Brand new, clearly excellent, I’ve not finished reviewing but you need to know about them:

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Don Prothero.Though I’ve not seen this latest edition, I’m very familiar with the earlier version of the book, which was excellent. I recommend this as a textbook, or as a general reader book for those who want to delve into the topic.

A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species (The University Center for Human Values Series)

The Quotable Darwin

Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal

Books for kids

The Best Children’s Books #1

The Best Children’s Books #2

Extinct Mammals

Aside from McKay’s book (below) on Mammoths, you another fantastic extinct mammal book came out recently. The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (Princeton Field Guides) will be very handy in case you run into an extinct mammal. The cool thing about this book is that it is written by the paleontologist who has the most experience with the North American fossil record than anyone, and given that the fossil record almost always grows and rarely shrinks, that means that this book is written by the one person who knows more about this material than anyone ever has. Amazing illustrations as well.

Butterflies

A Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America is a field guider’s field guide. It is the shape and size of a traditional field guide. The designers of this book said “we don’t need no stinking margins” so there are no margins. Color bleeds on the page edges allow a quick index to major butterfly categories. There is a two page spread visual index. A no nonsense introduction give you the basics about how to use the book, how to be a butterflyer, and how to not be a jerk about butterflies (like, don’t net them and kill them). The front covers even have those flaps that you can use as bookmarks. Excellent example of an animal field guide. My full review is here.

Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution by Anurag Agrawal is a fantastic, readable, scientifically rich, detailed monograph about – you guessed it – the monarch butterfly and the milkweed plant. The conclusions about monarch conservain reached in this book will surprise you. My full review is here.

Best Climate Change Books (not all recent, yet, scientifically current)

Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Changeis everyperson’s guide to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The IPCC issues a periodic set of reports on the state of global climate change, and has been doing so for almost two decades. It is a massive undertaking and few have the time or training to read though and absorb it, yet it is very important that every citizen understands the reports’ implications. Why? Because human caused climate change has emerged as the number one existential issue of the day, and individuals, corporations, and governments must act to implement sensible and workable changes in behavior and policy or there will be dire consequences.

How Mammoths Changed How Science Works

John McKay’s excellent Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science exposes the role that mammoth fossils played in cajoling Europeans to struggle out of the clutches of ancient bible based thinking about the world, and finally embrace science to explain the strange things they saw. John is the world’s authority in this subject, and this book is a must read.

Math and related

You can solve mysteries with math, and you can do it in either English or Spanish, with One Minute Mysteries – Misterios de un Minuto: Short Mysteries You Solve With Math! – ¡Misterios Cortos que Resuelves con Matemáticas!, by Yoder and Yoder.

The original version of this book was all English, and was a best seller. This new version obviously gives you mucho mucho mas and math to boot.

The One Minute Mysteries series is well known and widely loved, and is recommended by the NSTA.

Have a notebook or a pile of blank paper and some writing instruments handy because you will need them to work out some of these problems.

This is for kids age 10-14, and is a well written, well constructed, well printed resource. I strongly recommend it if your family has young ones around that age, regardless of their math level. Also check out One Minute Mysteries: 65 Short Mysteries You Solve With Science! and One-Minute Mysteries and Brain Teasers: Good Clean Puzzles for Kids of All Ages.

Horses

Over the years, the field guide and the coffee table book have merged, and we now have coffee table-ish books (but serious books) that include a species description of every critter in a certain clade. In the case of Horses of the World by Élise Rousseau (Author), Yann Le Bris (Illustrator), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator), while every living species of horse is in fact covered, the book is a comprehensive guide to breeds of horses.

Of which there are 570.

A horse is horse, of course, but but is a donkey or an ass? What about zebras?

Horse people are very picky about what they call a horse. It is generally thought that there are onlly three living or recent species of horse. The Prewalski’s horse (Equus ferus prezewalski), which lives in Asia, the tarpan (Equus ferus ferus) which is the European version of this animal, and went extinct when the last zoo inmate of this species died in 1909, and the modern horse, Equus ferus caballus. But if you think of a horse as a member of the genus Equus, there are more, including the donkey/ass and three species of zebra, the Kiang (a Tibetan ass), and another Asian ass called the Onager. And, since when speaking of horses, the extinct European wild horse is generally mentioned, we will add the Quagga, the half horse-half zebra (in appearance) African equid that went extinct in 1984 (having disappeared from the wild in 1883).

