Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived

8 best books like Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (Chip Walter): Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, So Far from God: The U.S. War With Mexico, 1846-1848, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, A Planet of Viruses, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth

Author	Marcia Bjornerud
ISBN	0465006841

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and...

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Author	Bart D. Ehrman
ISBN	0060859512

For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand––and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity...

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

Author	Jared Diamond
ISBN	0060845503

Another great book from Jared Diamond. I found this to be just as engaging as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and also an easier read. I find that his books have so much information that it is helpful for me to outline them as I go. Here are my favorite bullet points from The Third Chimpanzee. Not at all a comprehensive...

So Far from God: The U.S. War With Mexico, 1846-1848

Author	John S.D. Eisenhower
ISBN	0806132795

The Mexican-American War of the 1840s, precipitated by border disputes and the U.S. annexation of Texas, ended with the military occupation of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. In the subsequent treaty, the United States gained territory that would become California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona,...

Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins

Author

Ian Tattersall

Fifty thousand years ago—merely a blip in evolutionary time—our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led...

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...

A Planet of Viruses

Author	Carl Zimmer
ISBN	0226983358

Viruses are the smallest living things known to science, yet they hold the entire planet in their sway. We are most familiar with the viruses that give us colds or the flu, but viruses also cause a vast range of other diseases, including one disorder that makes people sprout branch-like growths as if they...

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

Author

Darrell Bricker

From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape.

For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning...