American Scientist

The holiday season has arrived, and the editors of American Scientist have compiled a wonderful selection of STEM-related books for anyone on your shopping list, from young children to adults. If you got your holiday shopping done early, don’t worry—these books are perfect gifts any time of the year! (Don’t forget to treat yourself, too!) For even more STEM book recommendations, take a look at some of our previous gift guides:
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

STEM Books for Young Readers

(Suggested age ranges, where noted, are those provided by the publisher.)

Black Lives: Great Minds of Science by Tonya Bolden; illustrated by David Wilkerson. Ages 8-12. Abrams Fanfare, 2024. $15.99.

Discover the remarkable contributions of Black scientists in Black Lives: Great Minds of Science, the first book in an engaging nonfiction graphic novel series designed for middle-grade readers. Bolden offers a colorful glimpse into the lives of ingenious yet underappreciated Black doctors, engineers, mathematicians, and biologists who molded the world of STEM. Through rich illustrations, Great Minds of Science brings to life the tenacity and brilliance of these trailblazers. Their journeys, marked by overcoming challenges and breaking barriers, serve as a reminder that life is not linear and that trying new things is not just okay, but often necessary. Their stories are about science, but also about the human spirit and the universal quest for knowledge and understanding. It’s the perfect book for the young history buff, science fanatic, or aspiring graphic novelist in your life. More than just a collection of inspiring stories, Great Minds of Science also serves as a potential catalyst for sparking interest in STEM careers among middle graders, paving the way for a future generation of scientists and innovators. —Nwabata Nnani

Hike It: An Introduction to Camping, Hiking, and Backpacking in the U.S.A. by Iron Tazz, illustrated by Martin Stanev. Ages 4-17. Magic Cat, 2024. $30.00.

My son and I love the U.S. National Parks, and I incorporate them into our homeschooling: geology, history, biology, even astronomy! This oversized illustrated book is a fun and informative read. You’ll notice the broad age range, and it’s absolutely true. Tazz briefly explores 20 national parks in the United States in this book, providing a short overview of the park and its landscape, as well as lays out the basics of a variety of aspects of hiking and backpacking. He writes about the best food to bring while backpacking, the backpacking essentials, principles of leave no trace, and even, to the delight of my son, going to the bathroom in the woods. Outdoors safety is reviewed, as well as staying safe around wildlife, making this a wonderful overview of hiking and parks, especially if you’re not able to hit the trail yourself. —Jaime Herndon

I Am Stephen Hawking (Ordinary People Change the World) by Brad Meltzer, illustrated by Christopher Eliopoulos. Ages 5-9. Rocky Pond Books, 2024. $16.99.

If you’ve never read this series, you’re in for a treat. I’m constantly surprised by how deep these books are, though they’re completely appropriate for children. This is the 34th book in the series, and Meltzer has done a fantastic job with it. He touches on Hawking’s childhood, and doesn’t shy away from explaining what the disease ALS is and how it effected Hawking—but he also illustrates how Hawking lived with ALS and the accessibility aids he used in his life and work. Physics is explained in a basic way, and kids get a glimpse of who Hawking was as a person. At the end of each of these books is a timeline, complete with pictures and some notes, which are a nice complement to the story. —Jaime Herndon

Lonely Planet Kids: National Parks Activity Book by Lonely Planet. Ages 6-8. Lonely Planet, 2024. $14.99

A revised version of Lonely Planet Kids America’s National Parks was published this year, and the publisher decided to also create an activity book to go along with it. My eight-year-old loves this activity book: It’s full of crosswords, drawing challenges and activities, word and matching games, and tons of interesting facts about the parks. It also combines history and science in an accessible way while encouraging kids to take an active role in conservation and preservation of the environment. Though we also have the parks book, kids can enjoy the activity book without it (though it’s a great book with beautiful pictures!). This volume is a perfect activity book to take on trips, add to homeschooling curricula, or to pull out on a rainy day. —Jaime Herndon

Lonely Planet Kids: The Rocks Book by Lonely Planet. Ages 9-12. Lonely Planet, 2024. $22.99.

If you’ve got a budding geologist on your hands—no matter what the age—you’ll want to take a look at this one. The Rocks Book is an oversized tome full of pictures and illustrations of various rocks and gemstones around the world. There are sections on what rocks are, rocks around the world, how to be a rock collector, and a rock and mineral directory, and within each section are plenty of subsections going into further detail about everything you could want to know about rocks and minerals. At the end there’s also an informative glossary to help define unfamiliar terms. As is typical of Lonely Planet, the pictures and illustrations are beautifully done, and even younger kids will love poring over the graphics. Take the age range for this book with a grain of salt; this is a book that is truly for anyone interested in rocks. —Jaime Herndon

Mathematics: An Illustrated History of Numbers, Revised and Updated (Ponderables series) by Tom Jackson. Ages 12 and up. Shelter Harbor Press, 2024. $24.95.

