Science

Wallace Nichols compiles the neuroscience research on why water makes people feel better — calmer, more creative, more connected. The science is real. The writing occasionally drifts toward self-help, but the core argument is compelling: we are hardwired for water.

A teenager who strolled away from a deadly plane crash in the jungle. A sailor who was rescued after spending two months adrift on the Atlantic. An alpinist who dragged his injured body to safety across an unforgiving landscape. Sure, luck played a factor for all of them, but Gonzales mashes up hard science with adrenaline-splashed anecdotes to suggest that some people are just hard-wired for survival—while explaining how the rest of us can still tip the odds in our favor.

Elizabeth Kolbert's early climate reporting, before The Sixth Extinction made her famous. She travels to melting glaciers, drowning islands, and warming permafrost, building the case with the same calm, devastating clarity that defines all her work.

This landmark exposé is the result of the nearly two decades that biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson spent in the weeds, studying the damaging effects of synthetic pesticide use on environmental and human health. Its release drew plenty of venom from chemical giants like DuPont, but it also led to a ban on the use of DDT and galvanized a surge in environmental activism that would, among other things, pave the way for the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

How diseases jump from animals to humans — Ebola, SARS, HIV, and the next pandemic. Quammen spent years tracking viruses through jungles and labs, and the book reads like a thriller because the threat is real. Published in 2012. Everything in it proved correct.

Part science storytelling and part memoir, Spineless takes us around the world and down in deep-sea submersibles to explore the mysteries of jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. You’ll learn a lot about the world’s oceans and cutting-edge science, yet all the research stays afloat with enthusiasm: “There’s a copepod that says ‘Fooled you!’ when it releases bioluminescent globs of light…” We also meet people who’ve dedicated their lives to the soft-bodied-yet-mighty jelly, and while there’s no red-beanied Steve Zissou, this cast of characters could hold their own in a movie: a Frank Zappa-obsessed Italian marine biologist, engineers infatuated with jellyfish propulsion systems, a quirky inventor of a sting-blocking lotion. Author Juli Berwald, a former ocean scientist, threads in just enough of her personal story to get you thinking about your own shelved dreams. If you grew up wanting to be the next Jacques Cousteau or Sylvia Earle, or even a Wes Anderson oceanographer, this book is for you.

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” If you’re reading AJ, you probably live by this John Muir quote, and you definitely don’t need a brain scan or stress hormone report to convince you nature is a good, good thing. But author Florence Williams, a skeptical New Yorker at heart, asks a reasonable question: why? She takes us around the world in The Nature Fix, a wide-ranging nonfiction tour of the science behind nature’s effect on humans. Meet Japanese researchers analyzing the mental health benefits of “forest bathing,” neuroscientists in Utah mapping connections between adventure and problem-solving skills, and Korean immunologists studying how short bursts of nature enhance cancer-killing cells. From gritty urban park trails to the Idaho wilderness, it’s a heady, thought-provoking investigation that even minimalist Muir would have packed into the backcountry, snug between his bread and tea.

The Pulitzer-winning investigation into the current mass extinction event. Kolbert visits the sites where species are disappearing — coral reefs, rainforests, bat caves — and builds the case that we are living through the sixth great extinction, and we are its cause.

Geological time as a framework for understanding climate change, resource depletion, and our species' myopia. A short, powerful argument that we can't solve long-term problems with short-term thinking.

What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets the sea. Willard Bascom, an engineer, adventurer, photographer, scientist, and cinematographer who pioneered a number of ocean technologies, including being one of the first to suggest neoprene as a wetsuit material, wrote the book in 1963. When Bascom died in a car accident in 2000, oceanographer Kim McCoy, Bascom’s friend and protégé, inherited the beloved manuscript. This third edition reflects both authors and their seventy years of experience on shorelines on all seven continents, as well as an update devoted to the history and effects of climate change. Four hundred pages stuffed with physics illustrations, encyclopedic text, and gorgeous photography makes for essential reading that belongs on the bookshelves of all coastal explorers.

“I had forgotten that my phone knew nothing of whether humans can fly, or the seasonal flow of the Rio Grande, that it had no actual experience because it had never been born, only programmed by someone who might never have set foot in New Mexico.” Winding up far off-route after trying to find a hot spring, science journalist M.R. Connor wonders at the extent GPS technology has commandeered our natural sense of direction, and she then heads out to investigate traditional techniques of human wayfinding with master navigators in the Canadian Arctic, Australia, and the South Pacific. She also ventures deep into modern psychology and the science behind why our brains need to free range; for example, a lack of natural spatial exercise can shrink the hippocampus, increasing risk for depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer’s. Combining a travel narrative with fascinating research, Wayfinding makes a captivating case for reconnecting with our senses and the journey rather than the destination.