Since “horses” (as in Mr. Ed and friends) and Zebras can interbreed successfully, and some of these other forms can as well to varying degrees, we need to think of Equus as a close knit genus and not be exclusionary in disregarding the Zebra and Donkey.

Anyway, that is not what this book is about. As noted, there are some 570 or possibly more varieties of horse (no two experts will likely agree on that number) and Horses of the World covers them all. There is introductory material about horses, breeds, how we tell them apart, conservation status, etc. Each horse breed is then given one half of a page on each of two folios, so you see overleaf some illustrated text on one side, and a fuller and very official illustration on the other, for most breeds, with some variation.

This is one of the few books that comes with a movie, compete with some rather galloping music:

Élise Rousseau is the author of numerous books on horses. Illustrator Yann Le Bris has illustrated numerous books.

Physical Science

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new book.

The War on Science

No science interested person’s library is complete without a copy of Shawn Otto’s The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

Nature

Consider the Neotropical Companion, especially if you plan to visit the neotropics any time soon. See my full review of it here. I love this book.

Skepticism

Another book by Don Prothero, which I’ve not seen but that is probably very good (I read an early draft of a chapter, IIRC): UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says

Get this book that I have a chapter in! Karen Stollznow has edited this book: Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You’d Least Expect, and you will find my chapter on page 112.

This is a great idea for a book. Suppose Susan Blackmore told you she had an out of body experience? Or that Don Prothero had an alien abduction story for you? Or that I claimed I had once hunted down and captured a ghost? Would you believe it??? Indeed.

You would probably be skeptical if any of the 30+ established skeptics who authored chapters in this book told you that they had a paranormal, psychic, or otherwise impossible experience. But that is what this book is full of: people who don’t believe in any of these things having these very experiences.

In some cases, the teller of the True Tale of Mystery can explain their experience as a natural phenomenon. In other cases, not, but for some reason, they still believe that what happened to them was not paranormal. Why? Well, read the chapters to find out.

Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You’d Least Expect has a forward by James Randi, and a few of the chapters are more theory than observation. There is an afterward by James Alcock.

Has anything mysterious ever happened to you?

Experiences of this kind are more common than you think. And they happen to people you’d least expect, even notable scientists and skeptics.

This collection features personal stories and experiences of the mysterious, as told by Banachek, Susan Blackmore, Joe Nickell, Eugenie Scott, Chris French, Ken Feder, George Hrab, Brian Regal, Steve Cuno, Ray Hyman, and many others, with a foreword by James Randi and an afterword by James Alcock. These are tales about a wide range of extraordinary experiences, including ghost and UFO sightings, alien abduction, Bigfoot encounters, faith healing, séances, superstitions, coincidences, demonic possession, out-of-body-experiences, past lives, episodes of missing time and one case where time stood still. You will read about a poltergeist in a bakery, a genius baby, a haunted concert hall, a stone carving that vanishes and reappears mysteriously, a one-time palm reader, and a former Mormon missionary who once believed he healed a woman of a brain tumor.

Indeed, when Karen asked me to write a chapter for the book, and if I had any stories of this kind, several such experiences came to mind. I didn’t mention to her two UFO observations I had made as a kid (one seemingly bogus even at the time although all the adults bought it as real, the other very realistic and still a bit difficult to explain). I did have a more recent, adult-age, UFO experience that I could easily explain that I put on the initial list to consider. Also, having grown up in an old-world style religious household (not American evangelical Christian, but rather, Midlevel demonic possession poltergeisty Central European and Irish Catholic style household), I had a lot of stories handed on to me from relatives, including one harrowing story having to do with Exorcist style levitation, vomiting of green goo, and all that. And, of course, there are those non drug induced time shifting experiences and the pets that can read your mind and all that. I settled on the story about the ghost because it is the best story for the telling.

Birds

This book from last year is still one of the best books out there on birds that is not a bird guide: What the Robin Knows by John Young.

Some excellent new bird guides worth checking out if they pertain:

Birds of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East

The Birds Of India

Birds of Australia

Maker and Tech

Excellent volumes on Arduino, operating at various levels:

Arduino Inventor’s Guide for the Medium level tinkerer. Check out Arduino Playground for the much more advanced user.

For the novice: Arduino Project Handbook Volume 2 (see the review for a link to Volume 1, also excellent)

There are two kinds of books out this year of special interest. There is a plethora of books that expose the evil underpinnings of the white supremacist meritocratic oligarchic patriarchy. And, there is a growing collection of books about the last time America was going under for the third time, and the people of those times. Here is a selection for you to ponder.

