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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLife: An Unauthorised Biography: A Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth
Richard Fortey · 416 pages
Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment befo
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey · 339 pages
Investigates colossal ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers who seek them out. For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100 feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dismissed these stories; waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a number of ships have vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized s
A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth
Samantha Weinberg · 240 pages
"Just before Christmas 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the young curator of a small South African museum, spotted a strange-looking fish on a trawler's deck. It was five feet long, with steel-blue scales, luminescent eyes, and remarkable limb-like fins - unlike those of any fish she had ever seen. Determined to preserve her unusual find, she searched for days for a way to save it, but ended up w
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond · 592 pages
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
Jonathan Balcombe · 296 pages
"The author of Second Nature challenges popular misconceptions to explore the complex lives of the planet's diverse fish species, drawing on the latest understandings in animal behavior and biology to reveal their self-awareness, elaborate courtship rituals and cooperative intelligence,"--NoveList.
Poseidon's Steed: The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality
Helen Scales · 274 pages
A fascinating journey with the sea creature that has captured human imagination for thousands of years Poseidon's Steed trails the seahorse through secluded waters across the globe in a kaleidoscopic history that mirrors man's centuries-old fascination with the animal, sweeping from the reefs of Indonesia, through the back streets of Hong Kong, and back in time to ancient Greece and Rome. Over tim
The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World's Most Elusive Sea Creature
Richard Ellis · 322 pages
"An authoritative look at the biology and mythology of the world's most elusive sea creature".--Jacket.
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Stephen Jay Gould · 350 pages
At the Water's Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea
Carl Zimmer · 290 pages
At the Water's Edge takes you to the icy peaks of Greenland, the ancient shores of the Tethys Sea, and the warm waters of the Bahamas to visit with dolphins as it surveys how we have come to understand two special cases of macroevolution. In the first, around 360 million years ago, the descendants of one lineage of fish came ashore and rushed over the continents, eventually evolving into everythin
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
A Short History of Nearly Everything by American author Bill Bryson is a popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more so to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from
Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
Steve Olson · 300 pages
For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, sightseers, and nearby residents listened anxiously to rumblings in Mount St. Helens, part of the chain of western volcanoes fueled by the 700-mile-long Cascadia fault. Still, no one was prepared when an immense eruption took the top off of the mountain and laid waste to hundreds of square miles of verdant forests in southwestern Washington State.
Assembling California
John McPhee · 303 pages
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to t
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe · 312 pages
Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a
Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America
Jerry Thompson · 337 pages
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom
Walter Alvarez · 185 pages
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet or asteroid larger than Mt. Everest slammed into the Earth, causing an explosion equivalent to the detonation of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Vaporized impactor and debris from the impact site were blasted out through the atmosphere, falling back to Earth all around the globe. Terrible environmental disasters ensued, including a giant tsunami, continent-s
The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth
Alan Cutler · 228 pages
The tale of a seventeenth-century scientist-turned-priest who forever changed our understanding of the Earth and created a new field of science. It was an ancient puzzle: How did the fossils of seashells find their way far inland, sometimes high up into the mountains? Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing--
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez · 464 pages
This is an account of the author's exploration of the Western Arctic region, between Bering Strait and Davis Strait. It is an account both of the natural history of the Arctic, and equally of how the Arctic grips the human spirit and imagination.\ The chapters are rich in their descriptions of the Arctic –of the physical land itself, the native peoples that the author met, the Arctic animals and
The Magic School Bus Gets Eaten: A Book About Food Chains: A Book About Food Chains
Patricia Relf, Joanna Cole, Bruce Degen · 32 pages
A class trip to the beach becomes an underwater lesson about food chains when Arnold and Keesha are challenged to discover what a tuna fish sandwich and some smelly green pond scum have in common.