Barbara J King

Here the New York Times columnist and author of Late Migrations and Graceland Margaret Renkl brings alive in 52 chapters her love for the animals and plants in her yard and nearby parks in Tennessee.

Activist Greta Thunberg was just 15 when she called on the world to take action on the climate crisis. Just as impressively, she has now pulled together essays by 100 scholars on what's needed now.

British paleontologist David Hone set out to write a book that stresses what isn't yet known about dinosaurs — as much as what is known.

Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.

The primatologist says it's crucial that young people know how positive action can still shift the frightening trajectories of climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the ongoing global pandemic.

Orlean's descriptions of the animals on the Hudson Valley farm where she once lived may evoke a warm feeling — but those of donkeys in Fez and others in her essays may conjure other emotions.

Writer Margaret Renkl's sense of joyful belonging to the South co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported.

The very antithesis of a fox-taming tale, Catherine Raven's memoir shows us that we are surrounded by wild animals who make thoughtful decisions and experience joys and sorrows on their own terms.

In his debut book Evolution Gone Wrong, Alex Bezzerides mixes the technical anatomical stuff we need to know with vivid examples and humorous phrases — in offering us some answers.

Abigail Tucker's descriptions of how radically women may change at the time of motherhood — and, as an extension, how this might affect their ability to focus on other things — gets pretty harrowing.

Investigative reporter Michael Moss explores how some food companies tweak their products to take advantage of evolved biology, creating room for novelty that triggers the brain to make us want more.

Harvard University's Daniel Lieberman looks at exercise from an evolutionary point of view, concluding that we evolved to limit our physical activity where possible, saving it for survival activities.

The anthropologist and physician teaches that the world needs not only medicine, but something more — a rejection of global racial inequalities and serious investment in the care of all people.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes describes evidence showing that as innovative tool- and fire-makers, Neanderthals adapted to changing climates, adopted symbolic cultural practices and expressed profound emotions.

David Allen Sibley's name is synonymous with his bird field guides. In researching this volume, he became convinced of something new: Birds make complex decisions and experience emotions.

Combining the knowledge of a seasoned scientist and the skills of a good storyteller, the ecologist-author invites us to leave our cultural worlds and enter some animal ones to see just how they work.

Understanding the lives of animals can illuminate our own — and those of loved adolescents too. But authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers at times push cross-species links too far.

Charles King tells the story of Franz Boas' powerful challenge to racial science — and of how others like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston contributed to that project.

New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl astonishes with her essays, a woven tapestry that makes one of all the world's beings that strive to live — and, in one way or another, face mortality.

With details at once compelling and disturbing, geographer Jacob Shell describes the lives of the elephants of mountainous Myanmar and northeastern India that haul timber or transport people.