American Scientist

One of the joys of working in science communication is the wide variety of books that cross our desks. Here are some of the books that American Scientist editors and contributors have enjoyed this year that would make excellent gifts for science enthusiasts young and old. We will continue to add to this list throughout the holiday season, so be sure to check back to see what other books we recommend!

Jump to: STEM Books for Adults

For more, check out our previous gift guides:

• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• and 2014, too.

STEM Books for Young Readers

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

ICE! Poems About Polar Life, by Douglas Florian. Holiday House, 2020. $17.99. Ages 7 to 10 years.

In a series of two-page leaps, the author takes the reader on a breakneck tour of Earth’s extremes—starting with a geographic introduction to the polar regions, ending with a discourse on climate change, and along the way describing tundra ecology, krill biology, and ptarmigan seasonal molting. Heavy stuff, except that it isn’t. Each of those leaps is told in the form of a short poem, 21 of them in all, each crafted in a whimsical style somewhat reminiscent of Ogden Nash. The poems are accompanied by equally playful full-page illustrations, along with one-paragraph science explainers that provide the deeper ideas behind the verses.

The result is that ICE! can be read three ways. Parents can recite the poems aloud to the young ones, who may both laugh and groan at the nonstop wordplay (Florian describes the abundance of krill in the ocean by rhyming “millions” with “krillions”). Budding readers will enjoy sounding out those rhymes and matching them with the crayon-style drawings. And slightly older kids can follow their curiosity into the descriptive text, where they will learn, for instance, that a single blue whale can consume 40 million krill a day—krillions indeed. Keeping with the silly-serious theme, the book culminates with a call to environmental action delivered by a human, a polar bear, an artic hare, a gray fox, and a caribou, huddled together in concerned camaraderie.—Corey S. Powell

Stand Up! Speak Up!: A Story Inspired by the Climate Change Revolution, by Andrew Joyner. Schwartz and Wade Books, 2020. $17.99. Ages 4 to 8 years.

Children often feel helpless in the world. They are told what to wear, what to eat, and where to go. As they grow older, they begin to learn that the people telling them what to do are not always making the right choices themselves. Stand Up! Speak Up! is about empowering kids to act, and shows how their efforts can influence others. Each page has a different two-word imperative sentence ending in “up”—as in “Stand up” and “Speak up”—as the book follows a girl who is at first excited, then discouraged, and finally hopeful about fighting climate change and building a better future. Both my preschooler and my first-grader loved the girl’s story, and they have asked me to read it to them more than once.

The book’s last two pages feature charming portraits of young people who are working to change the world, alongside descriptions of their efforts. This material didn’t hold my younger son’s interest, but his brother was rapt. For kids who are old enough, those last pages are crucial, because they take the theoretical story of a girl causing change and demonstrate that although the book is fictional, it is not fantasy. Even in a world where kids may seem to have little agency, they can work to effect change.—Stacey Lutkoski

Rachel Carson and Ecology for Kids: Her Life and Ideas, with 21 Activities and Experiments, by Rowena Rae. Chicago Review Press, 2020. $16.99. Ages 9 to 12 years.

At a time when more young people are being homeschooled or educated virtually, there is a need for books that have good ideas for educational activities that give kids a break from screens and engage them in imaginative and outdoor experiences. This biography of Rachel Carson, the iconic science writer who launched the environmental movement in the 1960s, fits the bill. Nine chapters cover her early life and education, her career as a government biologist, her writing about the natural world, and her legacy. The text is interspersed with historical photographs, sidebars (about famous people and topics such as the Great Depression and persistent organic pollutants), and educational activities, such as making a sound map, inventing a creature and an ecosystem for it to live in, writing a haiku, and learning how to edit an essay about an endangered animal. Although the book is aimed at children 9 years of age or older, some of the activities could be fun for younger children if they have adult guidance.

At the end of the book is a brief section about the environmental movement today. Unfortunately, it fails to mention many important advocacy efforts of the past 15 years, including those led by young people, such as the Sunrise Movement.—Katie L. Burke

Crows: Genius Birds, by Kyla Vanderklugt, and Rocks and Minerals: Geology from Caverns to the Cosmos, by Andy Hirsch. First Second Books, 2020. $12.99 each. Ages 9 to 13 years.

Kids will tackle nearly any topic if it is presented in comic format, I’ve discovered. And my young daughters and I have never been disappointed with any of the books in the long-running Science Comics series from First Second Books. We have read together the volumes on Coral Reefs, The Brain, Volcanoes, and Dinosaurs, and my older daughter, a nine-year-old who is eager to read any volume that features a cute central character, has devoured on her own Cats, Dogs, Trees, and Polar Bears. The overarching approach that this series takes is to create some kind of storyline, rather than simply relaying facts, so that the reader follows along with the characters’ adventures while learning about the subject.

