May 2021 list by Dan Berube
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Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
by Michelle Nijhuis
A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement-told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born.
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Count Down
by Shanna H. Swan
An award-winning scientist, in this urgent, thought-provoking and meticulously researched book, shows how chemicals in the modern environment are changing – and endangering – human sexuality and fertility on the grandest scale.
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Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
by Frank Wilczek
The winner of the Nobel Prize for physics and author of The Lightness of Being explains 10 fundamental ideas that form humanity’s understanding of the universe, from time and space to matter and energy.
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Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings
by Alan P. Lightman
The author of Einstein’s Dreams presents a collection of scientific, meditative essays on the possibilities and impossibilities of nothingness and infinity, exploring such questions as the link between neurons and consciousness and whether life can really be lab-created.
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The Problem of Alzheimer's
by Jason Karlawish
Traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis and discusses biomedical breakthroughs that may be used to prevent and treat the disease so that people with dementia and caregivers alike can reclaim their autonomy.
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Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. One way to look at human civilization, she says, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature.
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The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy
by Arik Kershenbaum
Using universal laws that govern life on Earth, a noted Cambridge zoologist presents an engaging, scientifically sound exploration of what life may be like on other planets and in space, discussing such speculative topics as supersonic animals and alien emotions.
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