JFK: A Vision for America. As our political system slides off the seat and into the crapper, I am finding this book to be a worthy and informative distraction. From the publisher:

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and edited by JFK’s nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith and renowned historian Douglas Brinkley. Combined with over seven hundred documentary photos, it tells the story, in words and pictures, of JFK’s life and presidency, and depicts his compelling vision for America.

JFK brings together in one volume John F. Kennedy’s greatest speeches alongside essays by America’s top historians, analysis from leading political thinkers, and personal insights from preeminent writers and artists. Here is JFK at his best—thought-provoking, inspiring, eloquent, and wise—on a number of wide-ranging topics, including civil rights, the race to the moon, the environment, immigration, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and much more. JFK demonstrates the deep relevance of his words today and his lasting power and influence as an outstanding American leader and orator.

Elegantly designed and enriched by more than 500 photographs and facsimiles of Kennedy’s marginalia on drafts of speeches, his notes from important meetings, letters, and other fascinating documents, JFK is a major contribution to American history.

The august list of contributors includes Secretary John Kerry, Ambassador Samantha Power, Congressman John Lewis, Senator John McCain, Senator Elizabeth Warren, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Robert Redford, Conan O’Brien, Dave Eggers, Gloria Steinem, Don DeLillo, David McCullough, George Packer, Colum McCann, Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, David Kennedy, Ted Widmer, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Drew Faust, Tariq Ramadan, Pastor Rick Warren, Jonathan Alter, E. J. Dionne, Ron Suskind, Paul Krugman, Kofi Annan, Governor Jerry Brown, Paul Theroux, Jorge Domínguez, and many others.

Check it out

Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit by Chris Matthews

A revealing new portrait of Robert F. Kennedy that gets closer to the man than any book before, by bestselling author Chris Matthews, an esteemed Kennedy expert and anchor of MSNBC’s Hardball.

With his bestselling biography Jack Kennedy, Chris Matthews shared a new look of one of America’s most beloved Presidents and the patriotic spirit that defined him. Now, with Bobby Kennedy, Matthews returns with a gripping, in-depth, behind-the-scenes portrait of one of the great figures of the American twentieth century.

Overlooked by his father, and overshadowed by his war-hero brother, Bobby Kennedy was the perpetual underdog. When he had the chance to become a naval officer like Jack, Bobby turned it down, choosing instead to join the Navy as a common sailor. It was a life changing experience that led him to connect with voters from all walks of life: young or old, black or white, rich or poor. They were the people who turned out for him in his 1968 campaign. RFK would prove himself to be the rarest of politicians—both a pragmatist who knew how to get the job done and an unwavering idealist who could inspire millions.

Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Matthews pulls back the curtain on the public and private worlds of Robert Francis Kennedy. He shines a light on all the important moments of his life, from his early years and his start in politics to his crucial role as attorney general in his brother’s administration and his tragic run for president. This definitive book brings Bobby Kennedy to life like never before and is destined to become a political classic.

Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics by Lawrence O’Donnell.

From the host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, an important and enthralling new account of the presidential election that changed everything, the race that created American politics as we know it today

The 1968 U.S. Presidential election was the young Lawrence O’Donnell’s political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America’s shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself, but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different, and how we got to where we are now. Playing With Fire represents O’Donnell’s master class in American electioneering, embedded in the epic human drama of a system, and a country, coming apart at the seams in real time.

Nothing went according to the script. LBJ was confident he’d dispatch with Nixon, the GOP frontrunner; Johnson’s greatest fear and real nemesis was RFK. But Kennedy and his team, despite their loathing of the president, weren’t prepared to challenge their own party’s incumbent. Then, out of nowhere, Eugene McCarthy shocked everyone with his disloyalty and threw his hat in the ring to run against the president and the Vietnam War. A revolution seemed to be taking place, and LBJ, humiliated and bitter, began to look mortal. Then RFK leapt in, LBJ dropped out, and all hell broke loose. Two assassinations and a week of bloody riots in Chicago around the Democratic Convention later, and the old Democratic Party was a smoldering ruin, and, in the last triumph of old machine politics, Hubert Humphrey stood alone in the wreckage.

Suddenly Nixon was the frontrunner, having masterfully maintained a smooth façade behind which he feverishly held his party’s right and left wings in the fold, through a succession of ruthless maneuvers to see off George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and the great outside threat to his new Southern Strategy, the arch-segregationist George Wallace. But then, amazingly, Humphrey began to close, and so, in late October, Nixon pulled off one of the greatest dirty tricks in American political history, an act that may well meet the statutory definition of treason. The tone was set for Watergate and all else that was to follow, all the way through to today.