The 2020 additions to this series are Crows and Rocks and Minerals. Although my daughters were initially skeptical, once I started reading to them they were sucked in. We learned that crows have vision that extends into the ultraviolet, for instance, while following the antics of a crow that is trying to dupe a dog into helping it raid trash cans. We really enjoyed the way the author wove into the story research experiments about crow behavior, such as tests that have shown that crows can remember faces and teach one another to avoid “dangerous” humans. In Rocks and Minerals, an adventuring geologist named Sedona takes us all the way back to the Big Bang to teach her treasure-mad protégé, Wally, that gemstones are not the only cool rocks. Their travels take us to deep sea rifts and subduction zones, to island volcanoes, and into the deepest caverns on Earth (and yes, we get to see some cool crystals). My only criticism of the series is that although technical terms are always well defined, some of the vocabulary employed does not appear to have been tested for age appropriateness. But it never hurts a kid to learn new words.

You really can’t go wrong with any book in this series and there are titles to match the interests of nearly any recipient you might have in mind. Also, if you sit down and read the book with the child you give it to, you’re sure to learn something yourself.—Fenella Saunders

Your Place in the Universe, by Jason Chin. Neal Porter Books, 2020. $18.99. Ages 4 to 8 years.

The scale of the cosmos is so far removed from the scale of human experience that it strenuously resists intuitive comprehension. In 1957, Dutch educator Kees Boeke arrived at a creative work-around. He created a picture book called Cosmic View, which began with a photograph of a girl holding a cat and then zoomed outward. Each successive image covered a much larger region, revealing a park, a city, a country, a planet, and so on, leading ever deeper into space. The idea was adapted by designers Charles and Ray Eames into the landmark film Powers of Ten, and since then has been widely revised, quoted, and adapted in other formats.

Jason Chin proves that there’s still room for a fresh spin on the cosmic-zoom concept in Your Place in the Universe. He begins by using the book itself as his initial unit of measure, then expands the scale of his illustrations by swapping it out for ever-larger objects, sticking with the familiar as far as possible. This approach leads the reader from a group of kids stacking up books to a giraffe confronting an ostrich to a redwood tree growing alongside the Burj Khalifa skyscraper. By the time the reader is leaving the atmosphere and gazing down on Earth, space no longer feels quite so unfamiliar.

The ideas inevitably grow more abstract once the imagery switches to planetary orbits, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. But even then, the warm simplicity of the art prevents the book from feeling intimidating, and Chin does an admirable job of introducing complex astronomical ideas in a natural, commonsense way. In a clever final pivot, he connects the scale of the observable universe right back to the people doing the observing—in this case, the starting group of 8-year-old kids, who are setting up a telescope in a park. Readers who feel inspired can turn the page and read a tutorial about the core scientific concepts embodied at each scale shown in the book. Or they can simply linger on the last image of the zoom and accept Chin’s offer to “imagine their place in the universe.”—Corey S. Powell

Slide and Surprise in the Snow, by Natalie Marshall. Cartwheel Books (an imprint of Scholastic), 2020. $7.99. Ages 2 to 5 years.

This fun board book teaches facts about Arctic or Antarctic animals adapted to extreme cold, such as walruses, polar bears, snowy owls, and penguins. Each page poses a question (“Who is hiding behind the rocks?”), the answer to which (“A big polar bear!”) can be found by pulling out a slider, thereby providing surprise and engagement for curious toddlers. Every two-page spread also contains a fun fact about an animal (“Walruses can use their huge tusks to pull themselves out of icy water!”). Toddlers who have had the book read to them repeatedly will soon start providing the answer as soon as a caregiver reads the question, and will slide the slider themselves to reveal the hidden picture.—Katie L. Burke

Harlem Grown: How One Big Idea Transformed a Neighborhood. Tony Hillery, illustrated by Jessie Hartland. Simon and Schuster, 2020. $17.99. Ages 4 to 8 years.

As we near the end of an incredibly tumultuous year, it is nice to reflect on how small actions can yield big dividends. Tony Hillery’s book Harlem Grown tells his story of collaborating with students at a New York City elementary school to transform an empty lot into a thriving urban garden. The illustrations by Jessie Hartland walk the reader through the process of creating the garden. The book ends with a guide for kids who want to plant gardens of their own: six simple steps to starting a garden anywhere. At a time when the world’s problems may seem insurmountable, this uplifting book demonstrates that local actions can benefit the larger community.—Stacey Lutkoski

My First Book of the Cosmos, by Sheddad Kaid-Salah Ferrón and Eduard Altarriba. Button Books, 2020. $17.99. Ages 8 years and up.

Why doesn’t the Moon fall into the Earth? If you’ve ever had to find answers to questions like this from a child, you may want to pick up My First Book of the Cosmos. This handsomely illustrated book explains vastly complicated topics about the universe at a level that is accessible to kids ages 8 to 10; younger children could also enjoy the content with some help. The book starts off by talking about what gravity is and then moves on to explain how gravity is connected to relativity and how gravity can be used to investigate the cosmos. It goes on to cover a wide range of celestial phenomena, including the Big Bang, the size of the universe, the formation of galaxies, the lives of stars, exoplanets, cosmic background radiation, black holes, wormholes, and other topics, devoting a two-page spread to nearly every entry. This book joins two other titles from the same authors: My First Book of Quantum Physics and My First Book of Relativity. All three books in the series are worthwhile, but this latest entry is particularly good at inspiring awe about the universe.—Fenella Saunders

Bright in the Night, by Lena Sjöberg. Thames and Hudson, 2020. $17.95.

