Here are 100 books that Ten Million Aliens fans have personally recommended if you like
Ten Million Aliens.
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My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
Maria Sibylla Merian was a 17th-century painter and naturalist who traveled with her daughter at the age of 52, in the year 1699, to observe and paint the life-cycle of butterflies and other insects in the Suriname jungles.
She was an extraordinary woman, often referred to as "the Mother of Ecology", and this is a beautiful book telling her story.
As it happens, Maria played an important role in cracking the mystery of metamorphosis, going back to the philosophers and naturalists of ancient Greece.
Before Darwin, before Audubon, before Gilbert White, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist, known for her botanical illustrations, Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Germany just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis - an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less an unaccompanied woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I'm clinical psychology professor at UMass Boston and expert on mentoring relationships. When I was a senior in high school, my dad left behind thirty years of marriage, four kids, and a complicated legal and financial history to start a new life. I couldn't fully comprehend the FBI investigation that forced his departure—any more than I could've fathomed the fact that my classmate Jim Comey would eventually lead that agency. I was also reeling from a discovery that my dad had “shortened” his name from Rosenzweig to Rhodes, a common response to anti-Semitism. It was during that period that I experienced the benefits of mentors and the joy of books about hidden agendas and subtexts.
This book, by Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the story of a bizarre heist that took place at the British Museum of Natural History in 2009.
The thief, Edwin Rist, was a 20-year-old American flute student who broke into the museum to steal hundreds of priceless, exotic bird specimens, many of which were collected by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century.
What first drew me to the book was that I knew Edwin’s dad back when I was in grad school. But what kept me turning the pages was the writing and story. The book explores the world of Victorian-era fly-tying and the obsession that collectors have with rare feathers.
Rist, who was also an avid fly-tier, had planned the heist to obtain feathers for his own collection, which he intended to sell to other collectors. Many of the collectors and fly-tying enthusiasts knew that the feathers probably…
"Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever." -Christian Science Monitor
A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin…
I grew up in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and spent many weekends hiking, camping, and fishing with my parents. Identifying and understanding the plants and animals around me was always interesting, and this love of nature has stayed with me as an adult. I now live near Lake Michigan and am an avid hiker, birdwatcher, and an Indiana Master Naturalist. I take endless inspiration from the natural world in my illustration work and believe that co-existing with, respecting, and preserving the natural world is central not just to the integrity of our planet, but to our very humanity.
This book is a fascinating look at ornithology through the ages, from mythology and legend to the evolution of our scientific understanding of birds today. It includes beautiful illustrations from medieval monks to early naturalists through the 20th century. Even the most casual birdwatcher will learn something fascinating from this book; I read it slowly, digesting a section at a time, and it’s one I’m sure I’ll return to again and again.
For thousands of years people have been fascinated by birds, and today that fascination is still growing. In 2007 bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes, not just in Britain, but throughout the world, and the range of interest runs from the specialist to the beginner.
In The Wisdom of Birds, Birkhead takes the reader on a journey that not only tells us about the extraordinary lives of birds - from conception and egg, through territory and song, to migration and fully fledged breeder - but also shows how, over centuries, we have overcome superstition and untested 'truths' to…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
It has always seemed to me that humans underestimate the abilities—and particularly the conscious lives—of non-human animals. We, humans, are not apart from (and above) but live in a continuum of consciousness with the rest of life. All these books share stories of relationships between human and non-human animals. They make clear that we are connected to and part of all life on Earth. We are all in this together, and we better take good care of our shared natural living world.
Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher, but also an avid diver.
This is an engaging and readable philosophical examination of the mind of a very different kind of creature, an octopus. He grounds his thoughts both in his many diving interactions with octopuses and in what we know of the evolution of life—and mind—on Earth.
