26 books
David Yetman
Everything known about one plant. Yetman and his coauthors cover the saguaro’s biology and its absurd arithmetic — decades to reach a few inches, a hundred and fifty years to full height, thousands of seeds a year of which almost…
Gary Snyder
Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes…
Fernanda Melchor
The body of the Witch is found in an irrigation canal outside a Mexican village called La Matosa, and the novel works outward from there through five people connected to the killing — a teenage girl, a boy, a mother,…
David Allen Sibley
Sibley drew the definitive field guides, and this is the opposite of a field guide: A big book of large paintings with the answers to the questions people actually ask. Why do birds stand on one leg. How they sleep…
Suhita Shirodkar
Shirodkar sketches out of San Jose and this is the entry point to the handbook series — the one that arrived about ten volumes in, once somebody noticed there was no starting place. Value first, because getting light and dark…
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…
Janna Levin
Levin is a cosmologist at Barnard, and this is a short one, about 150 pages with drawings by Lia Halloran, meant to be read in a sitting. Her opening move is the one that gets you: A black hole isn’t…
John Muir Laws and Emilie Lygren
The companion to Laws’s Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, and it’s built for anybody leading a group — teachers, naturalists, parents, camp staff. Forty-plus field activities with the actual instructions, timing, and prompts, all organized around three questions…
Peter Godfrey-Smith
If Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. Godfrey-Smith works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap, crabs…
Patrick Syme
Before color charts, naturalists had no shared vocabulary, so a German mineralogist named Abraham Werner built one and the Scottish painter Patrick Syme expanded it in 1814 — 110 colors, each with a hand-painted swatch and three references: A mineral,…