Although this book is listed under the children’s books, the recommended ages are 12 and up, and I really debated where I should put this entry. In the end, I obviously went with the listed age classification on Amazon, but these books are more geared toward mature teens and adults. Mathematics was revised, updated, and republished this year, and there are countless other books in the Ponderables series, including Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Computer Science, The Elements, Engineering, and more. These oversized hardcovers can be imposing at first, but upon opening them, you’ll find beautifully illustrated pages listing 100 breakthroughs and important subject areas in the field, such as Pascal’s Triangle and Geodesics, all explained in plain language that is easily accessible. These are great texts for reference or exploring a new area of interest, and they have a foldout timeline guide in the back depicting milestones in the field. —Jaime Herndon

The Next Scientist: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of the World’s Great Scientists by Kate Messner, illustrated by Julia Kuo. Ages 8-12. Chronicle Books, 2024. $19.99.

Messner, the author of more than 50 children’s books, with many being science- and nature-themed, has written a fascinating nonfiction picture book, complete with beautiful illustrations by Kuo. The Next Scientist features scientists before they became scientists, focusing on what they did as children and STEM-related things that might have led to their entry into the field—such as stargazing, taking apart radios and clocks, and reading about engineering—and then describing what they ended up doing as adults. It’s a gentle, encouraging reminder that STEM can be found almost everywhere, and that the activities kids do and books they read are important and meaningful. With so many diverse scientists mentioned in the book, it’s also an engaging introduction to a variety of scientists that kids might not have heard about before. —Jaime Herndon

Oliver’s Great Big Universe: Volcanoes Are Hot! by Jorge Cham. Ages 8-12. Abrams, 2024. $15.99.

Some of you might remember Jorge Cham from his comic strip PhD Comics, and he brings that same humor to this immersive middle-grade graphic novel. This is the second in the series so far, and follows 11-year-old Oliver. Oliver is famous at his middle school—he just wrote his first book. But after an unfortunate incident involving barf and the school cafeteria, he’s now famous for something else. If he can just win the science fair, though, he can get his reputation back. With his geoscientist aunt helping him, the sky’s the limit. Cham is adept at bringing scientific concepts to the page in ways that are accessible and fun for kids, without dumbing it down. It’s a funny, smart story that parents and kids will enjoy reading. —Jaime Herndon

Quantum! The Strange Science of the Smallest Stuff in the Universe by Christopher Edge; illustrated by Paul Daviz. Ages 7-10. Candlewick Press 2024. $18.99.

Quantum! The Strange Science of the Smallest Stuff in the Universe is an excellent choice for middle-grade kids who never miss an opportunity to ask why. This book is designed to satisfy their curiosity about the world around them, taking them through a colorful journey of quarks and all they see in computers, supernovas, and even the Big Bang. Quantum! is sure to satisfy the curiosity of even the tiniest human in your life. —Nwabata Nnani

Science Comics: Human Spaceflight: Rockets and Rivalry by Andy Hirsch. Ages 9-13. First Second Books, 2024. $13.99.

The long-running Science Comics series returns this year with Human Spaceflight, a graphic novel about the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. This series never disappoints, and this volume is no exception. The graphic novels may be more oriented towards younger teens, but adults will learn things they never knew before. Younger children may need some help with some of the terminology, but are likely to be just as engrossed. The novel begins with early balloon flights, discoveries about the atmosphere, the physics behind rocket engines, the chemistry behind providing oxygen to astronauts in space, and the physics of re-entry to Earth. The remainder follows the development in space technology from the 1960s to the present day, weaving in historical figures (including women, who were more prominent in the Soviet program) and the rivalry between the two countries. To appeal to a kid’s sense of gross factor, there’s also a strong theme of how astronauts eat, and get rid of waste, in space. But for anyone fascinated by space, this graphic novel is a great overview of the history and the technology, with a human angle.
—Fenella Saunders

There Are No Ants in This Book by Rosemary Mosco; illustrated by Anna Pirolli. Ages 4-8. Penguin Random House, 2024. $18.99.

