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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorKrakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
Simon Winchester · 432 pages
Annals of the Former World
John McPhee · 695 pages
"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." "Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a many-layered tale, and the re
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--
Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America
Jerry Thompson · 337 pages
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Stephen Jay Gould · 350 pages
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
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
Robert M. Hazen · 306 pages
In this radical new approach to Earth's biography, senior Carnegie Institution researcher and national bestselling author Robert M. Hazen reveals how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere--of rocks and living matter--has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
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.
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 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
When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time
Michael J. Benton · 336 pages
Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World
Charles Darwin · 576 pages
Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature
Brian Switek · 320 pages
This book is about the epic quest for missing links and other myths about evolution. The author proposes that the strides made in paleontology have helped with understanding evolution, and discusses how fossils, prominent scientists, technology, and other factors have each influenced the theory's development.
The Magic School Bus Blows Its Top: A Book About Volcanoes
Joanna Cole, Gail Herman · 32 pages
Ms. Frizzle's class is having a hard time putting together a giant globe of the world.
The Sea Around Us
Rachel Carson · 237 pages
Published in 1951, The Sea Around Us is one of the most remarkably successful books ever written about the natural world. Rachel Carson's rare ability to combine scientific insight with moving, poetic prose catapulted her book to first place on The New York Times best-seller list, where it enjoyed wide attention for thirty-one consecutive weeks. It remained on the list for more than a year and a h
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
Lisa Randall · 422 pages
"Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of da
The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet
Neil deGrasse Tyson · 208 pages
An exploration of the controversy surrounding Pluto and its planet status from a renowned astrophysicist at the heart of the controversy.
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Kathryn Bowers · 320 pages
In the tradition of Temple Grandin, Oliver Sacks, and Neil Shubin, cardiologist and psychiatrist Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Bowers look at the remarkable correspondences between the way human beings and animals live, die, get sick, and heal in their natural settings.
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
Susan Blackmore, Rebecca Goldstein, James J. O'Donnell, Paul J. Steinhardt, Shing-Tung Yau, Frank Wilczek, Thomas Metzinger, Sean Carroll, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Gottschall, David G. Myers, Matt Ridley, Armand Marie Leroi, Gerd Gigerenzer, Martin J. Rees, Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran, Carlo Rovelli · 432 pages
Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most deep, surprising, and brilliant explanations of how the world works, with contributions by Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, Steven Pinker, and more”— Provided by publisher
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