Here are 35 books that Vanishing Treasures fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?
This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover.
Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
I discovered it and its author by listening to David Oakes’ nature podcast Trees A Crowd, which I devoured religiously every day while living in Alaska during the second year of the pandemic. I only intended it as research, but this book changed the composition of my soul.
It’s a fascinating and genuinely captivating exploration of one of the most evolved lifeforms on Earth. Their survival is essential to our own, and if we won’t learn from them, we’ll fall beside them. But more likely, they’ll outlast us!
"A paradigm-smashing chronicle of joyous entanglement that will make you acknowledge your own entanglement in the ancient and ever-new web of being."--Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben…
When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
Full disclosure: I still haven’t seen the National Geographic special, but I’ll go down arguing the book is better (much as I do love David Attenborough films). This book is something of a tome, but it’s so engagingly written that it had me up well past my bedtime night after night.
I’ve always been intrigued by our oceans – one of my first great childhood heroes was Jacques Cousteau – but the true charm of this book is its boundless hope. It would be easy to fall into despair and catastrophization writing a book that deals so intimately with climate change, but instead, there is example after example of people who live as full participants in the cycle of life, not observers of it, whose footsteps beat a path to a world where we all flourish together.
Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the earth's future.
Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder, and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet—the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate, and creates the air we breathe. This book showcase the oceans' remarkable resilience: they can, and in some cases have, recovered the fastest, if we only give…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
As an inveterate and wildly ignorant amateur birdwatcher, I couldn’t resist giving this book a try.
I found it at my local library. The very title seemed to mirror much of my own poetry, an unexpected synchronicity that called my name, and its contents exceeded expectations.
This book is deeply personal without being self-involved. Although the author possesses a depth of knowledge about birds I will never approach, his humor and self-deprecation make the book as accessible as it is mind-blowing. Like a poet, Knapp offers us vignettes whose tiny glimpses manage to mirror the whole universe.
Who hasn’t looked at a raven riding columns of air and ached for that perfect freedom of flight? Though we’ll never know the skies as they do, we can still learn so much from our feathered neighbors – about the world, about ourselves, and about what sort of magic is real.
In the Crosswinds takes readers on a captivating and humorous journey from the woods of western New York to the jungles of Ecuador and the wetlands of Africa, exploring the complexities of land, movement, identity, and belonging. Join ecologist and avid birder Eli J. Knapp on a quest to rediscover how to connect with the natural world. In the face of restlessness and rootlessness, we look to the birds of the world-creatures that are at once migratory and deeply connected to place-for insight and understanding. A rollicking blend of avian science and crackling narrative, In the Crosswinds confronts the all-too-human…
Telescopes, microscopes, computer modeling–these exist because some things are easier to study when you change their shape. That’s how we learned about planets, germs, and the economy. Enlarging, shrinking, and filling in details lets us examine and understand. I think literature can do the same thing with ideas. Asking ‘what if?’ lets us probe things we can’t with our gadgets. Concepts. Hypotheticals. A story that pulls a big idea like taffy? That is a treat. I’ve got five in this dish.
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.
A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never…
I’ve travelled to the Pantanal and along the Amazon both ways from Brazil and Colombia while I was teaching English in Brazil and will never forget the destruction of the Amazon. A visit to the gaping hole of Serra Pelada, a gold mine, had a lasting effect on me as did the forest fires and scorched earth, devoid of any bird or animal apart from the skinny cattle grazing amongst the blackened trees, stretching for miles. A run-in with a hyacinth macaw egg thief, who was smuggling the beautiful birds into Europe, spurred my interest in writing a children’s series which touches on conservation, endangered species, and illegal wildlife trafficking.
This beautifully illustrated picture book is dedicated to 15 endangered animals out of the 41,000 species on the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List and explains why they’re in danger and what we can do. It features the most hunted and trafficked creature on the planet, the pangolin whose scales are made of keratin – the same as our nails – but are boiled to make pointless ‘medicines’ with zero effectiveness. Other creatures are the long-nosed crocodile, the peacock tarantula, and the snow leopard. With 60 percent of species being wiped out since the 1970s, perhaps it’s time for radical thinking. Should animals like tigers and cheetahs start charging companies for their images, spots, and stripes to raise money to protect what remains of their environments?
An interactive look at endangered animals imploring readers to discover fifteen species facing extinction.
Inspired and endorsed by the "Red List" database of animals in peril maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) this brightly illustrated book introduces species from six different habitats on six continents. Blending approachable text, secondary facts and lush art, Red Alert! offers full portraits of animals such as the Chinese giant salamander, the snow leopard, the blue whale, and the giant panda, and provides young activists additional resources for how they can help save these beautiful creatures.
