Natural History

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world....

First published in 1949 and praised in the New York Times Book Review as "full of beauty and vigor and bite", A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land....

A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate....

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories....

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods comes a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history....

Filled to the brim with far-out facts, this wickedly informative narrative from the author of National Geographic's popular Gory Details blog takes us on a fascinating journey through an astonishing new reality....

Birds. Over 9,000 species, the most widespread of all animals. David Attenborough has been watching and learning all his life. His classic book, now fully updated with the latest discoveries in ornithology, is a brilliant introduction to bird behaviours around the world....

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life....

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America's lakes and rivers....

The natural and human history of the Galapagos Islands - beloved vacation spot, fiery volcanic chain, and one of the critical sites in the history of science....

The world is changing at a relentless pace. How can we slow down and act from a place of respect for all living things? The Sacred Balance shows us how....

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents....

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology....

Elemental reveals how life itself shapes Earth using the elemental constituents we all share....

A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change....

For the whole of human history, we have lived alongside birds. Naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and intimate relationship through key species from all seven of the world’s continents....

In this thrilling history, David Baker captures the longest possible time span—from the Big Bang to the present day—in an astonishingly concise retelling....

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson takes his ultimate journey...

Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction....

The bonds of friendship are universal and elemental. In Friendship, journalist Lydia Denworth visits the front lines of the science of friendship in search of its biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations....

From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world....

American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will....

In recent years, scientists have hypothesized life-forms that can only be called "weird"....

A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution....