Natural History

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

A simple walk around the block set journalist Spike Carlsen, best-selling author of A Splintered History of Wood, off to investigate everything he could about everything we take for granted in our normal life — from manhole covers and recycling bins to bike lanes and stoplights....

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it....

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world....

David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message - a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world....

Filled to the brim with far-out facts, this wickedly informative narrative from the author of National Geographic's popular Gory Details blog takes us on a fascinating journey through an astonishing new reality....

Some of the only truly feral cattle in the world wander a long-abandoned island off the northernmost tip of Scotland. A variety of wildlife not seen in many lifetimes has rebounded on the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl.....

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers....

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson takes his ultimate journey...

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life....

In the tradition of Mountains Beyond Mountains and The Orchid Thief, Stronghold is Tucker Malarkey’s eye-opening account of one of the world’s greatest fly fishermen and his crusade to protect the world’s last bastion of wild salmon....

A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate....

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology....

The world is changing at a relentless pace. How can we slow down and act from a place of respect for all living things? The Sacred Balance shows us how....

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods comes a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history....

A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change....

A former endangered species biologist looks at the ongoing sixth mass extinction through the prism of human behavior, personal experience, ecology, evolutionary biology, and contemporary conservation efforts....

In the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Simon Winchester—An entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

A journey into the world of carbon, the most versatile element on the planet, by the New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken.

The great auk is one of the most tragic and documented examples of extinction. A flightless bird that bred primarily on the remote islands of the North Atlantic, the last of its kind were killed in Iceland in 1844.

A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution....

David Haskell's award-winning The Forest Unseen won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world....

This is the third and last of Sir David’s great natural history books based on his TV series and completes his survey of the animal world that began with Life on Earth and continues with Living Planet....

From the swamplands near Bishopville, South Carolina, come reports of a seven-foot-tall, scaly humanoid creature the locals call the “Lizard Man”....