69 Books Like Words of the Lagoon

Dr. John E.N. Veron, called Charlie by everyone who knows him, is an Australian coral reef scientist. He is also the person who single-handedly sorted out the names of the corals in the 1980s by emphasizing the study of corals in their natural habitats on reefs. Prior taxonomy, based on dried, cleaned bits of skeletons, had resulted in much confusion given the considerable plasticity of the form of corals growing in different reef habitats. This book is Charlie’s account of his life as a marine scientist, from his earliest exploring of rocky shores near Sydney to his numerous expeditions to reefs around the world over the course of his career. 

His love of the natural world, his curiosity and willingness to take risks, and his dogged determination in solving scientific puzzles stand out. So too do his humor, his down-to-earth Australian-ness, and his loving respect for corals, for reefs, and… show more.

Dr. C. Drew Harvell is an American marine biologist who has worked extensively on the diseases of corals and other marine organisms. She starts this book with an urgent e-mail in December 2013 – sea stars were dying in Monterey, California, and Drew dropped everything to race off to find out what she could.  That is not an exaggeration. In recent years, her life has been like that. While the book deals with serious diseases having huge consequences for various marine organisms, it also reveals the way in which marine biologists can be immersed in their work yet love every minute and find ways to marvel at the mystery that is life on this planet. 

An outstanding teacher as well as researcher, Drew’s ability to captivate, then skillfully mentor students, comes through loud and clear. She captivates us too, making the subject of marine diseases (of organisms most of us… show more.

Dr. Callum Roberts is a British marine biologist who has worked primarily in marine conservation. Like many British coral reef scientists, he got his start in the Red Sea rather than the Caribbean or the Pacific. The cultures of the middle east can make reef research there just a little bit different than elsewhere. This book is his memoir of a wonderful life exploring coral reefs that began, surprisingly, in the wilds of Scotland and took shape once he began his undergraduate studies in 1980. By then our impacts on coral reefs were becoming quite stark and this book does not shrink from the bad news. But it also captures his sheer joy in exploring coral reefs, his good humor and creativity as he grows from young student to research leader, and his concern to do what he can to keep coral reefs with us.

Not a book written by a coral reef biologist, this is a book by a non-scientist about how coral reef scientists cope with the knowledge that our degradation of reef ecosystems around the world is close to terminal. Our impacts on reefs, through climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, pollution, and many other forms of local disrespect have been going on ever since reef research really took off in the early 1960s, following the invention of SCUBA by Jacques Cousteau. Irus Braverman learned to dive in 1989 when she lived in Israel; the first reefs she saw were in the Red Sea. She loved diving, but it was only much later, 2015, when she began to wonder about what was happening to reefs, and how that might affect the scientists who have devoted their lives to exploring these captivating places. 

A series of interviews and some travel to reefs provided the… show more.

My first birding trip to the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona caught my fancy. Then I read this book, in which Dr. Nabhan recounts lively details of his encounters with Indigenous communities at home in the Sonoran Desert and learns how they engage with the desert plants and animals in their lives.

Nabhan is an astute observer, an intensely sympathetic storyteller, and a highly knowledgeable student of local natural history. In this book, he visits Tohono O’odham (Papago) friends as they harvest saguaro fruits to make an intoxicating brew to “bring on the rain.” He tells us about fiery wild chilis and bitter wild squashes that Coyote “shat upon.” End notes ground his vivid accounts in the academic literature.

I embarked on my ethnobiological career as a graduate student and shortly learned I was not alone. My fellow student north of the border, Nancy Turner, was likewise passionately engaged with ethnobotany for her thesis. Turner was trained as a botanist but then devoted her decades-long academic career to documenting how her Indigenous neighbors and friends in British Columbia recognize, name, cultivate, and respect the botanical riches of their millennial homeland.

A key principle clearly articulated by her Indigenous teachers is that plants are our kin and that “everything is one,” so we must all live together in a harmonious balance. People must “look after” the land and support its many “persons.” This Indigenous wisdom is never abstract, but in Turner’s telling, it is always exemplified by real people, specific plants, and particular places.

I have shelves full of bird guides to all sorts of places. However, this guide is unique. It is a “bird guide” to the exotic avifauna of highland Papua New Guinea as understood by and in the words of a native.

It honors a decades-long collaboration between the ethnobiologist Bulmer and his Kalam colleague and teacher, Saem Majnep. This began when Bulmer arrived to document the ethnozoological knowledge and ecological practices of this isolated Papuan community. Saem Majnep, then a young boy, eagerly assisted.

The book is a conversation: Saem Majnep describes all the birds of his local habitat, writing in his native language. Bulmer then provides an academic perspective on Saem Majnep’s ethno-ornithology. Here, we have the benefit of a binocular vision of the avian worlds of this little-known corner of our planet.

I first encountered Nelson’s arctic stories in his account of the sea-ice survival techniques he learned as an apprentice to Inuit whalers of Wainwright, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean shore. I followed his adventures south to the sub-arctic muskeg home of the Koyukon, an Athabaskan people at home on the Koyukon River, a northern tributary of the great Yukon.

His book, Make Prayers to the Raven, is a deep dive into the daily lives and worldview of the Koyukon. Their ancestors survived in the harsh climate of the Arctic Circle for 10,000 years by respecting the power of their animal and plant neighbors, their spiritual kin. Nelson's sensitive storytelling makes the Koyukon voices loud and clear.

Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.

That’s right: that Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of the Species. Seventeen years before that ground-shaking book, he wrote what marine scientists tell me remains the definitive work on the structure of coral reefs. Forget the famous Punch caricature of the gray-haired man trailing a long beard and a chimpanzee and think of the youthful naturalist daring crashing waves to vault to the edge of a South Pacific fringe reef. In places his accounts read like True Adventures for Boys.