The days are getting shorter as we approach the solstice, and at my house that seasonal change is accompanied by an annual slew of questions from my kids about the long, dark nights of winter. This year I have turned to Bright in the Night to direct their focus onto all of the things that shine in the darkness, both natural and engineered. The book’s pages are appropriately dark swaths of black, gray, and navy—shades that allow author-illustrator Lena Sjöberg’s bright illustrations to pop. Bright in the Night is encyclopedic in its coverage of all things glowing, from galaxies to mushrooms, and from deep sea shrimp to street lamps. Sjöberg even touches on the supernatural, such as will-o’-the-wisps. The language of the text is accessible, and its tone is neither tedious nor condescending. The author ends the book with speculation about possible genetic manipulations in the future that could create glowing plants and animals, and gently raises the question of whether such innovations would be ethical. My preschooler and first-grader both love the book, and I would recommend it for older elementary school kids as well.—Stacey Lutkoski

Hoot and Howl Across the Desert, by Vassiliki Tzomaka. Thames and Hudson, 2020. $19.95.

If the child on your gift list loves animals, then Hoot and Howl Across the Desert is a good choice. Like Bright in the Night (the book recommended above), Hoot and Howl consists chiefly of short passages that are packed with facts and richly illustrated, all relating to a single subject—in this case, the features and creatures of Earth’s deserts. Author-illustrator Vassiliki Tzomaka touches on desert flora, but focuses mainly on the fauna, which she beautifully renders in bright (though not always realistic) colors and patterns.

The book begins with a map of the world spread across two pages that shows the locations of the specific deserts discussed in the book: Hot deserts (such as the Sonoran, the Sahara, and the Arabian) are colored red; coastal deserts (Atacama and Namib) are yellow, and cold deserts (the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Great Basin, and the Patagonian) are white. Tzomaka then describes each desert, with occasional asides to examine a particular aspect in depth, such as nocturnal animals or acacia trees. One quibble is that the organization of the book is a bit confusing—for example, Antarctica, the Arctic, and the Great Basin appear consecutively, but the two remaining cold deserts, the Gobi and Patagonia, are examined later.

For children who find animals fascinating, that organizational inconsistency is more than made up for by the variety of creatures pictured. The animals in the illustrations range from the familiar (camels and zebras) to the exotic (warrus and vicuñas). Each drawing of an animal is accompanied by a sentence or two conveying fun facts about it. My preschooler was particularly excited about the kangaroo rat, which we learned can jump nine feet (or as I described it, one-and-a-half daddies) in the air. Kindergartners and elementary school–age children will love exploring deserts and learning about how different species have adapted to survive in harsh conditions.—Stacey Lutkoski

Butterflies Belong Here: A Story of One Idea, Thirty Kids, and a World of Butterflies, by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Meilo So. Chronicle Books, 2020. $18.99. Ages 5 to 8 years.

“Milkweed is in trouble, and so monarchs are, too,” thinks the young heroine of this sweetly illustrated book. Not that she pictures herself as a heroine who can help right the wrongs of the world; like so many of us, she automatically assumes that she’s “not that kind of person.” But a beloved book about monarch butterflies has ignited a slow-burn obsession in her head, and it will not be denied: She wants to see monarchs flying through her town, even after she realizes that they almost never show up in her area anymore.

To bring back the monarchs, she has to restore the milkweed plants on which the butterflies lay their eggs. And for that to happen, she has to find the inner strength to become an advocate, an educator, and a community organizer. The metaphor of a young girl emerging from her cocoon is handled with subtlety, and the information-driven parts of the book deftly align with our heroine’s restless curiosity about the natural world.—Corey S. Powell

Ocean Tails, illustrated by Scott Barker. Scholastic, 2020. Ages 0 to 3 years.

This small 10-page board book, which offers a variety of textures for young ones to touch and feel, is perfect for babies. With its colorful illustrations of marine life and alliterative rhymes, Ocean Tails is a quick bedtime, nap time, or playtime read. The tails of marine animals (an angelfish, a turtle, a whale, a jellyfish, and a lobster) stick out from the side of the book; these are made from a variety of materials that allow a baby to feel bumps, gritty glitter, ribbing, and smooth surfaces. Some tails also make a crinkling noise when squeezed, adding more sensory stimulation. Even when no caregiver is available to read the book aloud, a baby can explore the touch and sounds (and tastes, of course) of the tails to their heart’s delight.—Katie L. Burke

The Magical Yet, by Angela DiTerlizzi. Illustrated by Lorena Alvarez. Little, Brown Books, 2020. $17.99.

Once you get a Yet, you can do anything, according to this uplifting, Seussian-style book for younger children. It uses small, adorable characters, called Yets, to show kids that even if you can’t “yet” do something, practice and perseverance will get you there. The rhyming narrative emphasizes that you can fail lots of times, and some skills can take years to learn; success is all about keeping at it (with the help of your own personal Yet!). The theme that we learn from our mistakes and have a lifetime in which to improve our skills makes this book appropriate for budding scientists. My kids found the message to be inspiring and confidence-building. Patience and regular practice to develop skill are difficult for kids, but imagining that they have their own personal Yet cheering them on could help them stick with whatever isn’t easy for them.—Fenella Saunders

What If You Had an Animal Tongue!?, by Sandra Markle. Illustrated by Howard McWilliam. Scholastic, 2020. $5.99. Ages 4 to 8 years.