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I am a scientist and biologist. Learning about evolution changed my life and put me on a path to studying it as a career. As a child, I was a voracious reader, and as an undergraduate, I read every popular science book on biology I could get my hands on. In retrospect, those books were almost as important to my education as anything I learned in a lab or lecture theatre. When writing for a general audience, I try to convey the same sense of wonder and enthusiasm for science that drives me to this day.
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.
'Descriptive writing of a high order... this is an extremely intelligent book' The Times
Join Douglas Adams, bestselling and beloved author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine on an adventure in search of the world's most endangered and exotic creatures.
In this book, Adams' self-proclaimed favourite of his own works, the pair encounter animals in imminent peril: the giant Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the lovable kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphins of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius island in the Indian Ocean and the alien-like aye-aye of…
The truth? I’m scared of bears! But learning about them has helped me become a less fearful hiker. Turns out, bears spread seeds and salmon nutrients in their droppings. They also help maintain populations of prey species like deer. I don’t want those jobs. So, thank you, bears! The more kids learn about wildlife, the more comfortable they’ll be outdoors. And the better planet citizens they’ll become! Beyond bears, I’ve authored 200+ children’s books, writing everything from Greek Mythology take-offs (Goddess Girls middle grade series of 30 books) to math (Zero the Hero picture book) to a fractured fairy tale about how to write a story (Little Red Writing)!
Gail Gibbons is a well-known name in nonfiction. Librarians and teachers often look to her many books for basic info about animals, plants, our Earth, and more.
Although this isn’t a book with my favorite thing—humor—young readers will likely gobble up the simply related facts about pandas’ characteristics, eating habits, and habitat. In my experience, kids are pretty excited about pandas because these bamboo-eating bears are sooo cute!
Giant pandas: they are indigenous to China and are adored the world over. But they are more than a bundle of fluff and squeaks. Giant pandas are energetic climbers and swimmers. In one year, they may eat around 10,000 pounds of bamboo. And people in China have worked together to create protected areas for giant pandas to live peacefully.
Discover a detailed introduction to giant pandas - including baby panda development - in this beautifully illustrated nonfiction picture book. Gail Gibbons adds another book to her widespread collection of nonfiction for young readers of all levels, and introduces the topic…
I am a scientist and biologist. Learning about evolution changed my life and put me on a path to studying it as a career. As a child, I was a voracious reader, and as an undergraduate, I read every popular science book on biology I could get my hands on. In retrospect, those books were almost as important to my education as anything I learned in a lab or lecture theatre. When writing for a general audience, I try to convey the same sense of wonder and enthusiasm for science that drives me to this day.
A tour-de-force of science writing and arguably the best book about ecology and evolution ever written. Quammen’s book covers similar ground to Last Chance to See conceptually, and sometimes literally as several of the same locales are visited. But the similarities end there. As an undergraduate, it opened my eyes to the importance of ecological research and gave me a new appreciation for the contributions to science of the much-maligned Alfred Russell Wallace.
This book is unique in that, despite my enthusiasm for it, I have seldom found the need to re-read it because so much of the content—tenrec reproduction, the circumstances of the discovery that chuckwalla meat is more disagreeable than starvation, how invasive snakes overran Guam—has lived rent-free in my head for almost 30 years.
“Compulsively readable—a masterpiece, maybe the masterpiece of science journalism.” —Bill McKibben, Audubon
A brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope and far-reaching in its message, The Song of the Dodo is a crucial book in precarious times. Through personal observation, scientific theory, and history, David Quammen examines the mysteries of evolution and extinction and radically alters our understanding of the natural world and our place within it.
In this landmark of science writing, we learn how the isolation of islands makes them natural laboratories of evolutionary extravagance, as seen in the dragons of Komodo, the elephant birds of Madagascar, the…
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 a lover of wildlife and have written several nonfiction picture books on the topic, includingWinged Wonders: Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery, Cougar Crossing: How Hollywood’s Celebrity Cougar Built a Bridge for City Wildlife, and Ocean Soup: a Recipe for You, Me, and A Cleaner Sea. I’m also a humane educator, which inspires the focus of all my nonfiction picture books on “solutionaries” helping people, animals, and the planet. At heart, my books—which have won Golden Kite Nonfiction and Eureka! Nonfiction Honors and more—aim to inspire compassion, inclusivity, and positive 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!
Two renowned children’s book creators teamed up to make this stirring picture book that tells the story of how, over a century, wolves were persecuted in the United States and nearly became extinct. Gradually reintroduced, they are thriving again in the West, much to the benefit of the ecosystem. This book will teach a new generation to appreciate the grace, dignity, and value of wolves as it promotes awareness of the environment’s delicate balance. Paired with gorgeous paintings by landscape artist Wendell Minor, Jean Craighead George’s engaging text will inspire people of all ages to care about the protection of…