It’s pretty unrealistic to think one could escape ants anywhere in the outdoors, but the child in this book attempts to have a picnic without any of them. Ants of course crop up quickly, but the great part of the book is the wide diversity of ants that are discussed, soon winning the child over to the side of the ant appreciators of the world. Although this is a brief book intended for younger readers, there’s a more detailed listing in the back of all the ants discussed and their traits. The narrative is likely to keep younger children giggling while they learn about how ants are far more varied than the ones they might find in their own backyard. —Fenella Saunders

STEM Books for Adults

Audubon as Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America by Roberta J. M. Olson. Reaktion Books, 2024. $45.00.

John James Audubon's illustrations of more than a thousand birds in lifelike poses have long held a special place in the mind's eye of every natural historian, ornithologist, and garden-variety birdwatcher. Today these masterful depictions, many including glimpses of the birds' surroundings and their habitual foods, are so well known that it's difficult to imagine how revolutionary they appeared when the first pages of The Birds of America were published nearly two centuries ago. In her new book, Audubon as Artist, Roberta J. M. Olson, curator emerita of Auduboniana at the New-York Historical Society, sketches out the historical context of that book, as well as explores how Audubon’s work overlapped with his life in various ways. She writes about Audubon not just as a naturalist, but also an artist: Thanks to developments in the papermaking industry at the time, the first edition of The Birds of America displayed every bird at life size—a feat that required issuing the rare "double elephant folio," with each page measuring 102 centimeters in height. These glowing portraits showed not only the extravagant palette of male birds but also the (often less showy) females, along with the young and sometimes even their nests. The artist-ornithologist used any and every technique available—watercolor, pastel, graphite, gouache, the use of ink and chalk, selective glazing, and doubtless more—to produce his characteristic blend of lush color with precisely observed details. As Olson observes, "Even though Audubon was not a trained scientist, his impassioned approach to the study of birds marked the beginning of modern ornithology. He also led naturalists away from a purely systematic study of the natural world towards the environmental orientation that prevails today.” This book is part artistic biography and part social history, and generously illustrated throughout. It is a pleasure to tag along through this book as Audubon discovers the birds of America.
—Sandra J. Ackerman

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. by Zoë Schlanger. Harper, 2024. $29.99.

If, like author Zoë Schlanger, you could use more wonder in your life—a little less doom, a little more bloom—then this conversational and, at times, gleeful reexamination of just what plants are could be your cup of herbal tea, if you don’t mind a soupçon of self-reflection stirred in with your facts. Don’t be put off by the author’s occasional bouts of rapture: You’ll soon find that you are in the hands of a reliable, reflective, and probing guide through “a field in true turmoil, debating the tenets of what it knows, about to birth a new conception of its subject.” That field is botany (and the other plant sciences), and that turmoil is driven by research suggesting that—not unlike emerging ideas of intelligence and complexity in the animal kingdom—there’s more to flora than flowers and photosynthesis. Plants compete; moreover, they sabotage. They help relatives and harm competitors. They seek out water pipes, suggesting something akin to sensing; they also show traits not unlike behavior and memory. That’s a hop, skip, and a jump from intelligence and a stone’s throw from some definitions of consciousness. If that sounds like a lot of hedging, it’s because terminology, in this context, matters a great deal: Some scientists still smart from the memory of the 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, which made far more soaring claims (plant consciousness, communication, and even ESP) based on (to be kind) far less rigorous study. The pop-culture phenomenon inflicted near-fatal damage to botany when its claims were debunked (partly in American Scientist; see The Not-So-Secret Life of Plants, May–June 1979) and for years put the kibosh on any attempt to interpret evidence of such phenomena as anything but genetic programing masquerading as mind. Wherever you land on the issue after reading it, Light Eaters will leave you reinvigorated with the realization of how much of our world remains to be discovered, even among living things that we literally treat as window-dressing. To paraphrase Willy Wonka (paraphrasing Shakespeare): So shines a good read in a jaded world. —Nicholas Gerbis

Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World by Matt Parker. Ages 14 and up. Riverhead Books, 2024. $30.00.

