Our Most Favorite Natural History Books

Karisia's bookshelf: karisia-best-natural-history-books

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

by David Quammen

Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

by Thomas Halliday

The Diversity of Life

by Edward O. Wilson

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Locked in Time: Animal Behavior Unearthed in 50 Extraordinary Fossils

by Dean R. Lomax

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us

by Richard O. Prum

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples

by Tim Flannery

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

The World Without Us

by Alan Weisman

Europe: A Natural History

by Tim Flannery

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

by Jared Diamond

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

by Richard Dawkins

Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

by Carl Zimmer

The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World's Most Misunderstood Mammals

by Merlin Tuttle

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

by Marcia Bjornerud

The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

by Clive Finlayson

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs

by Brian Switek

An Indomitable Beast: The Remarkable Journey of the Jaguar

by Alan Rabinowitz

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

by David George Haskell

Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

by Paul Greenberg

Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects

by Scott Richard Shaw

Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World

by Richard C. Francis

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

by Charles C. Mann

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy

by William Von Hippel

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

by Stephen Brusatte

The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution

by Donald R. Prothero

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

Dinosaur Discoveries

by William Stout

The Genius of Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World

by Anders Halverson

Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions

by Mark W. Moffett

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl

by Jonathan C. Slaght

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

by Jonathan Weiner

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann