Nature Biography

This is the true story of a Londoner who gives up his job as an estate agent in the city, moves to the wilds of Exmoor, starts a smallholding and becomes self-sufficient, with a few bumps along the way. Simon's journey from urbanite to self-sufficient smallholder is brimming with incidents - some funny and some tragic - leading him to question Mother Nature, himself, the food he eats and his role in it all.

The first full-length biography of George Ingle Finch - maverick Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch. George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing.

“McDowell’s gorgeous book opens an ivy-covered door to new information about one of the world’s most famous authors.”—Angelica Shirley Carpenter, editor of In the GardenNew York Times bestselling author Marta McDowell has revealed the way that plants have stirred some of our most...

The stark and inhospitable high-elevation landscape of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert may not be an obvious (or easy) place to settle down, but for self-professed desert rat Michael Branch it’s home. Of course, living in such an unforgiving landscape gives one many things to rant about. Fortunately for us, Branch—humorist, environmentalist, and author of Raising Wild—is a prodigious ranter.

The inspiring story of a mother who took unimaginable tragedy and used her grief as a force to do good by transforming the lives of others. When Maria Kefalas’s daughter Calliope was diagnosed with a degenerative, uncurable genetic disease, the last thing Maria expected to discover in herself...

Before a surfing accident caused thirty-three-year-old Devon Raney to lose all but 15 percent of his vision, he had already lived an extraordinary life. Time and again he'd gone against the grain to maximize time for his passions--surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding--bringing him into the...

Exploring the science in George R. R. Martin's fantastical world, from the physics of an ice wall to the genetics of the Targaryens and Lannisters. Game of Thrones is a fantasy that features a lot of made-up science--fabricated climatology (when is winter coming?), astronomy, metallurgy...

When celebrated neuropsychologist Paul Broks's wife died of cancer, it sparked a journey of grief and reflection that traced a lifelong attempt to understand how the brain gives rise to the soul. The result of that journey is a gorgeous, evocative meditation on fate, death, consciousness, and...

With Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives, new media pioneer Randi Zuckerberg offers an entertaining and essential guide to understanding how technology and social media influence and inform our lives online and off. Zuckerberg has been on the frontline of the social media movement since...

Can reindeer fly? Why is Santa Claus fat? Could scientists clone the perfect Christmas tree? Was the Star of Bethlehem really a comet? Why is Rudolph’s nose red? How does Santa manage to deliver presents to an estimated 842 million households in a single night? What could we do to guarantee a...

Soon to be a feature film, The Late Bloomer is the revealing, harrowing and often funny memoir of a celebrity journalist and former hotshot hockey player who discovers that he has been biochemically infused with a female hormone. On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally...

A passionate naturalist explores what it’s really like to be an animal―by living like them How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the non-humans, the...

Called “the best kind of nonfiction” by Michael Connelly, this riveting new book combines true crime, brain science, and courtroom drama. In 1991, the police were called to East 72nd St. in Manhattan, where a woman's body had fallen from a twelfth-story window. The woman’s husband, Herbert...

A psychologist's gripping, troubling, and moving exploration of the brutal murder of a possibly transgender middle school student by an eighth grade classmate On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who...

Will climate change force a massive human migration to the Northern Rim? How does our sense of morality arise from the structure of the brain? What does the latest research in language acquisition tells us about the role of culture in the way we think? What does current neurological research...

Hervé Barmasse, uno degli ultimi eredi dei grandi alpinisti del passato, racconta la sua storia: le salite su cime inviolate in terre lontane e il ritorno al Cervino, la sua montagna; la passione, la preparazione, la fatica e l'emozione della scalata; l'apertura di nuove vie; i momenti in cui il coraggio delle decisioni si intreccia alla fragilità e alla paura. In parete, come nella vita.

“This quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.” —The New York Times The riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers—and then...

The floods that devastated large parts of Kerala in 2018 were not an isolated, freak phenomenon; rather, they signalled something graver-the ecological devastation of the Western Ghats.Made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, the Ghats have become increasingly vulnerable to serious ecological...

"Every year, our planet loses over 150 species of plants and animals, and India is very much in the midst of this mass ‘sixth extinction’. We are losing species in our backyard—where are the once ubiquitous sparrows, or the fireflies that lit up our nights? And in the forests, iconic...

The Wild East explores the social, political, and environmental changes in the Great Smoky Mountains during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although this national park is most often portrayed as a triumph of wilderness preservation, Margaret Lynn Brown concludes that the largest forested region in the eastern United States is actually a recreated wilderness—a product of restoration and even manipulation of the land.