Playing With Fire is the perfect holiday gift!

The other category, the present state of democracy and governing, includes urgent information and often advice on what to do. You should start with Shawn Otto’s The War on Science, which recently won the Minnesota Book Award for non-fiction. (Click through to my writeup of the award to find the book.)

Then check these out:

The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy by Brian Klass. It is the current Amazon best seller in the category … wait for it … “fascism.” Here’s the details:

An ex-US campaign advisor who has sat with the world’s dictators explains Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and the threat they pose to American democracy.

Donald Trump isn’t a despot. But he is increasingly acting like The Despot’s Apprentice, an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy. Whether it’s attacking the press, threatening rule of law by firing those who investigate his alleged wrongdoings, or using nepotism to staff the White House, Donald Trump is borrowing tactics from the world’s dictators and despots. Trump’s fascination for the military, his obsession with his own cult of personality, and his deliberate campaign to blur the line between fact and falsehood are nothing new to the world of despots. But they are new to the United States. With each authoritarian tactic or tweet, Trump poses a unique threat to democratic government in the world’s most powerful democracy.

At the same time, Trump’s apprenticeship has serious consequences beyond the United States too. His bizarre adoration and idolization of despotic strongmen?from Russia’s Putin, to Turkey’s Erdogan, or to the Philippines’ Duterte?has transformed American foreign policy into a powerful cheerleader for some of the world’s worst regimes.

The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy will explore how Trump uniquely threatens democracy?and how to save it from him.

Here is a discussion with the author.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean is a book much hated by the right wing, and that is very much under attack by them, so it is a fair guess that MacLean is on to something.

The enemy in this particular story is not Barry Goldwater, or the Koch Brothers, but rather economics James McGill Buchanan. Of course, Charles Koch ends up being a disciple of Buchannan’s approach, ad do others. And that is where the money comes from.

MacLean’s key point is that this is not a battle of who rules, but rather, what the rules are, and the key objective is to rewrite those rules so the wealthy elite can, well, rule.

Buchanan was a well established and widely respected scholar, won the Nobel, founded a center for studies in political economy. When he died (2013) the New York times noted that he had influenced the current generation “of conservative thinking about deficits, taxes and the size of government.”

MacLean’s book has shaken up quite a bit of thinking on Buchanan. The book’s thesis is based on documents not previously examined, that are part of the Buchanan archives. Liberarian activists have complained at length about MacLean’s scholarship and arguments.

Democracy in Chains might be an insighful analysis using a fresh examination of previously ignored documents. Many of the attacks on the author and the book have been personal, similar to attacks on, say, evolutionary biologists or climate change scientists. Her Amazon page was covered with negative reviews clearly from people who never read the book, probably organized by the right wing. She was called a rabid feminazi, pathological socialist, etc.

Of the Libertarian attack on her work, MacLean noted in a recent interview:

…look, Buchanan was a gentleman, generous and kind with students and colleagues who shared his commitments and was well-liked by them in return.

And I’m getting the sense from the complaints of movement insiders that they view the book as disrespectful to heroes of the cause.

So it’s perhaps important for everyone to understand that I did not set out to critique Buchanan or other libertarians as human beings. I was not writing a biography or biographies. I was looking at these scholars’ ideas and tracing the impact of those ideas.

This is a group that has been insular since its founding. Now its members are confronted with an outsider’s view of their history. And they don’t like what they’re seeing in the mirror Democracy in Chains puts up to them.

To the criticism that her book oversimplifies the story and demands that we ignore all the other factors leading to the rise of the Right Wing in America, she responded, “As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them… my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light….The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.”

You should just go read it.

Also read Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

Also consider having a look at Hillary Clinton’s book.

Let’s start off with a kid’s book: Grandmother Fish: a child’s first book of Evolution by Jonathan Tweet.

From the blurb:

Grandmother Fish is the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers. While listening to the story, the child mimics the motions and sounds of our ancestors, such as wiggling like a fish or hooting like an ape. Like magic, evolution becomes fun, accessible, and personal. Grandmother Fish will be a full-size (10 x 8), full-color, 32-page, hardback book full of appealing animal illustrations, perfect for your bookshelf. US publishers consider evolution to be too “hot” a topic for children, but with your help we can make this book happen ourselves.

I reviewed the book here before it first came out. This was a kickstarter project, and it may be currently unavailable commercially, but if you click through to the kickstarter project you can probably get a copy of it.

The most recent book to come across my desk is Don Prothero’s The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution. I’ve got a review of Prothero’s book in my draft file, so look for that post coming out over the next few days.

One might ask, “how do you choose 25 fossils, among so many choices, to represent evolution?” Well, Don cheated a little by mentioning more than 25 fossils. Also, you really can’t do this. Don selected fossils using several criteria, but one basis for his choice was the availability of rich historical information about a fossil’s discovery, interpretation, and effect on our thinking about evolution. And, he covers all of that.

Don is one of those rare authors who is both an expert scientist and a great writer, with a proven ability to explain things in a way that is not watered down yet totally accessible.

Here’s a selection of the many other books written by Prothero:

• Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids

• After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals (Life of the Past)

• Catastrophes!: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and Other Earth-Shattering Disasters

• Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet

• Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres (Life of the Past)

• Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Prothero, Donald R. 1st (first) Edition [Hardcover(2007)]

Evolution: The Whole Story is an astonishing book that needs to be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in evolution. The work is edied by Steve Parker, but authored by nearly a dozen experts in various subfields of fossils and evolution, so it is authoritative and scholarly. At the same time, it is very accessible and enjoyable. This is not a book you read from cover to cover, though you could. Feel free to skip around, and you;ll find yourself looking stuff up all the time.

The book is divided into major sections, and each section has a series of short pieces on this or that fossil, group of fossils, type of life system, method for studying fossils, etc. There is a running sidebar on the bottom of many pages giving “key events” in evolutionary history of the group of life forms under consideration The book is VERY richly illustrated, with detailed keys to the illustrations. Many of the illustrations are broken down into “focal points” that expand significantly on the illustrations’ details. There are countless additional inserts with more information. The book itself is beautiful, intriguingly organized, and it is full of … well, everything. The book is very well indexed and sourced, and has helpful, up to date, phylogenies and chronological graphics.

The Biology Book: From the Origin of Life to Epigenetics, 250 Milestones in the History of Biology (Sterling Milestones) by Michael Gerald and Gloria Gerald is a compendium of biological topics and key moments in the history of biological science, organized in a sort of chronological framework. Major groups (the insects, the amphibians), major ideas (Pliny’s Natural History, Ongogeny and Phylogeny), key physiological and developmental concepts (meiosis, mitosis, many topics in endocrinology), key fossils (like the Coelocanth) and so on are discussed, very nicely illustrated. This is almost like having a gazillian short articles from Natural History Magazine (or similar) all in one book. There are 250 biological “milestones” in all. The charming part of the book is that a milestone can be an evolutionary event, an extinction episode, the emergence of a great idea, or a particular discover. And, as noted, these are ordered across time, as well as one can, from the beginning of life to a selection of the most recent discovery. The book effectively combines history of biology (and related sciences) and the biological history itself.

Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by the well respected scientist and historian Matthew Cobb is a carefully and clearly written history of the discovery of the nature of DNA, covering a lot more than, and since, Watson and Crick. It is extremely well sourced, indexed, and supported, and very readable.

This is the detailed and authoritative work on all the elements that came together to understand the genetic code. Don’t talk about the discovery and understanding of DNA any more until you’ve read this book. From the publisher:

Life’s Greatest Secret mixes remarkable insights, theoretical dead-ends, and ingenious experiments with the swift pace of a thriller. From New York to Paris, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cambridge, England, and London to Moscow, the greatest discovery of twentieth-century biology was truly a global feat. Biologist and historian of science Matthew Cobb gives the full and rich account of the cooperation and competition between the eccentric characters—mathematicians, physicists, information theorists, and biologists—who contributed to this revolutionary new science. And, while every new discovery was a leap forward for science, Cobb shows how every new answer inevitably led to new questions that were at least as difficult to answer: just ask anyone who had hoped that the successful completion of the Human Genome Project was going to truly yield the book of life, or that a better understanding of epigenetics or “junk DNA” was going to be the final piece of the puzzle. But the setbacks and unexpected discoveries are what make the science exciting, and it is Matthew Cobb’s telling that makes them worth reading. This is a riveting story of humans exploring what it is that makes us human and how the world works, and it is essential reading for anyone who’d like to explore those questions for themselves.

Extinction and Evolution: What Fossils Reveal About the History of Life is a an updated version of a classic book about evolution and extinction written by one of the scientists who developed our modern way of thinking about evolution and extinction (especially the extinction part).