This fun book is part of a series that imagines what young kids could do if their body parts were replaced with ones found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. What if you could have the tongue of, say, a Komodo dragon, an okapi, a red-bellied woodpecker, or a blue-tongued skink? These scenarios help kids learn about the many different uses tongues can have for animals that live lives very different from our own. Providing prompts for the imagination, the book invites kids to pretend that their tongues have all sorts of superpowers, allowing them to detect fresh-baked cookies from miles away and to catch out-of-reach frisbees on their gooey tongue tips. By the end of the book, we learn that human tongues are special too, and great at what humans need to do. So even if it might be fun to try out the tongue of a wild animal, we’re best off keeping our own!—Katie L. Burke

STEM Books for Adults

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Orbit, 2020. $28.00.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest science-fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, begins in the mid-2020s with the harrowing story of Frank May, who is working in India for an international aid organization when a brutal heat wave escalates and 20 million people die within a week. In the aftermath, the United Nations establishes the ministry of the book’s title, which is “charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.” Irish citizen Mary Murphy, director of the ministry, must persuade the economic and political forces driving the world over a cliff to look farther down the road than the next election or quarterly earnings report.

Using multiple viewpoints, interjecting documents and fables and scraps of memoir from a dozen points of view, Robinson creates a multifaceted picture of the next 30 years. The ministry tries persuasion, international agreements, economic incentives, geoengineering. Frank, damaged by what he experienced in India, becomes an ecoterrorist. Mary argues with bankers and bureaucrats. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere keep rising. When persuasion fails and legislation is inadequate, some people start shooting down airliners to discourage air travel and assassinating the CEOs of banks and fossil fuel conglomerates. The question of whether such actions are justified is left open.

This big, fascinating novel covers a lot of ground and is crammed with science and speculations. It asks real moral questions. In the end, The Ministry for the Future says that yes, the world can be saved—but only at a cost that so far we have been unwilling to pay.—John Kessel

Failed State, by Christopher Brown. Harper Voyager, 2020. $16.99.

Given the political turmoil the United States has seen recently, it’s all too easy to imagine dystopia. In two previous sci-fi novels, Tropic of Kansas and Rule of Capture, Christopher Brown has shown the environmental and political troubles that lie ahead. Failed State, the stand-alone third book of the trilogy, takes on the task of finding a way through that turmoil to a better future.

The book begins in a United States in tatters after years of conflict following the refusal of an authoritarian U.S. President to leave office after losing reelection; that government has recently been overthrown, and the recalcitrant president has been arrested. During those years of conflict, a tentative green utopia has emerged in New Orleans, where experiments were conducted to develop genetically modified plants that could reverse the ecological depredations of the previous hundred years. With the help of these plants, the city is returning to a balance with the environment; it is a place where trees have rights and lawyers go to court on the behalf of ecosystems. But New Orleans is now engaged in a struggle to prevent multinational corporations from taking away its control over use of the GMO plants.

At the center of the story is a down-on-his-luck Dallas lawyer, Donny Kimoe, who once fought to help establish the New Orleans experiment but was banished from that polity for trying to work through a U.S. legal system tilted in the favor of the rich and powerful. Like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Kimoe has troubles that mount as he moves among the poor and the powerful, within the legal system and without. Brown, an attorney himself, uses the character to wryly examine the difference between law and justice. Failed State is a political thriller and courtroom drama, but it moves beyond those genres to point to a path from dystopia to a place of hope.—John Kessel

How to Astronaut: An Insider’s Guide to Leaving the Planet, by Terry Virts. Workman Publishing, 2020. $27.95.

There are plenty of books about space travel, and plenty of do-it-yourself books about how to learn new skills, but retired NASA astronaut Terry Virts had the inspired idea to combine the two into something fresh and fun. He knows his material: Virts was the pilot on the STS-130 space shuttle flight and was the commander of Expedition 43 aboard the International Space Station. He also achieved a bit of social-media fame for giving the Vulcan salute from Earth orbit after the death of Leonard Nimoy.

Part of what is striking about How to Astronaut is how little time is actually spent in space compared with the enormous effort spent preparing to fly and dealing with the aftermath. And much of the training process bears little resemblance to the grimacing runs in high-g simulators that you might remember from astronaut-themed movies. Virts had to learn about the dangers of different types of bears while attending National Outdoor Leadership School in Alaska, struggle with Russian-language lessons, and force himself to pee in a diaper while lying in a bathtub in case he needed to use that skill for real during a spacewalk.

Much of the book deals with actual adventures in space, but even those elements of the process are told in a humble, disarming style—as when Virts faced one of his most daunting trials: giving a zero-g haircut to his very fashionable Expedition 43 crewmate, Samantha Cristoforetti. He also writes frankly about the challenges of bureaucracy, politics, solitude, and even a religious crisis. Virts can’t actually tell you how to be an astronaut; the only way to do it is to do it. But over 51 witty and heartfelt chapters, he does an impressive job of making you feel like you were doing it right there with him.—Corey S. Powell

Earth Almanac: Nature’s Calendar for Year-Round Discovery, by Ken Keffer. Mountaineers Books, 2020. $24.95.

Although recent events have forced many of us to spend much of our time indoors and in isolation, we are still part of an everchanging natural world that continues to evolve as it moves through repeated yearly patterns. Naturalist Ken Keffer’s Earth Almanac is a welcome doorway to that world and would make an excellent gift for anyone seeking to connect with nature and its curiosities. It provides brief daily entries filled with gripping facts about natural history and seasonal patterns; reading them unveils the interdependence of various forms of life and the environment. These synopses are nicely complemented by the delightful drawings of Jeremy Collins.

The book begins not on January 1 but on December 21, the first day of winter. Some of the daily entries relate directly to the season at hand (snowbirds, reindeer lichen, the Christmas Bird Count, mistletoe, frogs whose blood freezes in cold temperatures, hoarfrost), but others do not (armadillos, palm trees, bayous, bioluminescence, dark-sky parks, citizen science projects, and biographical sketches of famous naturalists). Each entry is about the length of this review and would go down well with a cup of morning coffee or evening tea.—Efraín E. Rivera-Serrano

Spiders of the World: A Natural History, edited by Norman I. Platnick. Princeton University Press, 2020. $29.95.

Books about spiders may not be on everyone’s holiday list, but the unique natural history of these creatures is more engrossing than most people realize. Spiders are incredibly diverse, with an array of evolutionary adaptations that have allowed them to thrive on every continent except Antarctica; there are more species of spiders (about 48,000) than of all vertebrates combined (about 40,000). Spiders of the World is a fitting homage to this underappreciated order. It will fascinate readers new to spiders and has enough scientific detail to be of interest to arachnologists and naturalists as well.

A brief introduction devoted to the features and anatomy of spiders is followed by a description of the major groupings of spider families. The book then embarks on a lavishly illustrated tour of a selection of 117 representative genera found across the globe. Readers are sure to learn surprising facts about an assortment of araneids that includes exotic, dazzling spiders as well as the more familiar inhabitants of our homes and gardens. The profile of each genus includes a map of its distribution, quick facts about its habitat and characteristics, and a description of its natural history that is laden with intriguing tidbits. The text is readable, precise, and remarkably detailed, but what really makes this book stand out are the illustrations: Vivid color photographs of various species adorn nearly every page, and there are several scanning electron microscope images of spider anatomy, which I found particularly striking and interesting.—Henri Feola

The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes from the Man Who Lived in Season, edited by Laura Dassow Walls. University of Chicago Press, 2020. $12.

Henry David Thoreau’s writings about nature and transcendentalism are a valuable trove that one could spend a lifetime studying. Laura Dassow Walls (who was interviewed in the July–August 2017 issue about her well-regarded biography of the essayist and philosopher) has done that work, and now she has compiled a year’s worth of short passages from Thoreau that remind readers of the rhythms of the seasons. The Daily Henry David Thoreau offers for each month and every day of that month a short quote written during that month in the mid-1800s. This gateway into Thoreau’s perspective offers daily inspiration for modern-day transcendentalists and people who keep nature journals of their own.

The entry for New Year’s Day (written on January 30, 1854) notes a temperature of 13 degrees below zero; entries for March mention melting snow, the first spring birds and insects, the first croak of a wood frog, and the first green leaves of plants. Thoreau’s careful daily documentations of the natural world have been used to study climate change, a reminder that bearing witness to the natural world can be a practice that may have value to future generations.

In a lovely, brief foreword, Walls sets up the premise for this collection: “living in season,” a concept Thoreau was exploring in works left unfinished when he died. “These quotes invite us to pay full attention to each moment as it passes,” writes Walls. For Thoreau, this immersion was a metaphysical practice and a political practice, in addition to being an artistic and scientific pursuit. “Globalization was already overturning his landscape,” Walls notes. “Living in season became Thoreau’s way of fighting back.” Indeed, this concept of living in season as a form of bearing witness is a tradition carried forward in our most recent issue of American Scientist, in a personal essay by plant biologist Beronda Montgomery. This meditative read provides daily encouragement to return to bearing witness to the present moment and to not ignore the profundity of our own experiences and the life around us.—Katie L. Burke

What Is a Bird? An Exploration of Anatomy, Physiology, Behavior, and Ecology, edited by Tony D. Williams. Princeton University Press, 2020. $35.

This handsome coffee-table book with hundreds of color illustrations aims to answer the sorts of questions an armchair naturalist might have about the biology of birds: Why are they so diverse in structure? How have they adapted to such a wide range of habitats? How do they communicate? Why do some species migrate and others stay put? Ten chapters addressing such questions are authored by experts in relevant fields. Dipping into the book, you’ll discover fascinating facts about a wide range of topics, including complex mechanisms of feather coloration, the deep evolutionary history of birds going back before the origin of flight, sex differences in the brains of songbirds, the ability of migrating birds to sleep on the wing, and why the first-laid egg of a crested penguin is much smaller than the second-laid egg. Soon you may find yourself reading straight through and learning a great deal about ornithology.—Flora Taylor

Botanicum Medicinale: A Modern Herbal of Medicinal Plants, by Catherine Whitlock. The MIT Press, 2020. $29.95.

About 40 percent of pharmaceutical drugs are derived from plants, including many agents for the management of conditions ranging from acute pain and insomnia to diabetes and cancer.

