May 2019 list by Bernadette LeRoy
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Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
A cutting-edge exploration of the biological roots of positive social behavior that reveals how human genes have countered violence and self-interest with equally inherent, society-building tendencies toward friendship, cooperation and learning.
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Down From the Mountain: The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear
by Bryce Andrews
The award-winning conservationist and author of Badluck Way documents the story of an endangered grizzly and how her struggles to raise her cubs in the face of climate change and shrinking wild lands reflect changing human values.
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Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe
by Ella Frances Sanders
An illustrated exploration of the principles, laws, and wonders that rule our universe, our solar system, our world, and our daily lives from the bestselling creator of Lost in Translation. A beautiful merging of art and science.
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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Insights into how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and robotics, are being developed through fervent ideologies that are threatening the diversity of human experience.
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Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
by Edward O. Wilson
Forming a 21st-century statement on Darwinian evolution, one shorn of “religious and political dogma,” the author offers a bold work of scientific thought and synthesis.
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The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
The epic story and ultimate big history of how human society evolved from intimate chimp communities into the sprawling civilizations of a world-dominating species. In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies.
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Our Planet
by Keith Scholey
A companion guide to the Netflix series showcases nature's beauty, the surprising lives of animals and the destruction that humans have wrought on wildlife and habitats, with photos of the world's rarest animals and previously unseen parts of Earth.
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Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees
by William Bryant Logan
Tree lovers will be drawn in by vast cultural and scientific references, and charmed by passages that read like prose poems. The book discusses how people once used trees as an endless and self-renewing source of food and building materials, and presents practical knowledge about how we can again learn to tend to them in this way.
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Supernavigators: Exploring the Wonders of How Animals Find Their Way
by David Barrie
Weaving interviews with leading experts on animal behavior with the groundbreaking discoveries of Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientists, Barrie introduces astounding animals of every stripe: Dung beetles that steer by the light of the Milky Way. Ants and bees that navigate using patterns of light invisible to humans. Sea turtles, spiny lobsters, and moths that find their way using Earth’s magnetic field. Salmon that return to their birthplace by following their noses. Baleen whales that swim thousands of miles while holding a rock-steady course, and birds that can locate their nests on a tiny island after crisscrossing an ocean.
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
This travelogue of our near future brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.
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