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When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them. In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom. The Elephant Whisperer is a heartwarming, exciting, funny, and sometimes sad account of Anthony's experiences with these huge yet sympathetic creatures. Set against the background of life on an African game reserve, with unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, it is a delightful book that will appeal to animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere. |
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“A compelling case” that humans are not the only species with moral intelligence, based on years of research into animal behavior ( Discover ).   Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German zoo who spent days mourning the death of her baby? Or a wild female elephant who cared for a younger one after she was injured by a rambunctious teenage male? Or a rat who refused to push a lever for food when he saw that doing so caused another rat to be shocked? Aren’t these clear signs that animals have recognizable emotions and moral intelligence? With  Wild Justice  Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce unequivocally answer yes. Marrying years of behavioral and cognitive research with compelling and moving anecdotes, Bekoff and Pierce reveal that animals exhibit a broad repertoire of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Underlying these behaviors is a complex and nuanced range of emotions, backed by a high degree of intelligence and surprising behavioral flexibility. Animals, in short, are incredibly adept social beings, relying on rules of conduct to navigate intricate social networks that are essential to their survival. Ultimately, Bekoff and Pierce draw the astonishing conclusion that there is no moral gap between humans and other species: morality is an evolved trait that we unquestionably share with other social mammals. Sure to be controversial,  Wild Justice  offers not just cutting-edge science but a provocative call to rethink our relationship with—and our responsibilities toward—our fellow animals.   “This well-thought-out, provocative work will give scientific and lay readers plenty of examples to rethink and open new paths of research into the lives and minds of animals.” ― Choice   “I will never be able to look at a dog or a cat, or a cow or a coyote for that matter, in the same way again.” ― Telegraph   “An excellent introduction to a new science.” — Booklist |
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Bestselling author and worst-drawing artist Ben Orlin expands his oeuvre with this interactive collection of mathematical games. With 70-plus games, each taking a minute to learn and a lifetime to master, this treasure trove will delight, educate, and entertain. From beloved math popularizer Ben Orlin comes a masterfully compiled collection of dozens of playable mathematical games. This ultimate game chest draws on mathematical curios, childhood classics, and soon-to-be classics, each hand-chosen to be (1) fun, (2) thought-provoking, and (3) easy to play. With just paper, pens, and the occasional handful of coins, you and a partner can enjoy hours of fun—and hours of challenge. Orlin’s sly humor, expansive knowledge, and so-bad-they’re-good drawings show us how simple rules summon our best thinking. Games include: Ultimate Tic-Tac-ToeSproutsBattleshipQuantum Go FishDots and BoxesBlack HoleOrder and ChaosSequenciumPaper BoxingPropheciesArpeggiosBankerFrancoprussian LabyrinthCats and DogsAnd many more. |
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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing • Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize • Winner of the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize • Winner of the 2024 Lane Anderson Award • Finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction • Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction • One of the New York Times ’ Top Ten Books of The Year • Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction  A stunning account of the colossal wildfire at Fort McMurray, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce . Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian • TIME • The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • Financial Times • CBC • Smithsonian • Air Mail Weekly • Slate • NPR • Toronto Star • The Washington Post • The Times • Orion Magazine In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.     For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.     With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun. |
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"Engaging. . . . Balcombe demonstrate[s] that animals do indeed experience the world as richly as us and may well feel and suffer more intensely than we do.” — New Scientist For centuries, the idea that animals had feelings was either dismissed or considered heresy. Today, that's all changing. New scientific studies of animal behavior reveal perceptions, intelligences, awareness and social skills that would have been deemed fantasy a generation ago. The implications make our troubled relationship to animals one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. Jonathan Balcombe, animal behaviorist and author of the critically acclaimed Pleasurable Kingdom , draws on the latest research to reveal the full gamut of animal experience—from emotions, to problem solving, to moral judgment. Balcombe highlights animal traits we have disregarded until now: their nuanced understanding of social dynamics, their consideration for others, and their strong tendency to avoid violent conflict. Did you know that dogs recognize unfairness and that rats practice random acts of kindness? Did you know that chimpanzees can trounce humans in short-term memory games? Or that fishes distinguish good guys from cheaters, and that birds are susceptible to mood swings such as depression and optimism? With vivid stories and entertaining anecdotes, Balcombe gives the human pedestal a strong shake while opening the door into the inner lives of the animals themselves. “Balcombe builds a compelling case for blurring the line between animal and human perception. . . . A passionate and persuasive argument for vegetarianism on both humanitarian and environmental grounds.” — Publishers Weekly “Graceful prose makes this an excellent introduction to the examination of animal minds.” — Booklist |
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A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR   “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again. |
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By the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a "brilliant" and "beautifully told" new history of mammals, illuminating the lost story of the extraordinary family tree that led to us [New Scientist; The Times UK] National Bestseller • Top 10 Nonfiction of the Year: Kirkus • Best Science Book of the Year: The Times UK We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals. Indeed humankind and many of the beloved fellow mammals we share the planet with today—lions, whales, dogs—represent only the few survivors of a sprawling and astonishing family tree that has been pruned by time and mass extinctions. How did we get here? In his acclaimed bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs—hailed as “the ultimate dinosaur biography” by Scientific American—American paleontologist Steve Brusatte enchanted readers with his definitive history of the dinosaurs. Now, picking up the narrative in the ashes of the extinction event that doomed T-rex and its kind, Brusatte explores the remarkable story of the family of animals that inherited the Earth—mammals— and brilliantly reveals that their story is every bit as fascinating and complex as that of the dinosaurs. Beginning with the earliest days of our lineage some 325 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the astonishingly diverse range of animals that dominate today’s Earth. Brusatte also brings alive the lost worlds mammals inhabited through time, from ice ages to volcanic catastrophes. Entwined in this story is the detective work he and other scientists have done to piece together our understanding using fossil clues and cutting-edge technology. A sterling example of scientific storytelling by one of our finest young researchers, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals illustrates how this incredible history laid the foundation for today’s world, for us, and our future. |
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AN INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Memory is far more than a record of the past—in this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world's top memory researchers reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from learning and decision-making to trauma and healing, and helps us take control of our unconscious mind to live happier, more deliberate lives. A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In short, the memory is not what we think it is—a repository of the past that we tap into as we wish. It is actually a highly transformative power, active at all times, that shapes our present in often secretive and sometimes destructive ways.  We are in many ways creatures of memory and only when we understand the mechanisms of memory can we truly understand ourselves and our motivations, and use our knowledge of those mechanisms to our advantage while avoiding their pitfalls. Why We Remember teaches the principles behind memory storage and retrieval and explains how our memories are always changing. It reveals how these processes affect what we think we know about ourselves and how we make decisions. It shows that the real power of psychotherapy isn't to remember what happened, but to change our interpretations of those events, so we can heal and grow.  Memory is designed to be selective, meaningful and malleable. When we understand how memory works, we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can not only remember more—we can remember better. |
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Climate change is the environmental, political, and societal challenge of our time.  Yet some of us throw up our hands and say Canada is a cold country that only produces 2% of global emissions and we need our oil-and-gas industry—nothing can or should be done. Others argue just as vehemently that we are doomed unless we radically reduce emissions by keeping our resources in the ground and turning our backs on economic growth. Meanwhile our governments talk about the need for an energy transition and achieve little. The truth is that we do have a climate problem, we do need fossil fuels (for the foreseeable future), and we do have to make changes. The good news, argues Andrew Leach in the first inaugural McGill/Max Bell Lecture, is that we have the tools and the power to make a real difference. The question is: are we up to the challenge? |
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Rocks, Gems, and Minerals is a field guide to 80 of the most common and sought-after rocks, gems, and minerals hidden throughout North America. Conveniently sized to fit in your pocket and featuring full-color, detailed photographs, this informative guide makes it easy to identify rocks in your backyard and beyond. Also included is an introduction that covers fundamental geology information and interesting facts. This is the essential source when you're out in the field, both informative and beautiful to peruse. |
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For readers of Giulia Enders’ Gut and Bill Bryson’s The Body , a surprising, witty and sparkling exploration of the teeming microbiome of possibility in human feces from microbiologist and science journalist Bryn Nelson. The future is sh*t: the literal kind. For most of human history we’ve been, well, disinclined to take a closer look at our body’s natural product—the complex antihero of this story—save for gleaning some prophecy of our own health. But if we were to take more than a passing look at our poop, we would spy a veritable cornucopia of possibilities. We would see potent medicine, sustainable power, and natural fertilizer to restore the world’s depleted lands. We would spy a time capsule of evidence for understanding past lives and murderous ends. We would glimpse effective ways of measuring and improving human health from the cradle to the grave, early warnings of community outbreaks like Covid-19, and new means of identifying environmental harm—and then reversing it. Flush is both an urgent exploration of the world’s single most squandered natural resource, and a cri de coeur (or cri de colon?) for the vast, hidden value in our “waste.” Award-winning journalist and microbiologist Bryn Nelson, PhD, leads readers through the colon and beyond with infectious enthusiasm, helping to usher in a necessary mental shift that could restore our balance with the rest of the planet and save us from ourselves. Unlocking poop’s enormous potential will require us to overcome our shame and disgust and embrace our role as the producers and architects of a more circular economy in which lowly byproducts become our species’ salvation. Locked within you is a medicine cabinet, a biogas pipeline, a glass of drinking water, a mound of fuel briquettes; it’s time to open the doors (carefully!). A dose of medicine, a glass of water, a gallon of rocket fuel, an acre of soil: sometimes hope arrives in surprising packages. |
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Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the earth's future. Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder, and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet—the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate, and creates the air we breathe. This book showcase the oceans' remarkable resilience: they can, and in some cases have, recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.   Drawing a course across David Attenborough's own lifetime, Ocean takes readers on an adventure-laden voyage through eight unique ocean habitats, countless intriguing species, and the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years, to a future vision of a fully restored marine world—one even more spectacular than we could possibly hope for. Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet. It is a book almost a century in the making, but one that has never been more urgently needed.   |
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In a fascinating story of discovery and science, we meet a remote population of wolves unafraid of humans.   For parts of twenty-four summers, wolf biologist L. David Mech lived with a group of wolves on Ellesmere Island, some six hundred miles from the North Pole. Elsewhere, most wolves flee from even the scent of humans, but these animals, evolving relatively free from human persecution, are unafraid. Having already spent twenty-eight years studying other populations of wolves more remotely by aircraft, snow-tracking, live-trapping, and radio-tracking, Mech was primed to join their activities up close and record their interactions with each other. This book tells the remarkable story of what Mech—and the researchers who followed him—have learned while living among the wolves.   The Ellesmere wolves were so unconcerned with Mech’s presence that they allowed him to camp near their den and to sit on his all-terrain vehicle as he observed them, watching packs as large as seven adults and six pups go about their normal activities. In these extraordinarily close quarters, a pup untying his bootlace or an adult sniffing his gloved hand was just part of daily life. Mech accompanied the wolves on their travels and watched as they hunted muskoxen and arctic hares. By achieving the same kind of intimacy with his wild hosts’ every action that we might experience living with domesticated dogs, Mech gained new insights into common but rarely studied behaviors like pup feeding, food caching, howling, and scent-marking. After Mech’s time at Ellesmere ended, his coauthors and fellow wolf researchers Morgan Anderson and H. Dean Cluff spent parts of four summers studying the wolves via radio collars, further illuminating the creatures’ movements and ecology. This book synthesizes their findings, offering both a compelling scientific overview of the animals’ behavior—from hunting to living in packs to rearing pups—and a tale of adventure and survival in the Arctic. |
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Nous savons de Newton qu'il fut celui qui découvrit la gravité, grâce au fameux mythe de la pomme tombée de l'arbre, propagé malicieusement par Voltaire. Nous savons moins quelle fut sa vie et c'est là le propos de James Gleick : nous faire mieux connaître ce génie qui s'intéressa à la fois aux mathématiques, à la physique et à l'astronomie. Au-delà d'un portrait historique, Gleick décortique l'abondante correspondance et les nombreux carnets non publiés de Newton pour souligner l'importance de ses travaux dans le domaine de la physique, de l'optique et de l'arithmétique, mais aussi de la théologie et de la philosophie. Il s'intéresse également à la personnalité et aux conflits intérieurs de l'homme : ses idées, ses ambitions, mais aussi sa discrétion, sa solitude, son refus des critiques, brossant ainsi un portrait à la fois fidèle et chaleureux de celui qui est à l'origine de la conception moderne du monde. « Dans un style clair, concis et ne manquant pas de poésie, Gleick nous donne ici une superbe biographie condensée d'un des génies les plus incontestés de la science et une de ses figures les plus troublantes. » Extrait de la préface de Trinh Xuan Thuan |
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Now a National Bestseller!  Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs. |
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The third edition of the comprehensive—and entertaining—gardening reference by the master horticulturalist. This is the long-awaited third edition of Allan Armitage’s masterpiece on garden perennials. Armitage’s extensive traveling, teaching, and trialing experiences provide a depth of understanding of the best ornamental perennials for North American gardens unparalleled by any other garden writer. One of the most definitive and conclusive books written about perennials, the first edition was designated as one of the best seventy-five books written in the last seventy-five years by the American Horticulture Society. Now the third edition of “The Big Perennial Book” (as it is fondly referred to by many practitioners) describes 3,600 species in 1224 pages. More than three hundred color photos complement detailed text filled with the author’s pointed observations of plant performance, cultivar selection, and current taxonomy. In addition, his trademark wit and passion are both in abundance, making reading as pleasurable as it is informative. |
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION • WINNER OF THE WRITERS’ TRUST NON-FICTION PRIZE “Absolutely spellbinding.” — The New York Times The environmental true-crime story of a glorious natural wonder, the man who destroyed it, and the fascinating, troubling context in which this act took place.  FEATURING A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR On a winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence in the mythic Queen Charlotte Islands. His victim was legendary: a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree, fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles. In a bizarre environmental protest, Hadwin attacked the tree with a chainsaw. Two days later, it fell, horrifying an entire community. Not only was the golden spruce a scientific marvel and a tourist attraction, it was sacred to the Haida people and beloved by local loggers. Shortly after confessing to the crime, Hadwin disappeared under suspicious circumstances and is missing to this day. As John Vaillant deftly braids together the strands of this thrilling mystery, he brings to life the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, the historical collision of Europeans and the Haida, and the harrowing world of logging—the most dangerous land-based job in North America. |
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Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going--next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup. Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right. |
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of "maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more. |
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality—not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. “A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” — The Wall Street Journal In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries. Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded. |
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New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith , ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people—from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists—agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the primary justification for religious faith. In this highly controversial book, Sam Harris seeks to link morality to the rest of human knowledge. Defining morality in terms of human and animal well-being, Harris argues that science can do more than tell how we are; it can, in principle, tell us how we ought to be. In his view, moral relativism is simply false—and comes at an increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our “culture wars,” Harris delivers a game-changing book about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation. |
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In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music—its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it—and the human brain. Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals: • How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world • Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre • That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise • How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature. |
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The Sea Around Us remains as fresh today as when it first appeared over six decades ago. Carson's genius for evoking the power and primacy of the world's bodies of water, combining the cosmic and the intimate, remains almost unmatched: the newly formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky; the centuries of nonstop rain that created the oceans; giant squids battling sperm whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface; the power of the tides moving 100 billion tons of water daily in one bay alone; the seismic waves known as tsunamis that periodically remind us of the oceans' overwhelmingly destructive power. The seas sustain human life and imperil it. Today, with the oceans endangered by the dumping of medical waste and ecological disasters such as the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, the gradual death of the Great Barrier Reef, and the melting of the polar ice caps, Carson's book provides a timely reminder of both the fragility and the centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it. Anyone who loves the sea, or who is concerned about our natural environment, will want to read, or re-read, this classic work. |
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In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field—gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease.   The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.   While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of “dysevolution,” a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. And finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment. (With charts and line drawings throughout.) |
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence." Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons. |