'Brilliant' Guardian 'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of…
I believe stories to be our species’ instinctual tool for discovering our best selves. Sometimes those stories are about real people in the past, sometimes they’re completely imagined people in the future — sometimes we even swap out the humans for animals or aliens, or sassy anthropomorphized objects. Whatever the case, for a story to work its wonders, its details must be believable, or we reject its premise. These books help make a story believable, and, if you get the alchemy just right, those details can even help tell the story themselves.
If you’re gonna draw any creatures, humans included, it’s important to understand all the factors that influence their size and their shape. The temperature of their environment, the altitude, the precipitation— even the gravity of the planet itself. The book gives gives an in-depth understanding as to why animals look they way they do, and why some weird structures are not only practical, but crucial for a species to survive.
Why are all the big land animals on Earth mammals? Why are reptiles so small today when they were so huge in the Age of Dinosaurs? Why are rivers, lakes and swamps dominated by large cold-blooded reptiles and not by mammals? Why are there so many birds on Earth and why are they all so small? In this beautifully written and utterly compelling book Lavers scours the fields of biology, physiology, ecology and palaeontology to find answers to these global-scale questions. In the process he reveals a fundamentally new view of life on Earth, one that offers no room for…
Like most children, I adored baby animals from an early age. I bonded deeply with a pet kitten; I campaigned (unsuccessfully but perennially) for a puppy; I delighted in caterpillars. In college, my biology classes introduced me to a profusion of marine larval forms, and a fascination with the true diversity of animal babies fully gripped me. I eventually earned a PhD in the biology of squid babies and, shortly afterward, produced two human babies of my own. I now live with my human family, a cat, and a garden full of grubs, caterpillars, maggots, and innumerable other babies. I read and write about science and nature, especially the intersection of the weird and the adorable.
I laughed so hard and learned so much from this collection of science-based answers to fictional letters from animals.
The author uses an “agony aunt” advice column format to describe bizarre reproductive acts and the evolutionary history behind them. I found the structure incredibly easy to read, and I kept wanting to share snippets with my friends and family.
Compared to reading newspaper advice columns, this book provides all the schadenfreude and none of the guilt since these animals didn’t actually write in for advice and don’t care whether or not you judge them for cannibalizing their mates.
If you have ever wondered why women always bite your head off or why one guy gets all the girls, if you have ever pondered why some men bring you balloons while others leave you their genitals, then Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is the book for you. It explains all this and much more. It discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to seduce your sisters or eat your lover. Quirky and brilliant, it takes as its starting point all creatures great and small worried about their bizarre…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
In Vermont’s Green Mountains, wildlife, forests, ponds, and rivers were a given. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love animals, exploring wild places, and, in my case, drawing. Inspiring eye rolls from my grandfather, when he took us fishing, I was often more interested in the Lilliputian worlds along the shorelines. That led to biology, and the rapid development Vermont experienced in the ‘60s stirred a deep concern for conservation. However, graduate school plans were sidetracked when my lab drawings unexpectedly launched me into art. Along the way, hiking, camping, canoeing, cross-country and track gave me the skills and conditioning to tackle big adventures – and here I am.
I read this book as a young boy, about the time I started deer hunting, and it made an enormous and everlasting impression because it validated my intrinsic empathy for animals, and Seton was the perfect messenger: a wildlife artist and naturalist, but also a hunter and trapper.
I grew up in a hunting culture (Vermont in the ‘60s), so reading such emotional accounts from someone who had hunted and trapped (I never trapped) resonated deeply. 60 years after reading it, I can still tear up thinking of Lobo and Silverspot.
Like Seton, I gave up hunting decades ago (though I acknowledge the ecological necessity of deer hunting where we have eliminated natural predators) and am now a wildlife artist and advocate for animals.
Meet Old Lobo, a gigantic gray wolf whose death-defying predations on sheep and cattle herds are the scourge of farmers and ranchers in the Currumpaw region of northern New Mexico. This great wolf is just one of the animals whose true stories come to life in this engrossing collection of tales by the celebrated naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946). Combining scientific observations of animals in their natural habitats with a romantic vision of nature and the narrative skills of a born storyteller, Seton created an extraordinary collection of tales that gave the animal story new force and believability as a…
I am a former primary teacher, now a gardener and more recently an author of children’s books–maths features heavily in my writing! My love of maths began when I started teaching it and really took off when I explored maths alongside the concept of Growth Mindsets. Through much study I found that the majority of children can access a good level of maths by adopting a Growth Mindset. Maths is a fascinating subject area, full of beauty and patterns, complexity and wonder; hopefully, over the years, I have inspired at least a few children to feel the same.
I love this book because it presents complex data in the most stunning and visually appealing way. It focuses on a subject (animals of the world) that is almost universally popular with children.
The originality in the way in which animal statistics are presented is magnetic—I could dip in and out of this book for hours! Every page is a revelation, every page is beautiful, and every page is packed with information about animals.
How many species are there across the globe? How much do all of the insects in the world collectively weigh? How far can animals travel?
Steve Jenkins answers these questions and many more with numbers, images, innovation, and authoritative science in his latest work of illustrated nonfiction. Jenkins layers his signature cut-paper illustrations alongside computer graphics and a text that is teeming with fresh, unexpected, and accurate zoological information ready for readers to easily devour. The level of scientific research paired with Jenkins’ creativity and accessible infographics is unmatched and sure to wow fans old and new.
Ever since my parents gave me a copy of Dorothy Aldis’ The Secret Place and Other Poems, I have enjoyed a lifelong love of poetry. Now, as a traditionally-published children’s author, I have had numerous books and poems published over the years, including books that began as poems, like Flashlight Night (Astra Young Readers, 2017) and Once Upon Another Time (Beaming Books, 2021). My poems can be found in various anthologies including The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry (N.G. Children’s Books, 2015) and Construction People (Wordsong, 2020) as well as Highlights for Children magazine.
When it comes to animal photography, National Geographic set the standard for excellence – and when one pairs 200 of their best photographs with poetry from some of the country's finest poets, you end up with a beautiful, coffee table book that deserves to be in every house.
From classic poets like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Rudyard Kipling to contemporary writers including Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Prelutsky, and Jane Yolen (and even a few from anthologist and former U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis) this is a book you will want to take time to peruse read, and ponder.
What could be better than cuddling up with your child and this book on your lap and allowing your imaginations to soar with the words and images? Lovingly selected by U.S. Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis and paired with vibrant animal photography, this collection of poems is an exuberant celebration of the animal kingdom and a beautiful introduction to this genre of literature.
Designed for family sharing but targeted to ages 4-8, this dynamic, fresh, yet still classic collection of animal poems is a must-have for the family bookshelf. Featured poets include J. Patrick Lewis, Dorothy Aldis, Emily…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I write nonfiction books for children and teens that focus on current environmental stories. But environmental headlines are usually gloomy and filled with foreboding, so, I prefer to focus on stories that involve individuals identifying an environmental problem and working to develop a solution – hence this list of happy conservation stories. The stories in this list – and many others – are the antidote to the headlines. They are the hope. They show human ingenuity at its most creative, most flexible, and most caring. Happy conservation stories empower kids, teens, and adults to care about the role they play in nature and unite them in action.
Human progress is often bad for wildlife. Our roads, housing developments, and stores often disrupt wildlife migration corridors. We are the problem, but Meeg Pincus writes an uplifting book about how we are also the solution.
Make Way for Animals! is a book about coexisting with wildlife. When we put our heads together there is always a way to meet our needs and the needs of the creatures with whom we share this planet.
Around the world, city highways and country roads have cut through natural spaces. Wild animals are blocked from the resources they need to survive, or must make dangerous crossings across busy roads to get to them. Fortunately, solving this problem has inspired some creative solutions! Take a tour of wildlife crossings across the globe, from grassy badger bridges to underpasses for elephants. Discover how these inventive pathways have saved both animal and human lives and helped preserve ecosystems.