Botanicum Medicinale is a richly illustrated guide to 100 medicinal plants and what they have to offer to alleviate the symptoms of common medical conditions. The book opens with a brief historical overview of herbal medicine and plant chemistry. Then a two-page spread is devoted to each of the 100 plants covered. The left-hand page contains a stock photo of a full-color drawing of the plant and a bulleted list of its key uses; the facing page contains discussions of classification and habitat, harvesting, and medical uses, along with cautionary notes. The plants are discussed in alphabetical order but have been conveniently indexed by their medical use. However, any readers interested in using herbal medicines to promote their own health should be sure to heed not only the cautionary notes but the disclaimer in the introduction that “this book does not constitute medical advice.” Whitlock advises that such advice should be sought instead from a health practitioner, preferably someone with a university degree in herbal medicine.—Efraín E. Rivera-Serrano

A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, by Sean B. Carroll. Princeton University Press, 2020. $22.95.

Evolutionary developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll is a talented storyteller and the author of a number of successful books about science for a general audience. His latest book, A Series of Fortunate Events, is about the role chance has played in shaping the conditions of life and in generating the adaptations that living creatures have needed to survive. Entertaining anecdotes about what some well-known people (scientists, writers, comedians) have had to say about chance are intermixed with this scientific information.

Carroll begins by unpacking some chance external events (shifts in plate tectonics, for instance) that had big effects on life on Earth. In one of the most interesting chapters in the book, he recounts in transfixing detail the story of how scientists figured out that an asteroid was the cause of the extinction of about three-fourths of all species at the end of the Cretaceous period about 66 million years ago. The collision was a crucial chance event, because it led to the rise of mammals, primates, and our own species.

Next the book considers the random mutations inside living organisms that have allowed them to adapt to the conditions that resulted from chance events such as that asteroid impact. Carroll presents a brief history of the theory of evolution and natural selection and shows that mutations are “a feature, not a bug” in DNA. He then describes the creative role that random mutations played in such things as the ability of Antarctic fish to withstand extreme cold.

Finally, Carroll looks at the role biological chance plays in the life of an individual. He explains how unique individuals are created when the union of a sperm and an egg combines chromosomes in 1 of 72 trillion possible ways. And then he shows that a series of mutations can have cumulative effects on a person—by creating a “staircase” that leads to cancer, for example.

The scientific information Carroll conveys is sometimes complex, but the book is actually a fairly quick read; during some passages, I couldn’t put it down. If you’re at all interested in science, you’ll keep turning these pages.—Flora Taylor

Forests Adrift: Currents Shaping the Future of Northeastern Trees, by Charles D. Canham. Yale University Press, 2020. $28.

Have you ever stared at your neighborhood and asked yourself, “I wonder what was here before all of this?” Perhaps you have pictured a pristine primeval forest. Have you stared at a forest that has been disturbed by human activity and wondered what could be done to return it to a pristine state? In Forests Adrift, ecologist Charles Canham looks at where forests have been and where they are headed, and suggests that we should abandon the idea that any forest can be returned to a primeval steady state in the foreseeable future. We should accept instead, he says, that forests are “adrift” and being buffeted by a variety of forces, some of which are unpredictable. Taking the northeastern United States as his focus, he has looked at the rates of birth, growth, and death of individual tree species and at the impact on them of human influences as he considers how the distribution and abundance of those species might change over time.

Canham discusses how the ecological footprints of various types of trees differ and overlap, and the value in thinking in terms of how “neighborhoods” within a forest vary. He describes the landscape of the northeastern United States before the arrival of settlers from Europe. And then he devotes a chapter each to a number of important historical influences on forests, including agricultural clearing, fire suppression, air pollution, pathogens, and climate change. It will take centuries to millennia for forests to recover from the damage that has already been done to them, Canham says; nevertheless, our tree species having evolved to tolerate stressful conditions, he is hopeful that forests will prove “seaworthy” amid the currents he has described.—Efraín E. Rivera-Serrano

Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, by Kevin Peter Hand. Princeton University Press, 2020. $27.95.

Trying to sneak a bottle of salt water through airport security does not seem like an obvious way to search for alien life. Then again, nothing about how to conduct that search seems obvious—or at least, it shouldn’t, as planetary scientist Kevin Peter Hand explains in his provocative new book, Alien Oceans. If we are looking for something completely different from life on Earth, we need to be prepared to find it in unfamiliar places and in unfamiliar forms. Unlike movie aliens, actual extraterrestrial organisms might not breathe air. They might not live on the surface of a planet. They might not live on a planet at all.

The closest thing we’ve found to a universal rule of biology, Hand writes, is that “water is essential to all life as we know it.” And recent discoveries show that most of the liquid water in the solar system is hidden in places where, until recently, nobody even thought to look: in vast pools inside the icy moons of the outer solar system. Those “alien oceans” are the reason why Hand was playing a game of chicken with airport security. Salt water deflects a magnetic field in ways that can set off a metal detector. It can also set off the magnetic detector on a spacecraft, which is how the Galileo probe originally found evidence of a vast, salty ocean just beneath the frozen crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Hand carried the bottle with him, hoping to trigger airport the security alarm and thereby convince himself that the alarm sent back by Galileo was equally real—a scientist’s version of pinching his arm to make sure he’s not dreaming.

