64 Books Like The Blue Machine

The multitudes of this book are not the ones envisioned by Walt Whitman. Rather, they are bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other microbes that each of us carries. The human body is more microbial than human, with bacteria alone outnumbering human cells by almost 10 times.

As Yong puts it, “We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.” Not just the lives of animals, but of plants too, as this book makes clear.

With advanced degrees in biochemistry and an award-winning stint as a writer at The Atlantic, Yong has the chops to get the science right and the skills of a journalist to weave the science and sketches of scientists together into compelling stories. The book’s subtitle is a nod to Darwin (“There is grandeur in this view of life”) and gets at the big-picture perspective gained by looking at… show more.

As a microbial ecologist, I didn’t need to be convinced that microbes make all life on Earth possible. I knew that Falkowski, a preeminent biological oceanographer, would be a trustworthy guide in the microbial world. What makes this book so much fun to read is how Falkowski mixes science with snippets of history, both his own and of early scientists.  

Yet, the science is the main story here and is fascinating. Microbes, specifically cyanobacteria, are the engines that first put oxygen in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, which set the stage for the evolution of more complicated lifeforms, including, eventually, Homo sapiens.  Microbes are also the ancestral source of what Falkowski calls nanomachines, which continue to power all organisms today. Falkowski convincingly argues that microbes are what make life on Earth possible. 

While there has been some controversy about the science in Simard’s book, there’s no doubt that it’s a great read that juxtaposes Simard’s personal life with her scientific life.

I was drawn to her personal story, which takes place in both government and academic spheres. I cried with her when her brother passed away, and I was proud with her when her daughter said she might want to study forestry at university.

The mix of science and memoir works well in this book, showing how the two are inextricably entwined. I was impressed by how hard Simard worked to keep her family together, particularly when she was a professor at UBC in Vancouver, and they were living in Nelson.  

I almost put this book down when Marra started to describe what happened one early morning off the coast of Iceland, where he was trying to measure photosynthesis by marine microbes. A day earlier, he had filled bottles with seawater spiked with a radioactive form of carbon, carbon-14, and thrown the bottles overboard to incubate in the ocean. Now he had to retrieve them. As Marra recounted how the ship rolled in huge waves whipped up by 55-knot winds, my stomach churned as I remembered similar experiences on other vessels, in other seas.

Luckily for me and perhaps other seasick-prone readers, Hot Carbon returns to land for several chapters to sketch out the discovery of carbon-14 and its use in C14-dating historical artifacts such as the Shroud of Turin and in unraveling the mechanism of photosynthesis.

In the last part of the book, Marra returns to the ocean and outlines… show more.

As a climate activist and lover of glaciers and glaciation, I took a special interest in David Archer’s book, The Long Thaw. Archer takes us in and out of ice ages, explaining with surprisingly understandable prose just how ice ages are formed, their predictable cycles, why they’re important, and how with current climate change trends and impacts, we just may have missed the onramp to the next one. That could put us into a Hothouse Earth scenario not seen since the times of the dinosaurs. Archer masterfully brings science to the layperson. If we think that the year 2100 is a marker in the sand for climate change, think again. Archer reveals that the chilling (or heating) reality of climate change just might be forever. 

Why, and how, did a man from Togo in West Africa go to Greenland? And what did he think when he arrived there?

Wouldn’t you like to know what circumstances drive people from one end of the earth to the other? This book has surprising answers, and tells you facts about both Togo and Greenland which you never knew! 

If you want to understand ice cores, this is your book. As a climate scientist, Alley taught me so much with this expert, clear-eyed but humble overview of ice core collection and analysis. I loved reading about GISP2, one of two Greenland ice cores that brought up rock and soil from below the ice.

I found this book powerful because the author was there when drillers extracted the core–he lived ice coring, and that made this a special read.

For me, this book was a time machine. Full of photographs and easy-to-follow stories, it took me back to the 1960s, under the ice, and inside Camp Century. I felt like a soldier bunking in the camp, an engineer starting up the reactor, and relived the frustration and loneliness of young men living in a dark, cold place for months on end.

Sure, they had unlimited steak and four meals a day in the mess hall, but they lived without family and fresh food. What a life on and off the ice!

As a geologist who studies snow and ice as well as rocks, I thought this book was a winner. Imagine being shipped off to east Greenland during World War 2 and living with a dozen men in a tiny station at the ice sheet's edge. Almost mundane until a plane goes down on the ice – and then all bets are off. It’s rescue time.

I marveled at the stories Hansen told–intrigued by his ski adventures when he had spare time and then daring trips across the ice sheet in some of the first over-snow vehicles. I felt like I was reading one man’s journal–his thoughts about ice, cold, and isolation in a stunningly beautiful place.

My copy of Génsbøl’s nature guide is well-thumbed. I often used it to find out what I was eating. That’s right; it is a nature guide, packed with fabulous illustrations–better than photographs–that allow for easy identification of the flora and fauna of Greenland, but I also used it to identify what I was eating when invited to an Inuit hunter’s kaffemik–a celebration of culture, tradition, and food wrapped up in a birthday or child’s confirmation party. The guide is an indispensable companion for anyone travelling to the Arctic, and Greenland in particular. But it is equally enjoyable, perhaps even more so, when sitting in a favourite armchair with a favourite beverage in familiar surroundings, dreaming of the far north.