Eldredge’s groundbreaking work is now accepted as the definitive statement of how life as we know it evolved on Earth. This book chronicles how Eldredge made his discoveries and traces the history of life through the lenses of paleontology, geology, ecology, anthropology, biology, genetics, zoology, mammalogy, herpetology, entomology and botany. While rigorously accurate, the text is accessible, engaging and free of jargon.

Honorable Mentions: Older books that are great and may now be avaialable for much reduced prices.

I really liked The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy as an expose of a particular time period and major event in geological history. Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet by Prothero is a classic, again, looking at a fairly narrowly defined moment in prehistory. You can get it used for about five bucks.

The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution by Dean Falk is a great book focusing on one key human fossil. This is a personal story as well as a scientific one. Again, available used for a song.

Have you read Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body yet? I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It is still a great read, and you can get it used cheap.

The only book I would recommend that uses the “paleolithic” to advise you on diet and exercise is The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living.

Before I make any suggestions, I would like to point out that Princeton, an emerging and major player in the Bird Book world, has a facebook page that, if you “like,” will automatically enter you in a contest to get some signed bird books and stuff. Go here to like that page and you may get a free book. Since I already have all or most of the Princeton books, if I win one I’ll give away my old copy (and keep the signed copy they are giving away …. bwahahahaha!!!!)

I’ve reviewed a couple of dozen bird books on this blog (see this) and I have four or five more in a pile next to me right now up for treatment over the next few days. Quite a few excellent books have come out over the last year or so. Here, I’m going to make a suggestions because this is the time of year you may be thinking of what to get your spouse, child, parent, or friend who seems fascinated with birds. First, you may need to search their car and other key spots to find out which field guides or other books they already own. Then consider these items:

The biggest thing to come along in bird identification is the Crossley ID Guide for Eastern Birds.

The Crossley ID Guide is a unique and special bird book. It is not exactly a pocket field guide, unless you are the Jolly Green Giant and have pockets the size of … well, a big book. Nor is it a coffee table pretty-picture book, though it does have pretty pictures. The Crossley ID Guide is a large format systematic bird identification resource with a number of unique features …
(cont)

One of the most fun bird books I’ve ever owned is the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding. This is NOT a bird identification guide. It is a guide to the fine details of bird anatomy, behavior, and other stuff that is linked to “birding.”

The Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding (Kaufman Field Guides)is one way to bring your birding to the next level. Here, look at this conversation:

“Hey, look at that duck. It looks like a mallard but maybe it’s a wood duck.”

“I think it might be a wood duck because this time of year I think this might be what wood ducks look like.”

“Huh”

How boring. And, inconclusive. Now, try this conversation on for size:

“Hey, look at that duck. It looks like a mallard but maybe it’s a wood duck.”

“Wood ducks that were hatched this year are going through their first molt right about now. What you see here is the plumage pattern of a first year male duck transforming over into the plumage it will have over the winter.”

“Cool!”

“That other duck right next to it that looks totally different? That’s also a male wood duck in its first molt but a bit farther along.”

“Wow! Really cool!”

What a difference!

(cont)

Along the same lines, the not new but still fantastic Birder’s Handbook is a must own. It has been around long enough that you can probably pick it up cheap at a used bookstore somewhere.

There are a number of specialized ID guides out there, on waterfowl, warblers, etc. etc. A recent addition to this list that I’ve made great use of is How To Identify Hawks at a Distance

Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors, takes raptor identification to a new level, showing multiple photos of hawks, eagles, kites and their kin of North America as they almost always appear: Way the hell over there!

Amazingly, it actually works to have, in a field guide, pictures of the birds where you can hardly see what you are looking at. I know that seems strange, but if you think about it, it makes sense. Unless you’re going to shoot the damn thing and then pull out your Detailed Bird Anatomy Book to check it out feather by feather, you need to know what various species look like when they are …. way the hell over there!

Not new, but one that I always recommend for people to give to their middle shool or high school age kid who shows an interest in birds is The Young Birder’s Guide: A Bird Book for the Middle Schooler

And for the person you know who loves birds, and evolution, and has all the bird books already, there is always this academic title: Living Dinosaurs; The evolutionary history of modern birds.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting reviews of the following bird-related books:

• Weiner, Johathan. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. This is not new, but if you’ve not read it, you must.
• Arlott, Norman. Birds of North America and Greenland. Birds of North America and Greenland: (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)
• van Perlo, Ber. Birds of Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Central and West Pacific: (Princeton Illustrated Checklists)
• Unwin, Mike. The Atlas of Birds: Diversity, Behavior, and Conservation
• Goodfellow, Peter. Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build