Natural Science

Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day - and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History", the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

Man’s struggle against the sea is a theme that has created some of the world’s most exciting stories. Now, in the tradition of Moby Dick comes a New York Times best seller destined to become a modern classic. Written by journalist Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm combines an intimate portrait of a small fishing crew with fascinating scientific data about boats and weather systems.

In Dinosaurs Rediscovered, leading paleontologist Michael J. Benton gathers together all the latest paleontological evidence, tracing the transformation of dinosaur study from its roots in antiquated natural history to an indisputably scientific field. Among other things, the book explores how dinosaur remains are found and excavated, and especially how paleontologists read the details of dinosaurs' lives from their fossils - their colors, their growth, and even whether we will ever be able to bring them back to life.

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites listeners to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the 19th century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion.

An excellent bottle of wine can be the spark that inspires a brainstorming session. Such was the case for Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, scientists who frequently collaborate on book and museum exhibition projects. When the conversation turned to wine one evening, it almost inevitably led the two - one a palaeoanthropologist, the other a molecular biologist - to begin exploring the many intersections between science and wine. This audiobook presents their fascinating, freewheeling answers to the question.

Survive the unexpected. Statistically, you're more likely to die from a vending machine than a shark. But, Rob Nelson knows many shark survivors. His college girlfriend was attacked by a crocodile and his roommate, a grizzly bear. His wife was sucked by a wave down a blowhole, he was left stranded at sea after a storm sank his sailboat, and the list goes on and on. To Rob, these "improbable" altercations are "random acts of nature," and he's learned how to survive them.

The universal appeal of Laura Ingalls Wilder springs from a life lived in partnership with the land, on farms she and her family settled across the Northeast and Midwest. In this revealing exploration of Wilder's deep connection with the natural world, Marta McDowell follows the wagon trail of the beloved Little House series. You'll learn details about Wilder's life and inspirations, pinpoint the Ingalls and Wilder homestead claims on authentic archival maps, and learn to grow the plants and vegetables featured in the series. Excerpts from Wilder's books, letters, and diaries bring to light her profound appreciation for the landscapes at the heart of her world.

Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers and American pioneers had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer. In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of human attempts to own and contain the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson's expansionist land hunger through today's era of environmental concern

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too dangerous for women.

Natural Hospital Birth, Updated Edition shows how to apply the guidelines and tactics of natural birth in a hospital setting, where 99 percent of births take place. Doula Cynthia Gabriel shows expectant mothers what they can do to avoid unnecessary medical interventions and how to take initiative and consciously prepare for the kind of birth they want to have. Also included are inspiring stories from other women who know firsthand that natural birth in the hospital is possible.

In this accessible, absorbing overview, Mancuso considers how plants convince animals to transport them around the world, and how some plants need particular animals to spread; how they have been able to grow in places so inaccessible and inhospitable as to remain isolated; how they resisted the atomic bomb and the Chernobyl disaster; how they are able to bring life to sterile islands; how they can travel through the ages, as they sail around the world.

The latest Scandinavian publishing phenomenon is not a Stieg Larsson-like thriller; it's a book about chopping, stacking, and burning wood that has sold more than 200,000 copies in Norway and Sweden and has been a fixture on the best seller lists there for more than a year. Norwegian Wood provides useful advice on the rustic hows and whys of taking care of your heating needs, but it's also a thoughtful attempt to understand man's age-old predilection for stacking wood and passion for open fires.

Naming Darwin's Black Box to the National Review's list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the 20th century, George Gilder wrote that it "overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning". Discussing the book in the New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, "He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known."

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.

Fatal Forecast chronicles a dramatic fight for survival aboard two small fishing boats that were ambushed by a horrific surprise storm just southeast of Cape Cod. Soon after the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever reached the fishing ground at Georges Bank, they were hit with hurricane-force winds and massive 90-foot waves that battered the boats for hours. The direction of the wind made it impossible to turn back.

In early May of 2005, Captain Tom Tighe and first mate, Loch Reidy, of the sailboat Almeisan welcomed three new crew members, two men and a woman, for a five-day voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda. While Tighe and Reidy had made the journey countless times, the rest of the crew were paying passengers learning about offshore sailing—and looking for adventure. Four days into their voyage, they got adventure but nothing that they had expected or had any training to handle.

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.