Here are 22 books that The Story of Birds fans have personally recommended if you like
The Story of Birds.
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I was delighted when author Lerone Martin extended my earlier connection between Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. to find— through his own resourcefulness— that King began reciting Hughes’s poetry as early as ten years old when he was a 5th grade student in Miss Lemon’s class in Atlanta. For any Tina Fey | 30 Rock fans, Miss Lemon’s first name was (unbelievably) . . . Elizabeth!
Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King, Jr, portrays a wide-smiling King dancing the Charleston in front of his classmates while he recites a Hughes poem about Black dancers.
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
Having spent three of the last five summers hiking in New Mexico, I picked up a copy of The Jemez Mountains: A Cultural and Natural History while buying supplies at a local roadside stop. I was traveling down Highway 4, on my way to the historic Gisewatowa Pueblo. Like the land itself, the book covers ecology, sustainable forestry, ecology, geography, myth, and history. Next time you find yourself in Sante Fe or Taos, head west to Jemez Springs (after climbing up to 13,167 ft. of Wheeler Peak of course!) and hike Valles Caldera or Cerro Grande. The information in this book ensures you won’t forget it!
The Jemez Mountains are a quintessential New Mexico landscape. For centuries, Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo cultures have mixed and melded here. Many ancient villages are scattered across the mesas and in the canyons below the Valles Caldera-the crater of a giant, slumbering volcano. Rocks and trees of this landscape tell stories of past eruptions, lava flows, droughts, floods, forest fires, and hot springs damming a river. People tell stories of conquistadores, pueblos, and priests, of battles for land and water, of farming and sheep herding, and of raiders, rustlers, forest rangers, and hippies.
Great read. Discusses at length how animal cultures develop and sustain themselves amongst various animal communities. Focuses on Sperm Whales (families), Macaws (beauty), and Chimpanzees (peace). Of particular note for me was Safina’s explanation for how beauty evolved. The world is beautiful—and we perceive its beauty and participate in the development of its beauty—because we need a reason to strive evolutionarily. Why not just die? Beauty. Why struggle to survive? Beauty.
"In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Safina gives us a new way of looking at the natural world that is radically different."―The Washington Post
New York Times bestselling author Carl Safina brings readers close to three non-human cultures―what they do, why they do it, and how life is for them.
A New York Times Notable Books of 2020
Some believe that culture is strictly a human phenomenon. But this book reveals cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a…
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
This was a great book about wolves and a good thriller. Several points of view used to good effect, including the point of view of the alpha female of a wolf pack. It provides a decent introduction to wolves and the challenges of their reintroduction after almost being made extinct in the western US. The plot and the characters carry you along swimmingly. Really excellent.
“Violent, tender, thrilling…He keeps our attention until the final, startling sentence.” The New York Times Book Review
From the Southern Book Prize winning author of Rednecks: a thrilling novel of pursuit, survival, and redemption between two species in the American Southwest
Broke, dispossessed, and angry at the government after losing his family’s New Mexico ranch, Trace Temple is looking for revenge. He’s living out of his truck when a shadowy militia movement hires him to take down the legendary she-wolf of the Dark Canyon pack, One-Eleven. But One-Eleven is no ordinary wolf. Cunning, fiercely protective of her young, and seasoned…
I’ve been mad about dinosaurs and ancient life since I was seven. I have been amazingly lucky to be able to develop a career as a professional palaeontologist and to be able to research and talk about the subject. We were first to show the original colours of dinosaur feathers, and this discovery provides a perfect way to open the discussion about how palaeontologists know what they say they know. In my books, I seek to amaze, amuse and inform. I have written many books, including pop science, textbooks, technical-scientific works, and books for children, and every year brings new discoveries to be transmitted to the world.
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!
The Times Science Book of the Year. A Sunday Times Bestseller.
66 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years.
The world of the dinosaurs has fascinated on book and screen for decades - from early science fiction classics like The Lost World, to Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Tokyo, and the monsters of Jurassic Park. But…
When I first crossed the American West nearly 4 decades ago in my ’67 Chevy, it changed my life. I had never imagined mountains built of contorted rock shoved miles into the sky, faults slashing like fresh scars across the landscape, and starkly beautiful deserts where people seemed an afterthought. After many happy years of researching and exploring the West with my geology students, I knew I wanted to tell the story to a larger audience. The result has been three books: Hard Road West, Rough-Hewn Land, and Surf, Sand, and Stone.
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.
Hailed by The New York Times for writing "with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along," nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet's living and nonliving spheres. With an astrobiologist's imagination, a historian's perspective, and a naturalist's eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth's many iterations in vivid detail-from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath…
I am a college professor and paleoanthropologist–I study human fossils and the evolution of the human lineage. My field site is in the Afar region of Ethiopia, and I regularly spend a month or so wandering across the desert, picking up fossils. I view myself very much as a scientist and believe that the scientific view is the most reliable in some important ways. However, I came to science fairly late in life–I was an undergraduate philosophy and English literature student and didn’t go to graduate school until I was 30. Because of my liberal arts background, I have always felt it was important to bridge the science-humanities divide.
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 Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
When I first crossed the American West nearly 4 decades ago in my ’67 Chevy, it changed my life. I had never imagined mountains built of contorted rock shoved miles into the sky, faults slashing like fresh scars across the landscape, and starkly beautiful deserts where people seemed an afterthought. After many happy years of researching and exploring the West with my geology students, I knew I wanted to tell the story to a larger audience. The result has been three books: Hard Road West, Rough-Hewn Land, and Surf, Sand, and Stone.
The title is a bit misleading. This book is more of a history of thinking and discovery about seismology—the study of earthquakes—with a focus on the San Andreas fault. What I like best is how Dvorak weaves the personal stories of scientists into the geologic story. Too often in textbooks and general-audience books, scientists don’t exist as human beings with foibles, preconceptions, and occasional bursts of insight. I wish that other books presented the human side of science as effectively as Dvorak.
The sheer scope of this book is mind-boggling, but it's very readable. Bryson has the gift of explaining complex theories and discoveries to the average reader in a way that shares his own scientific wonder without ever condescending. The book is brilliantly written, and every page is fascinating. I'd suggest reading it slowly, the better to absorb everything. I'd also recommend At Home: A Short History of Private Life by the same author.
The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, A Short History of Nearly Everything is the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century and has sold over 2 million copies.
'Possibly the best scientific primer ever published.' Economist 'Truly impressive...It's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science.' Guardian 'A travelogue of science, with a witty, engaging, and well-informed guide' The Times
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to…
I didn’t know anything at all about meteorites (or, really, space in general) until I took a cosmochemistry class during my first semester of a PhD program in geology. As soon as I learned that meteorites captured information about the start of the Solar System – the material we started with, hints about how planets evolve, and how meteorites changed the course of Earth – I was hooked. At the end of that class in 2007, I switched the main topic of my PhD research to studying meteorites and what they can tell us about the past, and I have been doing it ever since.
Like many folks, I am fascinated with the “where we came from” question. And for me, this is the quintessential book to dive into this topic from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Correct or not, I fancy myself someone that knows a decent amount about evolution and the human body, but I was captivated by the parts of the human body that have endured, for good or for bad, the long journey of us crawling out of the ocean and eventually into the office cubicle.
This book isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some others I generally like, but it really is a great book, and I had a hard time putting it down.
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).
By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible…
