Carl Safina is in some ways a modern Rachel Carson, an ecologist who writes excellent stuff about ecology. The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
He’s a great writer and a great speaker. The book is about nature, ecology, the world, etc. under current conditions of environmental threat including climate change. In the area of natural history writing, is may be the best book to come out this year. Also, the Kindle (or other eBook) edition of this book should be quite satisfying because it has only a few illustrations (including a couple of maps) but they are all line drawings and should do fine in that format.
You know that we’ve recently spoken of chickens on this blog (as we sometimes do). Here I’ll simply note that Carl, as a writer, has this interesting quirk … during those times when he is not writing but is thinking about writing, he goes to his back yard and stares at the chickens for a while.
by Janet Lembke even if it is annoyingly unscholarly in places where it should be (assertions of fact are frequently made with zero or poor referencing). As far as I can tell, the writing is accurate in its coverage of all things Chicken. Chickens in science, chickens in stories, chickens in the back yard, chickens in history, chickens in evolution, chickens in art, chickens in mythology, chickens in medicine, chickens in Medieval times, chickens in Renaissance times, chickens all the way down.
by Megan Rothrock is primarily for people who have been messing around with LEG for, say, less than 10 years or so, especially those who are new at it and seek both inspiration and guidance in such daunting tasks as making a scale two engine turboprop airplane or an entire Lego town.
are unfounded. Well, probably not.
. This is the adult version.
by John Withington, who also wrote about other disastrous things such as 
. It is a couple of years old (and thus does not include the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami). This is more of a reference book than a sit-down-and-read-it book, and it lacks detailed presentation or critical analysis of sources, but if you want to know about a particular past major disaster or category of major disasters (volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, etc.) this is a good starting point. Reading just through the famous volcano disasters, for instance, one can get a good feel for the relationship between people’s experiences with volcanoes and an understanding of how these events play out and create the havoc they are responsible for. For example, 
is a good choice if you like eBooks. Also, note that the British edition has a slightly different title.
. Oddly, that particular question appears to be evaded in the book itself, but most of the 175 questions seem to be addressed accurately. This is one of those books you keep around and read bits from now and then…perhaps you bring it on a trip and the tweens use it to create a game show or perhaps you keep it in your Life Science classroom and use it to generate discussion or test questions, or perhaps you just thumb through a fifth of it or so before going to bed, then a few months later you wonder “where the hell did I learn that thing that just came into my head…”
. If you know someone who is planning to play around, er, I mean engage in DIY hobbyist activities, with this form of Lego, do them a favor and get them this book so they can mix and match and design their own stuff rather than buying those expensive kits. Some details from the publisher:
by George Church and Ed Regis looks like a futurist tome on what could happen when technology finally catches up with human imagination and everything changes. Except it isn’t. Most futurists are people with some knowledge of technology, a fertile imagination, and a publicist. 
) and George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School who is one of the key players in the Personal Genome Project. He directs Personal Genomics.org, which curates the only OpenAccess human “Genomic, Environmental and Trait database. His work led to the first commercial genome sequence (for apathogen) and he has been involved in both genome sequencing (reading the genes) and synthesis (making new ones) in both the academic and private milieu. He is also director of the NIH “Center for Excellence in Genomic Science” which places him at the center of biosafety, gene privacy, and security policy development.
by James Gould and Carol Grant Gould is an excellent entree into the science of animal navigation.
, comes in. This new volume in a series on “Critical Moments and Perspectives in Earth History and Paleobiology” (of which there are 
) comes in.
.”
by Ian Sinclair, Phil Hockey, Warwick Tarboton and Peter Ryan. You will know Sinclair from his South of the Saraha bird guide.
is a book designed for the youngest kids who can read comics and basic text who want to learn to program. The prgramming environment, Scratch, will be familiar to those who have experimented with Logo and Squeak. Especially Squeak. Scratch is a very easily installed environment. You just download it and run it, more or less (instructions provided). When installed, it looks like this:
