Science & Nature

Simon Parkin’s The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad tells a story so extraordinary that it sounds like fiction: during the 872-day siege of Leningrad, a group of botanists at the world’s first seed bank chose to starve rather than eat the collection they had sworn to protect. More than 250,000 seed samples, representing decades of painstaking…

Matthew La Plante’s Superlative: The Biology of Extremes, published by BenBella Books in 2019, takes a deceptively simple organizing principle and wrings from it a remarkably rich inquiry into how life works. The book examines biological extremes: the world’s oldest, fastest, largest, smallest, loudest, and most resilient organisms. But La Plante is not writing a…

The invention of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology gave scientists, for the first time, a genuinely practical tool for editing the human germline — making heritable changes to human DNA that would be passed to future generations. Paul Knoepfler’s GMO Sapiens: The Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies arrived at precisely the moment this possibility moved from…

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land arrived in 2018 from Chelsea Green Publishing and immediately occupied a category of its own. Leah Penniman, co-founder and co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, wrote a book that is simultaneously a technical farming manual and an act of…

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford is a fascinating journey through human genetics that upends myths about race, ancestry, and identity while celebrating the staggering complexity of our shared history. About the Book Adam Rutherford’s book begins with a deceptively simple premise: what can our DNA actually tell us about…

The Sting of the Wild by Justin O. Schmidt is a singularly entertaining and scientifically rigorous tour through the world of venomous insects — a book that only the world’s foremost expert on insect pain could write, and one that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely illuminating about evolution, ecology, and the natural…

A rigorous and deeply readable guide to food and climate from rangeland ecologist Mark J. Easter, challenging oversimplifications about which foods help or harm the planet and making the case for complexity over category rules.

Richard Feynman gave a lecture course at Cornell in 1958 that he later repeated at Caltech, working through the foundational ideas of relativistic quantum mechanics and the basic processes of elementary particle physics. The notes from those lectures became The Theory of Fundamental Processes, first published by W. A. Benjamin in 1961. At 172 pages,…