🧲 Books like this
The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History
William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLate Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis · 467 pages
The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot
William Rosen · 304 pages
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
Cynthia Barnett · 355 pages
Weaving together science with the human human story of our ambition to control rain, Barnett tells the story of rain -- elemental, mysterious, precious, and destructive.
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
John Robert McNeill · 416 pages
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan · 450 pages
What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as
After The Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 B.C.
Steven Mithen · 664 pages
"After the Ice is the story of a momentous period: one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could bring anything from the spread of lush woodland to apocalyptic floods - and one that contains the origins of civilisation itself. For, by its close, dogs, sheep and cattle had been domesticated; rice, wheat and cotton were being harvested; and permanent villages and towns had sprung up
The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Brian M. Fagan · 304 pages
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization
Thomas Homer-Dixon · 429 pages
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
Daniel Yergin · 816 pages
In this gripping account of the quest for the energy that our world needs, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Prize. A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change. It is a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond · 494 pages
An epic detective story that offers a gripping expose on why the world is so unequal. Professor Jared Diamond traveled the globe for over 30 years trying to answer this question.
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
Bjorn Lomborg · 540 pages
The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
Ramez Naam · 364 pages
This book is a powerful argument for the existence of global warming, a detail-oriented description of it's causes and a data-driven prescription to solve it.
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 279 pages
The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling more than four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world.Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with Superfreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.SuperFreakonomics challenges the way
Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air
David J.C. MacKay · 384 pages
Provides an overview of the sustainable energy crisis that is threatening the world's natural resources, explaining how energy consumption is estimated and how those numbers have been skewed by various factors and discussing alternate forms of energy that can and should be used.
Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet
Tim Flannery · 316 pages
"Here on Earth, which draws its points of departure from Darwin and Wallace, Lovelock and Dawkins, is an extraordinary exploration of evolution and sustainability. Our success as a species has had disastrous effects on many of the Earth’s ecosystems and could lead to our downfall. But equally, Flannery argues, we are now equipped as never before to explore our true relationship with the pla
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel · 192 pages
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailo
Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World
Bill Nye · 352 pages
How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint Of Everything
Mike Berners-Lee · 304 pages
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert · 336 pages
From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap
Lies, Damned Lies, and Science: How to Sort through the Noise Around Global Warming, the Latest Health Claims, and Other Scientific Controversies
Sherry Seethaler · 198 pages
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
Annalee Newitz · 305 pages
"In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. 'Scatter, Adapt, and Remember' explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow, from simulating tsunamis or studying central Turkey's ancient under