John James Audubon
10 best books like John James Audubon (Richard Rhodes): Silent Spring, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Jungle, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Rain Forest, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
| Author | Rachel Carson |
| ISBN | 0618249060 |
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land,...
| Author | Edward Abbey |
| ISBN | 0061129763 |
Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension...
| Author | Upton Sinclair |
| ISBN | 1884365302 |
For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown.
When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial...
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
| Author | Mark Kurlansky |
| ISBN | 0099268701 |
The Cod. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been triggered by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it. To the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious that gold. This book spans 1,000 years and four continents. From the...
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
The computer and the internet are among the most important innovations of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the...
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
| Author | Daniel Immerwahr |
| ISBN | 0374172145 |
A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire
We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire," exercising power around the world. But what about the actual...
Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right
| Author | Al Franken |
| ISBN | 0452285216 |
Al Franken, one of our savviest satirists (People), has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of slander, bias, and even treason. He has examined the Bush administration's policies of squandering our surplus, ravaging the environment, and alienating the rest of the...
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
| Author | Raphael Bob-Waksberg |
From the creator and executive producer of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman, a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love--the best and worst thing in the universe
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack...
For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced...
| Author | Rob Gifford |
| ISBN | 1400064678 |
Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution...
| Author | Dan Koeppel |
| ISBN | 1594630011 |
From a well-known outdoors and nature writer comes a narrative that explores a lifelong obsession with competitive birding.
What drives a man to travel to sixty countries and spend a fortune to count birds? And what if that man is your father?
Richard Koeppel's obsession began at the age of...
| Author | Lynn Schooler |
| ISBN | 0060935731 |
With a body twisted by adolescent scoliosis and memories of the brutal death of a woman he loved, Lynn Schooler kept the world at arm's length, drifting through the wilds of Alaska as a commercial fisherman, outdoorsman, and wilderness guide. In 1990, Schooler met Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino,...
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
| Author | Richard Preston |
| ISBN | 1400064899 |
Preston looks at the very tallest trees on our planet and the people who seek them out, climb them and study them. This was a very engaging trip into a very unfamiliar territory. One amazing thing was that knowledge of the whereabouts of earth’s wooden giants is held by a very few individuals. The people...
| Author | Joyce Sidman |
| ISBN | 0544717139 |
Robert F. Sibert Medal winner
Bugs, of all kinds, were considered to be “born of mud” and to be “beasts of the devil.” Why would anyone, let alone a girl, want to study and observe them?
One of the first naturalists to observe live insects directly, Maria Sibylla Merian was...
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
| Author | David Quammen |
| ISBN | 1476776628 |
Nonpareil science writer David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology can change our understanding of evolution and life’s history, with powerful implications for human health and even our own human nature.
In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences...
| Author | James N. Rowe |
| ISBN | 0345314603 |
When Green Beret Lieutenant James N. Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive.
In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beri-beri, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the...
