17 books
Andrew H. Knoll
I can’t read much deep-time stuff before it puts me to sleep. I read this. Knoll is a Harvard paleontologist who built his career on the Precambrian, the three billion years of microbial life that came before anything you can…
David B. Williams
David Williams spent nine years in Moab, working as a ranger at Arches and teaching for the Canyonlands Field Institute, and this is the field guide that came out of it, illustrated in line drawings by Gloria Brown. It covers…
John McPhee
McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is his four books on the subject plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He…
John McPhee
McPhee’s California book, and the fourth of the Annals volumes. He drove I-80 across the state with Eldridge Moores, a Davis geologist who read ancient seafloor for a living, and the story they told is that California isn’t one place.…
Craig Childs
Craig Childs went looking for the first people in the Americas by walking the ground they walked, back when the map looked nothing like it does now. Sea level was four hundred feet lower, an ice sheet sat on Canada,…
John McPhee
McPhee’s first geology book, 1981, and the one that started the whole run. He rides I-80 across Nevada with Ken Deffeyes, a Princeton geologist with a beard and a scheme to make money pulling silver out of hundred-year-old mine tailings.…
Alison Jean Cole
Alison Jean Cole is a lapidary in Portland who cuts stone for a living, guides rockhounding trips, and puts out a zine called Thunderegg about where the hobby is headed. Most rock guides hand you a list of famous sites…
David Rains Wallace
Here’s the riddle: Nobody can say how old the California desert actually is, or where its plants and animals came from. Creosote, ocotillo, cactus, the chuckwalla itself — did they evolve out there over tens of millions of years, or…
Frank Decourten
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996 and Utah went to war over it, and this was the first book to actually walk you through what got protected. It’s 1.9 million acres, bigger than Utah’s five national parks put together, bigger…
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Smug Homo sapiens have long looked down on Neanderthals, like city folk sneering at country cousins. Snort. You couldn’t even not go extinct. But these hominins have always gotten a bad rap, and Rebecca Wragg Sykes’s affectionate synthesis of a…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Third in the run that started with Other Minds, and this one widens out from mind to the whole planet. His subject is action — how living things don’t just experience the world but reshape it, from bacteria oxygenating the…
Yuval Noah Harari
The whole run of the species in one volume, organized around three revolutions: Cognitive, agricultural, scientific. Harari’s central move is that what let us take over wasn’t intelligence exactly but the ability to believe in things that don’t physically exist…
Laura Poppick
Deep time told through the layers themselves. Poppick is a science journalist and she goes to the outcrops with the geologists reading them — banded iron formations recording the moment oxygen first flooded the ocean, the black shales of a…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world in his lifetime and is now mostly a list of place names. Wulf brings him back: Five years in South America, climbing Chimborazo higher than anyone had gone, and…
Robert Macfarlane
Everything under our feet, in three parts: What we shelter, what we yield, what we dispose of. The dark matter lab under a Yorkshire hill. The wood wide web and the fungal networks trading sugar between trees. Catacombs beneath Paris…
Dan Flores
Sixty-six million years of American animals in one book. Flores starts after the asteroid and works forward — the strange menagerie that evolved here, then the arrival of humans and the extinction of mammoths, horses, camels, lions, and the giant…
