Here are 100 books that Condor fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve written books for kids of all ages, and always there were birds. Sparrows singing on windowsills, cardinals arrowing across yards, cormorants diving into Lake Erie, pigeons poking beneath park benches. Those things with feathers make my own heart sing! Slowly it dawned on me that I wanted to write a book where birds didn’t just flit across the pages but nested at the story’s heart. I had to do a lot of bird research for Perfect. What I learned about the precious, fragile bonds among all Earth’s creatures became one of the book’s themes: big and small, bound by gravity or able to defy it, we are all deeply connected.
Because…the ending is amazing! Well, not only the ending, but wow, the ending.
Many middle grade novels deal with loss and grief, but none better than this one, with a catharsis that’s totally organic and fully earned. Inspired by Miller’s experience of his own mother’s heart transplant, this coming-of-age story follows Graham in his quest to spot the Snail Kite, an elusive bird his ill mother has always wanted to see.
Family and friendship are at the heart of the story, but along the way, readers learn lots of tantalizing truths about birds, those symbols of hope and promise.
Jeff Miller's heartbreaking, coming-of-age middle-grade novel-inspired by his personal experience living through his own parent's heart transplant-invites readers into the world of a twelve-year-old birdwatcher looking for a place to call home and a way to save his mother, even if it means venturing deep into Florida swampland.
Twelve-year-old Graham Dodds is no stranger to hospital waiting rooms. Sometimes, he feels like his entire life is one big waiting room. Waiting for the next doctor to tell them what's wrong with his mom. Waiting to find out what city they're moving to next. Waiting to see if they will finally…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have loved insects and other wildlife for all of my life. I am now a professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, UK, specializing in bee ecology. I have published more than 400 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects, plus seven books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers A Sting in the Tale (2013), The Garden Jungle (2019), and Silent Earth (2021). They’ve been translated into 20 languages and sold over half a million copies. I also founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity that has grown to 12,000 members.
This is a wonderfully imaginative book. It examines how Britain, a nation of nature lovers with over 1 million members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, has become one of the most damaged and denuded countries on the planet. Although depressing in parts when looking at the depths of our global biodiversity crisis, this book explains how we can turn this around, heal our land, bring back wildlife, and ensure vibrant rural communities.
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize
'splendid' -Guardian
'visionary' -New Statesman
Britain has all the space it needs for an epic return of its wildlife. Only six percent of our country is built upon. Contrary to popular myth, large areas of our countryside are not productively farmed but remain deserts of opportunity for both wildlife and jobs. It is time to turn things around. Praised as 'visionary' by conservationists and landowners alike, Rebirding sets out a compelling manifesto for restoring Britain's wildlife, rewilding its species and restoring rural jobs - to the benefit…
When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
This book was another library find I had to immediately purchase as soon as I finished reading it.
Rundell’s descriptions of the creatures she chooses to feature are each an enchantment of their own. I confess a particular attachment to the Golden Mole, a bioluminescent mammal who lives completely underground in Africa, and whom I had no idea existed prior to her introduction.
This book, like many of the others, teeters on a precipice between despair and horror but tightropes its way across, fueled by a beautiful hope. I expected a book about spectacular animals on the brink of extinction to be a grim read, but I found the opposite to be true.
Brimming with the fierce sort of optimism that moves mountains, this book charmed, delighted, enchanted, and inspired me. I wish I’d had it to read to my children when they were younger and still at my mercy.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF FALL: WASHINGTON POST, CBS, BOSTON GLOBE, CHICAGO TRIBUNE & MORE • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book” (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world
"Extraordinary...For anyone whose capacity for wonder could use a jumpstart, Rundell's essays are essential reading."—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"In times like these, terror and rage will carry us only so far. We will also need unstinting, unceasing love. For the hard work that lies ahead, Ms. Rundell writes, 'Our competent and furious love will…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
Telescopes, microscopes, computer modeling–these exist because some things are easier to study when you change their shape. That’s how we learned about planets, germs, and the economy. Enlarging, shrinking, and filling in details lets us examine and understand. I think literature can do the same thing with ideas. Asking ‘what if?’ lets us probe things we can’t with our gadgets. Concepts. Hypotheticals. A story that pulls a big idea like taffy? That is a treat. I’ve got five in this dish.
What if extinctions could be traded like carbon? There’s an idea that doesn’t come up too often over dinner. It’s odd, awful, and yet somewhat plausible, as our hyper-capitalistic world keeps thinking it can buy its way out of physics.
Beauman chooses not to hash out the details in the Journal of Political Economy. He chooses to have it read instead. As you should, because I found the novel that fully examines this terrible concept to be terribly interesting, terribly inventive, and terribly funny. Not in a LOL kind of funny (though there are moments) but in the smirking, wry, ‘of course’ realm of humor ruled by the line of succession that runs from Jonathan Swift to George Carlin.
