Books like Fourteen Wolves — picked by fans

This is perhaps the best-known and most obvious choice illustrating Nature’s healing powers. Mary, an orphaned girl, moves in with an estranged, reclusive uncle on his isolated English estate. Lonely and bereaved, Mary spends her days exploring both the house and extensive gardens, when one day she discovers a secret garden, locked away behind a wall.

This garden, tucked away and neglected for many years, is the key to Mary’s healing. Through quiet deliberation, she begins to bring the garden back to life and, in turn, finds new life in herself. The healing of the uncle is perhaps the most mystical scene in the book for me, brought about by a quiet moment beside a trickling stream, where he has an epiphany of heart healing. I find the book’s mixture of nature and mystery beguiling.

I first became aware of this beautiful book when I shared a stage with the illustrator at a literary event. I was captivated by her cover illustration which is like a ‘Where’s Wally’ tree containing 70 hidden animals. Once I got my copy home (and after I found most of the animals) I flipped to explanations of the superpowers of trees. These are guaranteed to shift your youngsters’ perspectives. Nonfiction stories invite them to imagine themselves in the field with well-known conservationists and activists who have dedicated themselves to saving trees and their inhabitants. I love that so many of these heroes are women which, hopefully, will encourage more girls to embrace science.

Although I am originally from the UK, I now live in Australia—home to amazing creatures, many of whom make homes in hollows. This book rams home the importance of protecting habitat because it doesn’t just highlight species like possums, owls, parrots, quolls, snakes, and goannas, but it integrates them with their environment. A Hollow is a Home is designed in a magazine-like format, with illustrations and photos, which I have found connects really well with reluctant readers. The bite-size sections are useful for school projects and, if you don’t live in Australia, this book is a fantastic way to learn about global biodiversity!

Learning about nature and loving it through the narrative is the first step toward stewardship. If we want to grow young conservationists, the next step is translating that love into action. This book encourages kids (from five up) to put down their gadgets, get outside and discover the natural world in their own backyard. Each page includes 10 things to find in leaf litter with clever illustrations and hidden flaps that figuratively and emotionally open up a whole new minuscule world. Just like the experiments in my own books, Leaf Litter engages kinetic learners and harnesses the power of 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! 

The author Nate Blakeslee comes to this story about the famous Yellowstone wolf O-Six as a journalist and tells this true story with a keen eye for the myriad perspectives on modern wolf conservation. Whether or not you are familiar with the political debate of restoring wolves to the American West or the notions of Old West versus New West, you will find this story intriguing and informative.

This book took hold of my heart and has yet to let go. I was immediately sucked in with the engaging narrative, which was thoughtfully blended with facts to highlight the current crisis surrounding the population of Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest.

I felt like I was getting to know each of the featured orcas personally, which made me care about their struggles even more. This book is perfect for orca lovers and anyone interested in marine science.

Reflecting on the first decade with wolves back in Yellowstone National Park, this book highlights milestones in the reintroduction effort, takes you out in the field with a wildlife biologist, and shares compelling stories of individual Yellowstone wolves and their packs. With more than 25 years spent overseeing wolves and elk in the park, Doug Smith is a unique authority on wolves and wolf behavior. Around the time our wolf project was coming to an end in the mid-’90s, those first wolves were released into central Idaho and Yellowstone. When we read this book some ten years later, we heard the echoes of our own experience in the behavior and characteristics of the wolves in Yellowstone.

This is one of my favourite books. It is a palimpsest—a serious document about humanity’s effects on the natural world overlaid with Adams’s hilariously absurdist worldview. This book is different from most other popular science books in that it sort of isn’t one; it’s more of a travel book, with Adams acting as the uninformed everyman repeatedly confronted with the realities of an unfolding ecological tragedy and interpreting them as only he could.

Extinction is not an inherently amusing subject, and this book is a sobering account of how much biological diversity we have already lost, yet at the same time, it is painfully funny. For me, Adams’s recounting of his conversation with an Australian snake venom expert is worth the price of admission on its own.

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.