Annals of the Former World
10 best books like Annals of the Former World (John McPhee): Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of all Time, On Human Nature, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, The Land of Little Rain, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
| Author | Temple Grandin |
| ISBN | 0679772898 |
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible...
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
| Author | David Quammen |
| ISBN | 0684827123 |
David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message -- a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment...
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin...
Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living. Far less well-known is a much greater catastrophe that took place at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago: 90 percent of life was destroyed,...
| Author | Edward O. Wilson |
| ISBN | 0674016386 |
No one who cares about the human future can afford to ignore E.O. Wilson's book. On Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?
With...
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0393311031 |
Interesting. Gould wrote these essays around the time that the Alvarez meteoric impact theory was being published. This is something that we now know to be beyond doubt. But at the time, when it was just being introduced, the theory, and especially its association with the Cretaceous extinction, was...
| Author | Nick Lane |
| ISBN | 0199205647 |
If it weren't for mitochondria, scientists argue, we'd all still be single-celled bacteria. Indeed, these tiny structures inside our cells are important beyond imagining. Without mitochondria, we would have no cell suicide, no sculpting of embryonic shape, no sexes, no menopause, no aging.
In...
| Author | Mary Hunter Austin |
| ISBN | 0140249192 |
“Between the high Sierras south from Yosemite—east and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert” is the territory that Mary Austin calls the Land of Little Rain. In this classic collection of meditations on the wonders...
An award-winning biologist takes us on the dramatic expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet.
Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vague and vastly off the mark, and much of the knowledge of our own species’...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0452265622 |
The Journey Home ranges from the surreal cityscapes of Hoboken and Manhattan to the solitary splendor of the deserts and mountains of the Southwest. It is alive with ranchers, dam builders, kissing bugs, and mountain lions. In a voice edged with chagrin, Edward Abbey offers a portrait of the American...