I love jokes that last long enough for you to realize they were so much more than whimsy.
A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never…
My passion for hunting Tibetan wildlife (with a camera) started with tracking the near-mythical Takin in Bhutan for BBC Wildlife Magazine. The Takin is a beast about the size of a moose and surprisingly agile on steep mountain slopes. Where wild animals live, there is always lots of beautiful wild scenery! But Wilderness is in very short supply on the planet these days. So, my passion branched into speaking up for these wild animals and for preserving their precious habitats. In various books, such as my guidebook to Tibet (Bradt Travel Guides), I profile the incredible animals of Tibet. But the biggest inspiration is the readers themselves.
Might as well start them young: this work by Chelsea Clinton cites reading ages of 4 to 8 years old. Chelsea Clinton? Rings a few bells? Yes, she is the only daughter of former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. Targeting such a young reading age, the book relies heavily on superb illustration by Gianna Marino, who brings a dozen animals to life with engaging artwork. Extinction means gone forever. Can you imagine a world without tigers or rhinos?
Humankind is driving these two species to the brink of extinction. In the book, the reasons for this are covered by the phrase: ‘poaching and habitat loss’—without going into detail that ‘poaching’ mainly means hawking tiger-bone and rhino-horn concoctions as bogus cures in Traditional Chinese Medicine. But there is only so much bad news that a five-year-old can take.
Did you know that blue whales are the largest animals in the world? Or that sea otters wash their paws after every meal? The world is filled with millions of animal species, and all of them are unique and special. Many are on the path to extinction.
In this book, Chelsea Clinton introduces young readers to a selection of endangered animals, sharing what makes them special, and also what threatens them. Taking readers through the course of a day, Don't Let Them Disappear talks about rhinos, tigers, whales, pandas and more, and provides helpful tips on what we all can…
I’m a lover of wildlife and have written several nonfiction picture books on the topic, includingWinged Wonders: Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery, Cougar Crossing: How Hollywood’s Celebrity Cougar Built a Bridge for City Wildlife, and Ocean Soup: a Recipe for You, Me, and A Cleaner Sea. I’m also a humane educator, which inspires the focus of all my nonfiction picture books on “solutionaries” helping people, animals, and the planet. At heart, my books—which have won Golden Kite Nonfiction and Eureka! Nonfiction Honors and more—aim to inspire compassion, inclusivity, and positive action.
This book is a classic and a favorite of mine; I loved reading it to kids as a humane educator and seeing their eyes widen. I still marvel at how this book illustrates so simply and powerfully what happened to the entire ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park when wolves were reintroduced after being eliminated by humans years earlier. It’s a hugely impactful story about how any one species in an ecosystem affects all the others—and kids love it!
Two renowned children’s book creators teamed up to make this stirring picture book that tells the story of how, over a century, wolves were persecuted in the United States and nearly became extinct. Gradually reintroduced, they are thriving again in the West, much to the benefit of the ecosystem. This book will teach a new generation to appreciate the grace, dignity, and value of wolves as it promotes awareness of the environment’s delicate balance. Paired with gorgeous paintings by landscape artist Wendell Minor, Jean Craighead George’s engaging text will inspire people of all ages to care about the protection of…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
The truth? I’m scared of bears! But learning about them has helped me become a less fearful hiker. Turns out, bears spread seeds and salmon nutrients in their droppings. They also help maintain populations of prey species like deer. I don’t want those jobs. So, thank you, bears! The more kids learn about wildlife, the more comfortable they’ll be outdoors. And the better planet citizens they’ll become! Beyond bears, I’ve authored 200+ children’s books, writing everything from Greek Mythology take-offs (Goddess Girls middle grade series of 30 books) to math (Zero the Hero picture book) to a fractured fairy tale about how to write a story (Little Red Writing)!
Gail Gibbons is a well-known name in nonfiction. Librarians and teachers often look to her many books for basic info about animals, plants, our Earth, and more.
Although this isn’t a book with my favorite thing—humor—young readers will likely gobble up the simply related facts about pandas’ characteristics, eating habits, and habitat. In my experience, kids are pretty excited about pandas because these bamboo-eating bears are sooo cute!
Giant pandas: they are indigenous to China and are adored the world over. But they are more than a bundle of fluff and squeaks. Giant pandas are energetic climbers and swimmers. In one year, they may eat around 10,000 pounds of bamboo. And people in China have worked together to create protected areas for giant pandas to live peacefully.
