The best books about bacteria

After months of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing, kids can now help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by getting a vaccine. It’s a tiny task that not only gives kids their own protection from the virus, it also helps protect their family, their friends, and their whole community. In straightforward language, this book explains to kids how vaccines will help us rid the world of COVID-19 and how they have a role to play in that mission.

This book helps kids and grown-ups talk about their own experiences, questions, thoughts, and concerns that have arisen during the pandemic. 

After months of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing, kids can now help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by getting a vaccine. It’s a tiny task that not only gives kids their own protection from the virus, it also helps protect their family, their friends, and their whole community. In straightforward language, this book explains to kids how vaccines will help us rid the world of COVID-19 and how they have a role to play in that mission.

This book helps kids and grown-ups talk about their own experiences, questions, thoughts, and concerns that have arisen during the pandemic. 

After vegan chef Lindsay S. Nixon wrapped up her popular cookbook The Happy Herbivore Cookbook last year, she went back to her kitchen in her new home of St. Maarten. Island living encouraged Nixon to come up with simpler fare, which led to a follow-up cookbook focusing on recipes that bring tasty back to quick-and-easy. Now, in Nixon's much-anticipated follow-up cookbook, Everyday Happy Herbivore, readers will see, once again, that just because plant-based eating is optimal for health, it doesn't have to also be expensive or time-consuming.

Everyday Happy Herbivore includes more than 175 doable recipes--recipes that are so quick and easy, you could cook three healthy meals from scratch every day like Nixon does.

The Gecko’s Foot is a pioneering book on bio-inspiration: taking some of nature’s most ingenious techniques – the nano bristles on the feet of geckos that enable them to walk on a glass ceiling; the self-cleaning lotus leaf that has spawned a new wave of water repellent materials, including self-cleaning glass; the holy grail of spider silk which is stronger than steel – as the starting point for new human technologies.

The most prescient chapter is one on engineering proteins from microbes, now a major growth point in devising carbon-neutral energy and materials production.

“Owning How to Brew is like having a brewmaster as your best friend. In the 30+ years since the American craft beer revolution got its start, countless brewing books have appeared. None, however has achieved the status of How to Brew, which is thorough, comprehensive, and beautifully organized. And now, this new expanded and enhanced edition improves on the original. It’s a considerable feat to create a book that is invaluable both to first-time brewers and professional brewmasters, but John has done it with a book that is essential for everyone who is serious about brewing.”  — Jim Koch, Founder & Brewer of Samuel Adams

Public sanitation and antibiotics have delivered historic increases in the human life span. Unintendedly, they have also produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and our environment. As a result, antibiotic resistance now ranks among our deadliest medical problems. Good Germs, Bad Germs tells the story of what went terribly wrong in our war on germs. It also offers a hopeful look into a future when antibiotics will be designed and used more wisely, and beyond that, to a day when we may replace antibacterial drugs and cleansers with bacterial ones. 

Yeast is the microscopic thing that we cannot live without. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors abandoned bush meat and wild fruit in favor of farming animals and growing the raw materials fermented by yeast: cereals for brewing beer and raising bread, and grapes for winemaking. We domesticated wild yeast and yeast domesticated us. 

Over the millennia, our reliance on yeast has deepened. Yeast is used to produce bioethanol in industrial refineries and insulin and other life-saving medicines are manufactured by genetically modified strains of the fungus. As a model organism for research, yeast is helping us to understand how the trillions of cells in our bodies function and malfunction. This is the story of our favorite microbe.  

Public sanitation and antibiotics have delivered historic increases in the human life span. Unintendedly, they have also produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit our bodies and our environment. As a result, antibiotic resistance now ranks among our deadliest medical problems. Good Germs, Bad Germs tells the story of what went terribly wrong in our war on germs. It also offers a hopeful look into a future when antibiotics will be designed and used more wisely, and beyond that, to a day when we may replace antibacterial drugs and cleansers with bacterial ones.