When I came across the Geodesic Mission to the Equator 1735-1744, I realized that even in the 18th century, voyages of discovery could do more than simply find new lands to conquer and exploit–they could, and did extend our knowledge of nature and mankind.
Alexander von Humboldt’s name is synonymous with scientific discovery today–the Humboldt Current, the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and countless species named for him. Humboldt revolutionized our modern understanding of the natural sciences–geology, biology, meteorology, and much else–with his epic five-year voyage that set off in 1799 and brought him through the Amazon, the Caribbean, and North and South America.
Like Malaspina before him, Humboldt studied not only the flora and fauna of these regions but also their peoples and the political turmoil that was building towards revolution. He met with the leaders of the time–Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar among them–and opened their eyes to the richness of their lands. Unlike Malaspina, Humboldt’s works were published to wide acclaim and established the idea that all nature, including human nature, is interconnected.
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016
'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson
'Dazzling' Literary Review
'Brilliant' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist
'A superb biography' The Economist
'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.
I'm just a curious person. I have always been fascinated by literally everything. Everything is jaw-dropping: whether it's lying under a dark sky and marveling at the fact that what you see is the past (the time it takes for light from distant stars to reach your retina) or that your feelings for loved ones boil down to biochemistry, or thinking that intelligence is everywhere—from bacteria to plants and fungi, to Homo sapiens. As a university professor, I only understood later in life that I needed to leave that “ivory tower,” listen to non-academics, and read popular books that, in their apparent simplicity, can reach further and deeper.
This book gave me the dose of reality I needed: a big slap in the face! Our way of feeling, suffering, and worrying about death is just one among many ways of facing it.
Put bluntly, we don’t have an exclusivity agreement with life or death; we are simply another form of life on planet Earth—a much-needed blow.
How animals conceive of death and dying-and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.
With humor and empathy, Susana Monso tells the stories of ants…
I'm just a curious person. I have always been fascinated by literally everything. Everything is jaw-dropping: whether it's lying under a dark sky and marveling at the fact that what you see is the past (the time it takes for light from distant stars to reach your retina) or that your feelings for loved ones boil down to biochemistry, or thinking that intelligence is everywhere—from bacteria to plants and fungi, to Homo sapiens. As a university professor, I only understood later in life that I needed to leave that “ivory tower,” listen to non-academics, and read popular books that, in their apparent simplicity, can reach further and deeper.
I just devoured it on a recent train trip. I found it fascinating, a little gem. OMG, it holds so much wisdom! Less is always more, and Saucier knows what she’s doing.
The way she plays with characters: the tiniest of things compared to the magnificence of a great historical fire. I find it incredible to think how the Earth’s own dynamics and the events that occur on it can shape our personalities and the narratives of what is to come in our lives: love, which we can all find where we least expect it, and death.
A CBC CANADA READS 2015 SELECTION! FINALIST FOR THE 2013 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FRENCH-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION Tom and Charlie have decided to live out the remainder of their lives on their own terms, hidden away in a remote forest, their only connection to the outside world a couple of pot growers who deliver whatever they can't eke out for themselves. But one summer two women arrive. One is a young photographer documenting a a series of catastrophic forest fires that swept Northern Ontario early in the century; she's on the trail of the recently deceased Ted Boychuck, a survivor…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I'm just a curious person. I have always been fascinated by literally everything. Everything is jaw-dropping: whether it's lying under a dark sky and marveling at the fact that what you see is the past (the time it takes for light from distant stars to reach your retina) or that your feelings for loved ones boil down to biochemistry, or thinking that intelligence is everywhere—from bacteria to plants and fungi, to Homo sapiens. As a university professor, I only understood later in life that I needed to leave that “ivory tower,” listen to non-academics, and read popular books that, in their apparent simplicity, can reach further and deeper.
I savored this book sip by sip, wishing that each chapter would have lasted a little longer, a little longer. I felt a “healthy envy” for anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Klein in high school.
It’s impossible not to fall in love with the cosmos while reading his work. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible and poetic manner is admirable.
Each chapter has given me an unforgettable early morning coffee, revealing at a pace the magic that science holds in every corner.
An eye-opening celebration of the marvels of space, time, the cosmos, and more
How to Love the Universe is a new kind of science writing by an author truly enamored of the world around him. In ten short chapters of lyrical prose―each one an ode to a breathtaking realm of discovery―Stefan Klein uses everyday objects and events as a springboard to meditate on the beauty of the underlying science.
Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence of all life; a day of stormy weather points to the world’s unpredictability; a marble conjures the birth of the cosmos. As…
I grew up wandering farmers’ fields looking for arrowheads, and I started working in archaeology at 16 – 50 years ago. I ski, snowshoe, run, and play piano, but I sold my soul to the archaeology devil a long time ago. I specialize in hunter-gatherers, and I’ve done fieldwork across the western US, ethnographic work in Madagascar, and lectured in many countries. I’ve learned that history matters, because going back in time helps find answers to humanity’s problems – warfare, inequality, and hate. I’ve sought to convey this in lectures at the University of Wyoming, where I’ve been a professor of anthropology since 1997.
Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that.
With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics...nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.
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…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
This book was written by a biologist with a profound knowledge of the natural world, including our species. It is one of the best books written by a scientist. It combines biology, anthropology, and history to explain a lot about where we came from and why some countries are wealthier than others, rooting such discussions on biology.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
I have been passionate about continuous learning and understanding why people act the way they do. The books I recommend cover the topic of continuous growth across different states and areas of life.
This is a wonderful book for any person that is inspired to enact change in their communities.
I especially like the action steps at the personal, institutional, and legislative levels at the end of the chapters.I found inspiration in the real-life examples of individuals using an evidence-based approach to the actions they take.
What if there were a way to prevent criminal behavior, mental illness, drug abuse, poverty, and violence? Written by behavioral scientist Tony Biglan, and based on his ongoing research at the Oregon Research Institute, The Nurture Effect offers evidence-based interventions that can prevent many of the psychological and behavioral problems that plague our society.
For decades, behavioral scientists have investigated the role our environment plays in shaping who we are, and their research shows that we now have the power within our own hands to reduce violence, improve cognitive development in our children, increase levels of education and income, and…
I am now considered by many as the expert on creating allergy-free and allergy-friendly gardens and landscapes. I have lectured on the subject all across the US and Canada, and also in Israel, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. For 30+ years now I’ve been researching the connections between urban landscaping and allergies and asthma. My articles have appeared in dozens of fine publications, including The New York Times, The London Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Atlas Obscura, Scientific American, Der Spiegel, and The New Scientist. I have owned two nurseries and taught horticulture for twenty years.
Edited by Matilda van den Bosch and William Bird, Nature and Public Health. Each chapter was written by several top experts in the field. There were more than a hundred different experts chosen to write sections of this fine book, selected from all around the world of health, botany, horticulture, urban forestry, urban affairs, and the environment. Nature (or the lack of it) is closely aligned with human health, and this wonderful book explores the subject like no other.
Human beings have always been affected by their surroundings. There are various health benefits linked to being able to access to nature; including increased physical activity, stress recovery, and the stimulation of child cognitive development. The Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health provides a broad and inclusive picture of the relationship between our own health and the natural environment. All aspects of this unique relationship are covered, ranging from disease prevention through physical activity in green spaces to innovative ecosystem services, such as climate change adaptation by urban trees. Potential hazardous consequences are also discussed including natural disasters, vector-borne…
Diary of a Citizen Scientist
by
Sharman Apt Russell,
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
As a freshman in my Columbia University humanities class, I remember when we debated whether Achilles did the right thing in fighting Hector when Achilles could have led a peaceful life as a shepherd. I was arguing that only in risking our lives could we fully live them. A senior challenged me, saying, “I’ve struggled here for four years. I want a life of ease.” That debate has guided me through my years as a professor of English literature and philosophy and then as a management consultant. Only in conversations over the good life do admirable ways of treating customers, managing employees, or competing come to life.
This is the most readable philosophy book I know. Nietzsche wrote it in his brilliantly witty, epigrammatic style. Each episode is about a page long.
Concentrate on "Book Four." There, Nietzsche famously tells us that God is dead. Find out what he really means. (We criticize everything and can feel no true reverence.) Consequently, we seek convenience and flexibility over and over again. Stunningly, Nietzsche sets out four contrarian, incompatible good lives. (Philosophers have always sought to define one good life.)
If you read nothing else, read epigrams 290, 295, and 303: "The life of constant revision to perfect a style," "The life of short stories," "The life of brilliant improvisation," and "The risk-taking life." I use Nietzsche’s model of good lives to help business leaders restore their businesses and themselves.
The book Nietzsche called "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God—to which a large part of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.
Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.
Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years…
