78 Books Like Earthquake Storms

Written with the clarity and zest of Bryson and McPhee, but with the added benefit that Hazen is a professional geologist. I like this book because of how Hazen takes the reader into the process of how a geologist works and thinks. Hazen’s specialty is mineralogy, and his main thesis—that living organisms and minerals evolved together with each shaping the other’s future—makes for a unique and thought-provoking take on the history of our planet. 

Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.

In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.

McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is simply a visceral pleasure to read–I recommend you find a hammock and a few days.

The best seller of all time, a lively romp through dinosaur research (and researchers).

This is for all readers, and you’ll be hooked by the lively, pacy text by Steve, as he hurtles from continent to continent, digging up bones from China to Poland, working on Tyrannosaurus rex and other great beasts in the basements of the world’s museums, and sharing with readers what it’s like to be a working paleontologist.

For aspiring young bone-diggers, this is an inspiration, although it’s not like this all the time: paleontologists also sometimes have to mark student essays and fight with university systems to get their field trip costs refunded!

I find great pleasure in learning a little bit about a lot of things, and this book scratches that itch in a great way. Touring through big scientific concepts, Bryson delivers the potentially overwhelming (and boring) information in a fun way that made me understand space-time way more than any middle school physics class did.

It’s not a book that needs to be read in order or even be read in its entirety to enjoy, so it’s fun to have around to pick up a chapter here and there or read it straight through. The other day I went back and referred to it while having a conversation about space time and found an explanation that we both understood—and enjoyed. 

James D. Houston is an underrated California novelist, and Continental Drift is his best book.

I love this story of a family trying to re-establish a life in a world haunted by the aftermath of the Vietnam War and threatened by a string of inexplicable murders.

Houston’s descriptions of the land rival Steinbeck’s, and he situates the family’s home on the legendary San Andreas Fault—symbolically invoking the potential for disaster that lurks beneath the fertile soil.   

Humor and poetry brought to the natural wonders of earth? Wow! This book has twenty-two poems such as “Recipe for Granite,” “Obituary for a Clam” and “Instructions for the Earth’s Dishwasher.” A favorite is a plea for a glacier, so sluggish and slow. “Just once, when no one is looking, peel out!” The illustrations are bright and fun and the endnotes provide extra information.

This book is an awareness alarm for readers to comprehend the ubiquitous array of dynamic natural forces that impact the Earth. In local, regional, or global sweeping events, they need study to predict such happenings in advance and to learn from the aftermath for better future protection. The book shows a selection of events from historical to time of writing and provides gripping reading in seeing nature’s wayward effects in action.

A panel of seven expert writers well versed in these events documents and explains the forces unleashed in the visitations. Dramatic ground, aerial and satellite photography and explanatory diagrams give readers graphic grounding in the vagaries of storms, fires, floods, tsunamis, erosion, landslips, avalanches, volcanic outbursts, earthquakes, impacts from space matter, and even climate changes. 

Earthquakes and Volcanoes is another one of the fabulous Reader’s Digest Pathfinders series specifically for kids. It features scientists at work measuring the temperature of red-hot lava, destructive earthquakes, and monstrous tsunamis bearing down on coastal ports. The cause of all of these is simply explained in the context of our planet’s shifting plate tectonic motor. The book’s author, Dr. Lin Sutherland, gave me a great helping hand during my Ph.D. degree at Macquarie University by organizing access to state-of-the-art uranium-lead age dating equipment for my sapphire samples. We became firm friends and colleagues after that, going on together to publish numerous research articles on sapphires and rubies.

In this story, we’re in Georgia, deep in its geology, which for me wouldn’t be a draw for a novel, but Eager presents this landscape through the unforgettable character of Doreen, who struggles with poverty, her role as a woman in Southern culture, her inadequacies as a parent yet emerges as a real hero in her own life and others. 

What I took away was a new view on female pride, a woman’s honor, and what limits an aware person puts on her self-sacrifice. The characters are not all that likable, with the exception of Doreen, yet I was completely engaged in the story. The way the author weaves in the geology, what remains in the earth’s memory, and what remains in human memory was brilliant.  

This book tries to answer one of those vital questions that we have asked ourselves since we were children and that, at least in my case, continues to be part of my interest as an adult: Why don't we have any real proof of the existence of other civilizations beyond Earth?

This question has its own name: the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence for alien civilizations. I enjoyed how the author, Stephen Webb, goes over all the possible solutions to this paradox that science has been able to imagine. In the end, Webb gives his own solution (which does not match mine).