Books like The Islander

I love nature, both on land (backcountry hiking) and underwater (scuba diving and underwater photography). Ed Yong's book about how animals sense or perceive the world had been widely praised, and once I started reading it upon the recommendation of my son, I could hardly put it down. Absolutely superb writing by this science journalist, and seemingly every page holds a new, exciting insight. I recommended the book to my daughter, and now she is devouring it as well. Yong explores how animals perceive the world through their set of senses, some of which we humans share such as sight or hearing, but share with often vastly different degrees of ability to perceive. For instance, we cannot see infrared and cannot hear ultrasound. But nonhuman animals also have senses that we humans appear to lack entirely (e.g., echolocation), and how scientists invent clever ways of accessing and exploring these non-human… show more.

Roald Amudsen, Robert F. Scott, and Ernest Shackleton are perhaps the most well-known names of Antarctic explorers, with expedition leader Amundsen and four companions being the very first humans to reach the South Pole (in December 1911). Scott and his companions reached the South Pole a month later (January 1912) but they all perished on the return trip to their base on the Antarctic shelf. Shackleton never ever made it onto the continent, his ship, the Endurance, having been caught in the ice before even reaching the Antarctic landmass (in 1915). But far less well-known are the stories of their companions, including the sailors who handled and sailed the ships, managed the landings on Antartica, established the main bases where the ice met land, and built and stocked the supply depots on the frozen continent en route to the pole. One of them was Tom Crean who, incredibly, went on… show more.