Recent studies not only confirm Europa’s ocean, they also show that similar oceans probably exist inside at least five other moons; one of them, Saturn’s moon Enceladus, even shoots out icy geysers laced with carbon compounds. As for whether those moons could support life, and how we would find it if they do, those questions fill out the rest of the Alien Oceans story. It’s a tale full of scientific twists, and Hand proves an exemplary guide: never going quite where you expect him to go and confidently leading you to ideas that are, as you’d hope, not at all obvious.—Corey S. Powell

Gardening with Drought-Friendly Plants, by Tony Hall. Kew Publishing, 2020. $35.

In light of climate change and rising global temperatures, gardeners are increasingly on the lookout for plants that are able to survive in warmer, drier summers without much watering. In this book, Tony Hall, the senior arboretum and gardens manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in greater London, profiles more than 200 such plants. Brief introductory chapters touch on global warming, plant adaptations to harsh conditions, low-maintenance gardens, and small gardens; the plant profiles follow. Each entry includes the plant’s botanical classification, physical description, time of flowering, sun and shade requirements, and hardiness. A wide variety of plant types are included, grouped into the following categories: annuals and biennials, bulbs, climbers, grasses, palms, perennials, shrubs, succulents, and trees.

Do you have a dry outdoor space and not know where to start? The book has four handy tables: One lists plants under the month of the year during which they flower; another lists plants by flower color or foliage color; still another lists plants that have fragrant flowers or fragrant foliage; and the last lists plants attractive to wildlife. All you have to bring is your landscape imagination.—Efraín E. Rivera-Serrano

Tales from the Ant World, by Edward O. Wilson. Liveright Publishing, 2020. $26.95.

Pulitzer Prize–winning myrmecologist Edward O. Wilson has written a brief, charming memoir about his lifetime with ants, framing it as a physical and intellectual adventure story. In the introduction, he says that he hopes his Tales from the Ant World will be read by students interested in pursuing a scientific career.

After presenting the reader with four pages of appalling but intriguing facts about ants, Wilson launches into a chronological account of his peripatetic childhood. His only ambition from an early age was to become an expert in natural history. As an only child, he spent a lot of time alone and took refuge in the natural world. At age 8, he conducted a biodiversity inventory of sorts, collecting every kind of insect he could find in his neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida. Soon he was examining organisms under a microscope he received as a Christmas gift. He loved exploring natural environments, from the woods and pastures of Rock Creek Park to overgrown vacant lots, marshes, and swamps in Alabama. At age 16 in Decatur, Georgia, he believed that it would be advantageous to his career to decide as soon as possible what type of insect to focus upon. Fortuitously, some miniature army ants appeared in his backyard. Not long afterward he enrolled at the University of Alabama, where ants soon became his life’s work.

At that point, the narrative ceases to be chronological and ants take center stage. We find out how they communicate, how they evolved to occupy almost every corner of the globe, and how they find their way home after foraging for food. Many chapters focus on a particular type of ant, with tidbits of autobiography mixed in. A few chapters are devoted to Wilson’s sometimes dramatic encounters with fire ants; fierce leafcutters, Matabele warrior ants in Africa, and the hell ants that lived among the dinosaurs are among the other types discussed in some detail. We learn about what myrmecologists do in the field, as we get glimpses of Wilson studying ant behavior in exotic locales such as Mozambique and the Australian outback, and about what they do in the laboratory with the species they bring back from the field.

This affable account of a fulfilling life devoted to a scientific passion will appeal to anyone interested in the natural world. It would make a particularly good gift for a teenager contemplating career paths.—Flora Taylor

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, by Jonathan C. Slaght. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. $28.

In Owls of the Eastern Ice, wildlife conservationist Jonathan Slaght takes the reader along on the adventure of a lifetime: a trip to study the mysterious Blakiston’s fish owl in the remote wilderness of Primorye Province in eastern Russia. Slaght had been blown away by his first encounter with the fish owl when he served in the Peace Corps in Primorye. “It seemed almost too big and too comical to be a real bird,” he says, “as if someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear, then propped the dazed beast in the tree.” Not much was known about this enormous owl or how it survives in its harsh environment. So later, as a graduate student, Slaght launched the five-year study of Primorye’s fish owls described in the book; the goal of the study was to form a conservation plan for this endangered species.

Slaght is a superb storyteller, and his account of the challenges of tracking, capturing, tagging with transmitters, and gathering data about the fish owls in Primorye’s wild, riparian forests is colorful. Equally colorful are Slaght’s Russian research assistants and the residents of Primorye they encounter. “There are two reliable ways to get a Russian man to respect you,” Slaght says. “The first is to consume voluminous amounts of vodka and bond over the honesty exposed by the subsequent drunkenness, and the other is to go toe-to-toe in a banya.” Sometimes lodging with locals and sometimes camping along the way, Slaght and his team travel rough terrain in inhospitable conditions to follow fish owl mated pairs and their offspring, documenting their habitats from the Samarga River to the Serebryanka River at Terney.

Early in the book he describes “the quiet violence of this place.” A roe deer escapes being hunted by a Laika dog only to perish in the icy river as the swift current takes it under the ice. Slaght observes that “Primeval dichotomies still outlined existence on the Samarga: hungry or satiated, frozen or flowing, living or dead. . . . The line between life and death here could be measured in the thickness of river ice.”