Discover a detailed introduction to giant pandas - including baby panda development - in this beautifully illustrated nonfiction picture book. Gail Gibbons adds another book to her widespread collection of nonfiction for young readers of all levels, and introduces the topic…
I’ve travelled to the Pantanal and along the Amazon both ways from Brazil and Colombia while I was teaching English in Brazil and will never forget the destruction of the Amazon. A visit to the gaping hole of Serra Pelada, a gold mine, had a lasting effect on me as did the forest fires and scorched earth, devoid of any bird or animal apart from the skinny cattle grazing amongst the blackened trees, stretching for miles. A run-in with a hyacinth macaw egg thief, who was smuggling the beautiful birds into Europe, spurred my interest in writing a children’s series which touches on conservation, endangered species, and illegal wildlife trafficking.
This beautifully illustrated picture book is dedicated to 15 endangered animals out of the 41,000 species on the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List and explains why they’re in danger and what we can do. It features the most hunted and trafficked creature on the planet, the pangolin whose scales are made of keratin – the same as our nails – but are boiled to make pointless ‘medicines’ with zero effectiveness. Other creatures are the long-nosed crocodile, the peacock tarantula, and the snow leopard. With 60 percent of species being wiped out since the 1970s, perhaps it’s time for radical thinking. Should animals like tigers and cheetahs start charging companies for their images, spots, and stripes to raise money to protect what remains of their environments?
An interactive look at endangered animals imploring readers to discover fifteen species facing extinction.
Inspired and endorsed by the "Red List" database of animals in peril maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) this brightly illustrated book introduces species from six different habitats on six continents. Blending approachable text, secondary facts and lush art, Red Alert! offers full portraits of animals such as the Chinese giant salamander, the snow leopard, the blue whale, and the giant panda, and provides young activists additional resources for how they can help save these beautiful creatures.
I am a scientist and biologist. Learning about evolution changed my life and put me on a path to studying it as a career. As a child, I was a voracious reader, and as an undergraduate, I read every popular science book on biology I could get my hands on. In retrospect, those books were almost as important to my education as anything I learned in a lab or lecture theatre. When writing for a general audience, I try to convey the same sense of wonder and enthusiasm for science that drives me to this day.
A tour-de-force of science writing and arguably the best book about ecology and evolution ever written. Quammen’s book covers similar ground to Last Chance to See conceptually, and sometimes literally as several of the same locales are visited. But the similarities end there. As an undergraduate, it opened my eyes to the importance of ecological research and gave me a new appreciation for the contributions to science of the much-maligned Alfred Russell Wallace.
This book is unique in that, despite my enthusiasm for it, I have seldom found the need to re-read it because so much of the content—tenrec reproduction, the circumstances of the discovery that chuckwalla meat is more disagreeable than starvation, how invasive snakes overran Guam—has lived rent-free in my head for almost 30 years.
“Compulsively readable—a masterpiece, maybe the masterpiece of science journalism.” —Bill McKibben, Audubon
A brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world and our place within it.
In this landmark of science writing, we learn how the isolation of islands makes them natural laboratories of evolutionary extravagance, as seen in the dragons of Komodo, the elephant birds of Madagascar, the…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
When I was on holiday in Borneo with my daughter, we met an inspirational conservationist who was basically single-handedly saving sun bears from extinction. I asked what I could do to help. “Do what you do best,” he said. Those five powerful words shaped my last decade, most recently prompting the growing series of Wildlife Wong nonfiction children’s books based on his true adventures with rainforest creatures. I feel strongly about the importance of connecting kids to nature. Not only is it good for their physical and mental health, but my generation hasn’t done a particularly good job of environmental stewardship, and we need all the help we can get.
Narratives are such a powerful tool when it comes to connecting kids to nature and, let’s face it, that connection has been lost with increased reliance on technology. My doctorate focused on how nonfiction narratives can engage non-scientists in conservation. Two things I learnt were that we won’t save something unless we love it, and hopeful stories have more power than disasters. You will fall in love with the expansive, wild landscape of Yellowstone Park with the beautifully crafted descriptions in Fourteen Wolves. The important underlying story of regeneration also instills hope that we can make a difference, combating inertia. In my opinion, this beautifully illustrated nature biography is destined to become a classic, passed down through generations.
'A magical true story with stunningly beautiful illustrations. It is a book to treasure forever' David Walliams, comedian and children's author ____________________ In fairy tales, the wolf's cry makes people shudder. They've been hunted, captured. But the wolf carries a wild magic - a magic that once restored a barren land.
When wolves disappeared from Yellowstone Park in the 1930s, the ecosystem started to collapse. Enormous herds of elk swarmed the plains, bears starved, rabbit families shrunk and birds flew away to new homes. Plants vanished, trees withered and rivers meandered.