Love Triangle is more than Australian recreational mathematician, comedian, and YouTuber Matt Parker’s answer to the question, “Why do I need to study trigonometry?” It’s a collection of absurd anecdotes about pigs, hot-air balloons, and the law; a soup-to-nuts primer on how humans went from measuring a French road to gauging the breadth of a cosmic web; a discursion into how to cut a sandwich into thirds (with equal crust); and a diatribe about fake rainbows and how to recognize them. Along the way, Parker transports the reader from pool halls to the cosmic billiards of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, with a side trip to the Egyptian Ahmes Papyrus, which reveals that geometry word problems are nearly as old as written language itself. The true charm of this book, though, lies in how Parker has combined a winking, geeky self-awareness with a contagious can-do spirit. You don’t have to love triangles or even like Parker’s humor (“non-right-angle triangles are just two right-angle triangles in a trench coat” still sticks with me) to get caught up in his fever for back-of-the-envelope sussing-out. And is using a map and a few shadows to measure the heights of the London Shard and the Tokyo Tower really that different from the guesstimations we use to hang a picture or figure out how much extension cord we’ll need for our holiday lights? Parker knows it’s not, and he refuses to let his readers hold geometry at arm’s length. “You know how to do this,” he seems to say, like a fourth-grade teacher handing out an Encyclopedia Brown story. “Just piece the clues together and follow the steps.” But read at your own risk: By the time you’re done, you might just agree with Parker that triangles are everything, and that everything—us, even reality itself—is triangles. —Nicholas Gerbis

Math In Drag by Kyne Santos. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024. $24.95

If you’re into pop culture, you might know Kyne Santos from RuPaul’s Canada Drag Race, or from Santos’ popular YouTube channel on wig styling and skin care. What you might not know, however, is that Santos was a math enthusiast from a young age, and combines an obvious passion for both drag performance and math in this book. The connection might not seem straightforward, but Santos makes a great case, weaving both together with ease and combining each math topic with fun riddles. Covering such areas as probability, averages, imaginary numbers, illegal math operations, geometry, quadratic equations, and more, Santos intersperses historical figures who bucked mathematical conventions with personal life experiences. The goal of math, Santos reminds us, is not to get the right answer, but “to create a framework for understanding reality through patterns, abstractions, and metaphors.” The book is a charming, thought-provoking romp through mathematics with a drag twist that will be widely enjoyed. —Fenella Saunders

The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature by Alan Lightman. Pantheon, 2024. $36.00.

You might be familiar with Lightman from his previous books, including the novel Einstein’s Dreams and the nonfiction book The Transcendental Brain. His latest book, The Miraculous from the Material, is an examination of natural phenomena through a scientific lens: the flight of a hummingbird, rainbows, glaciers, lightning, even bubbles! Knowing the science behind natural phenomena doesn’t diminish their beauty or awe, argues Lightman, but adds to the wonder of it. And he does just that with each topic, with full-color photos paired with smart and reflective personal essays, reminding us of just how miraculous and amazing our world is, in so many different ways. —Jaime Herndon

Nonstandard Notebook: Mathematically Ruled Pages for Unruly Thoughts by Tim Chartier and Amy Langville. University of Chicago Press, 2024. $18.00.

Writing in a notebook, we are taught to follow the rules—to let the faint parallel lines guide the pen across the page. But what if the rules begin to tilt or curl, converge or diverge, twist themselves into loops or spirals? This is the unsettling premise of Tim Chartier and Amy Langville’s Nonstandard Notebook: Mathematically Ruled Pages for Unruly Thoughts. “What ideas might come to life,” they ask, “if the rules grew unruly.” The patterns exhibited in these pages are not truly haphazard, though. They are mathematically defined; in most cases an equation or formula is given. The upswept rules on this page follow a simple quadratic equation. There are also waves generated by trigonometric functions, geometric forms created by repeated scaling or rotation, some fractal patterns, and a selection of figures that do incorporate some measure of randomness. The notebook is handsome and well-made. The size (half of a letter sheet) is convenient for those who want to take notes in class or keep a journal. However, I do wonder how many owners of the Nonstandard Notebook will find the unruly rules too intriguing to scribble over. —Brian Hayes

Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Co, 2024. $29.99.

Richard Powers’ Playground reads as three books in one, with disparate stories coming together only in the last 20 perplexing pages. The story line of the inspiring diving career of Eveline, modeled on renowned marine biologist Sylvia Earle, introduces readers to the marvels and vastness of the Earth’s oceans and its creatures, and features some of the most eloquent and descriptive passages of the book. A second storyline about the 84 inhabitants of the island of Makatea not only introduces a variety of colorful characters, but also shows how humans are disrupting Earth’s natural resources, with devastating consequences and little regard. The main story, told in italicized sections, revolves around the development of computers, computer gaming, and artificial intelligence (AI), told through the relationships of three characters—Ina, Rafi, and Todd—who are central to the overarching story. For those interested in the history of gaming and a vision of where AI is heading, this book will be thought-provoking and inspire repeat readings. An undercurrent of social commentary on the power of billionaires to either cause more devastation or to save the planet plays a key role in the story. Strong, unconventional female role models make this a positive read for women in science, and overall, it’s a complex and timely read. —Lisa Merritt