Immersed in this beautifully written account of the team’s failures and successes, you will root for the continued flourishing of the fish owls and other inhabitants of wild Primorye.—Barbara Aulicino

Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles, by Jason Rosenhouse. Princeton University Press, 2020. $29.95.

“Whatever the precise subject matter, if the word ‘logic’ is in the title, it is likely not the sort of book most people would enjoy reading.” Jason Rosenhouse makes this disarming declaration in the first chapter of Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles. He risks scaring readers away from his own work, although “logic” appears only in the subtitle of his book, and there it is conjoined with “puzzles,” a much less intimidating term.

There is plenty of logic in these pages. Be prepared for syllogisms and sorites, categorical propositions and the law of the excluded middle. But there are also lots of puzzles. Here’s one borrowed from Lewis Carroll:

1. Babies are illogical.
2. No person is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3. Illogical persons are despised.

What can you conclude from these three peculiar premises? The basic principles needed to solve such problems were known to Aristotle, but Carroll contributed systematic methods of applying those tools, as well as a wealth of whimsical examples. To this mix Rosenhouse adds historical context and some tart opinions on just which parts of logic retain some utility for denizens of the 21st century. (The answer to Carroll’s puzzle: Babies cannot manage crocodiles.)

Carroll’s puzzles are the main subject of the first third of Games for Your Mind. Then we move on to the work of the late Raymond Smullyan, who had no end of fun with knights and knaves. Smullyan’s knights always tell the truth, and his knaves always lie. It follows, by ineluctable logic, that in this realm no one can ever utter the statement “I am a knave.”  

A knight can’t say it because it would be false; a knave can’t say it because it would be true. These silly-sounding antics of tongue-tied knights and knaves lead into some deep waters: They are related to Kurt Gödel’s theorem showing that the language of mathematics includes true propositions that it cannot prove.

Rosenhouse also offers a selection of his own puzzles, which focus on systems of logic where the distinction between truth and falsehood is less than perfectly clear. A statement might be neutral, or it could lie somewhere on a continuum of values between true and false. This blurring of the lines brings us closer to the world of familiar human behavior, where even inveterate liars occasionally tell the truth. Curiously, a dose of realism makes the puzzles harder to solve.

The puzzles in Games for Your Mind will appeal to anyone who enjoys this kind of mental exercise, but the book is more than a collection of brain-teasers. Rosenhouse is also keen to explain how the ancient and sober discipline of logic came to have a recreational branch—how it was “empuzzled.”—Brian Hayes

Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis, by Emily Willingham. Avery, 2020. $27.

This book about the biology of animal penises is ultimately also a criticism of science and society for their focus on all things phallic to everyone’s detriment. Science writer Emily Willingham, who is aware that a book all about penises that says we focus too much on penises is a paradox, explains that she intends the book to serve as a “Trojan horse” (her words) for “contextualizing our genitalia among other organs of sexual behavior.” She uses the subject matter as a springboard to a discussion of not only the study of sex in evolutionary biology, but also discrimination and violence against women and LGBTQ+ people in STEM research and society.

In the introduction, Willingham discusses what science and society’s treatment of the penis has to do with sexual assault and the #MeToo movement. She notes that the wide array of sexual organs in the animal kingdom argues against the pervasive idea that “nature promotes male dominance and supremacy, often by way of the penis.” And she points out the flawed arguments and studies behind this type of scientific-sounding misogyny.

Despite the seriousness of her aims, Willingham doesn’t hesitate to have fun with the entertaining aspects of this subject matter. She describes with panache the amazing diversity of penis anatomy and sexual biology in the animal kingdom, covering the smallest, largest, most complex, most weaponized, and weirdest penises known to date. Her focus is actually on intromitta (the broader term for appendages that are inserted to deliver sperm or eggs), some of which are not technically penises. She shows a particular fondness for arthropod intromitta (a topic sure to appeal to evolutionary biologists, entomologists, and arachnologists), devotes several pages to Charles Darwin’s beloved barnacles, and provides some truly strange examples of mating biology, with the leopard slug’s remarkable use of a penis taking the cake. The biological information in the book is delivered with a mix of snark and incisive wit that never shies away from a good double entendre.

Willingham also points out the ridiculous aspects of some penis research, which has been conducted mostly by men, many of them making assumptions to which a woman scientist would surely raise an eyebrow. One major theme of the book is how skewed scientific understanding of sex, genitalia, and gender can become when everyone conducting the research has the same gender and sexual orientation—and how much scientific understanding has changed since substantial numbers of women started earning doctorates in related fields. Willingham also emphasizes the need to study the evolution of female genitalia in the animal kingdom; if vaginas are ever studied as much penises have been, she says, major discoveries will likely result. Ultimately Willingham concludes that scientists who want to understand sex, gender, and sexual behavior in humans need to focus on another organ: the human brain.

This penetrating book, with its strong sense of justice, will appeal to many inquisitive minds. If you give it as a gift this holiday season, you may want to sing to the lucky recipient (à la Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg in their viral Saturday Night Live skit), “It’s a book in a box!”—Katie L. Burke