Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World
10 best books like Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World (Nick Lane): The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of all Time, At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom, A Planet of Viruses, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
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...
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 | Carl Zimmer |
| ISBN | 0684856239 |
Everybody Out of the Pond
At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is...
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans...
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...
| Author | Jessica Snyder Sachs |
| ISBN | 0809050633 |
Making Peace with Microbes
Public sanitation and antibiotic drugs have brought about historic increases in the human life span; they have also unintentionally produced new health crises by disrupting the intimate, age-old balance between humans and the microorganisms that inhabit...
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"Extraordinary. . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in biology should read this book."--The New York Times Book Review
"A marvelous museum of the past four billion years on earth--capacious, jammed with treasures, full of learning...
| Author | Sean B. Carroll |
| ISBN | 0393327795 |
Dnf'd. Not because it is a bad book, boring or not well-written, but because it turns out that my appetite for evolutionary biology does not extend as far as embryology. I just cannot summon up the interest to concentrate and have to keep rereading and looking (again and again) at the illustrations. Maybe...
| 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...
| Author | Lynn Margulis |
| ISBN | 0520210646 |
Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully...
| Author | Claire Nouvian |
| ISBN | 0226595668 |
On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where...
| Author | David Quammen |
| ISBN | 0380717387 |
I promised a second review / rant about people I hate. This is it. This time it's Smug Environmentalists. The hate will manifest as the review goes on.
Natural Acts is a collection of essays, which mostly appeared originally in the authors column in "Outside" magazine. The essays mostly look...
| Author | Richard Fortey |
| ISBN | 0375706216 |
With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures.
Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five...
| Author | Donald R. Prothero |
| ISBN | 0231139624 |
Over the past twenty years, paleontologists have made tremendous fossil discoveries, including fossils that mark the growth of whales, manatees, and seals from land mammals and the origins of elephants, horses, and rhinos. Today there exists an amazing diversity of fossil humans, suggesting we...
