Top 10
Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and
the Birth of Modern Science
Philip Ball. Yale Univ., Sept. 2 ($40, ISBN 978-0-300-28087-6)
Alchemy was a crucial stepping stone in the development of science, according to this overview of the discipline’s history.
The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics
Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker. Little, Brown Spark, Sept. 2 ($30, ISBN 978-0-316-25834-0)
This treatise contends that preventing the next global pandemic requires learning from the failure to contain Covid-19.
Crick: A Mind in Motion
Matthew Cobb. Basic, Nov. 11 ($35, ISBN 978-1-5416-0288-5)
An impulse to probe the existential mysteries of life inspired Francis Crick to unlock the structure of DNA, posits biographer and fellow biologist Cobb.
The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal
Yossi Yovel. St. Martin’s, Oct. 14 ($32, ISBN 978-1-250-37844-6)
Ecologist Yovel details bats’ biological and behavioral curiosities, including powerful immune systems, elongated fingers, and complex communication.
The Martians: The True Story
of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
David Baron. Liveright, Aug. 26 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09066-3)
Journalist Baron describes how businessman Percival Lowell’s claims to have discovered canals on Mars kick-started a scientific debate in the early 1900s over the existence of alien life that spilled out into broader society.
The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams
Jason Allen-Paisant. Milkweed, Sept. 9 ($26, ISBN 978-1-63955-157-6)
Blending personal and natural history, the poet recounts learning to see the beauty of his native Jamaica after living abroad.
Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy
Mary Roach. Norton, Sept. 16 ($28.99, ISBN 978-1-324-05062-9)
Reporting from a Boston burn unit, a Chinese pigsty for genetically modified swine, and a San Diego stem cell “hair nursery,” Roach discusses contemporary medical efforts to replace and recreate human body parts.
The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live
Alan Lightman and Martin Rees. Pantheon, Sept. 2 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-70202-4)
The physicists push back against growing mistrust of scientists by describing how physicist Werner Heisenberg, astronomer Govind Swarup, and other researchers have been motivated by a desire to improve the world.
Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China
Jonathan C. Slaght. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov. 4 ($30, ISBN 978-0-374-61098-2)
Wildlife biologist Slaght chronicles the successful campaign to restore the tiger population in the Amur River basin after the end of the Cold War.
When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy
Beronda L. Montgomery. Holt, Jan. 20 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-33516-6)
Exploring trees’ historical significance in Black American life, biologist Montgomery describes how enslaved Africans domesticated pecan trees and derived medicine from willow bark. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Longlist
Atria
Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs by P.E. Moskowitz (Sept. 9, $30, ISBN 978-1-6680-0777-8) investigates how individuals have come to rely on such drugs as SSRIs, LSD, and fentanyl to treat and cope with mental health issues.
Avery
The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine E. Webb (Sept. 16, $32, ISBN 978-0-593-54313-9). The belief that humans are superior to other animals has led researchers to overlook the sophistication of prairie dog communication, chimpanzee culture, and other nonhuman life, according to the Harvard University primatologist.
Basic
The Whispers of Rock: The Stories That Stone Tells About Our World and Our Lives by Anjana Khatwa (Oct. 14, $30, ISBN 978-1-5416-0464-3) examines humanity’s relationship with rocks through the natural history of the bluestone at Stonehenge, the schist bedrock of Manhattan, and the tuff used for Ethiopian churches.
Counterpoint
Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed, and Wonder by Philip Marsden (Nov. 4, $28, ISBN 978-1-64009-744-5) traces how various metals have transformed society, detailing tin’s role in the Industrial Revolution, radium’s importance to enhancing 20th-century scientific understanding of the atomic world, and lithium’s centrality to the digital age.
Crown
Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert (Nov. 4, $32, ISBN 979-8-217-08606-1) brings together the Sixth Extinction author’s articles on climate change, including reports from a carbon neutral Danish island and a Florida community that established rights for local waterways.
Diversion
The Last Extinction: The Real Science Behind the Death of the Dinosaurs by Gerta Keller (Sept. 9, $32, ISBN 979-8-89515-046-7)
details the paleontologist’s contentious efforts to convince her fellow scientists that the dinosaurs were wiped out by devastating
volcanic eruptions, not an asteroid.
Ecco
Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic by Neil Shea (Dec. 2, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-313857-5). Journalist Shea investigates how climate change is affecting the Arctic by reporting on the lives of Indigenous peoples, the travels of Canadian wolf packs, and brewing geopolitical conflict over the north pole’s natural resources.
The Experiment
The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier (Aug. 19, $30, ISBN 979-8-89303-070-9) describes how DNA sequencing led to the discovery of an ancient human subspecies called the Denisovans.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson (Sept. 16, $32, ISBN 978-0-374-61737-0) recounts the author’s attempts to make his Sussex farm more inviting for birds and traces his efforts to understand their behavior and how humans threaten their flourishing.
Georgetown Univ.
Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves by Nicole Negowetti (Jan. 2, $29.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64712-647-6) studies how communities around the world are developing local remedies for food system vulnerabilities exposed by climate change.
Greystone
Hidden Guests: Migrating Cells and How the New Science of Microchimerism Is Redefining Human Identity by Lise Barnéoud, trans. by Bronwyn Haslam (Nov. 4, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-77840-266-1), shines a light on how the presence of foreign cells in the body—be they from an organ donor or a twin absorbed in the womb—complicates common conceptions of individuality.
Holt
Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr (Nov. 18, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-34272-0) explores the science behind why people dream, the causes of nightmares, and the ways in which readers might use dreams to boost their mental health. 80,000-copy announced first printing.
Island
Squirrel: How a Backyard Forager Shapes Our World by Nancy Castaldo (Sept. 16, $30 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64283-375-1) delves into the ecological importance of the rodent’s food storage strategies, 19th-century conservation campaigns that used the animal to gin up public sympathy, and the threat posed by climate change to endangered squirrel species.
Johns Hopkins Univ.
Echoes of Our Origins: Baboons, Humans, and Nature by Shirley C. Strum (Sept. 9, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-5203-6) recounts how the scientist’s efforts to understand human aggression by studying baboons transformed into a decades-long quest to decipher the primates’ complex social behavior.
Little, Brown
Humanish: What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize by Justin Gregg (Nov. 4, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-57758-8) examines the evolutionary and neuroscientific underpinnings of humans’ tendency to see their own behavior and feelings reflected in other animals and objects.
Lyons
The Bear at the Bird Feeder: Why We’re Seeing More Wild Animals in Our Neighborhoods and How We Can Live in Harmony with Them by Randi Minetor (Nov. 4, $27.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4930-8949-9) explains how alligators, black bears, and other animals have adapted to living near humans and how people might more responsibly coexist with them.
McClelland & Stewart
The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink by Greg Mercer (Aug. 12, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-7710-0632-6). Rising demand for lobster has devastated wild populations while fueling an industry that bars Indigenous people from their historical hunting grounds and leaves fishermen in economic precarity, according to this treatise.
Melville House
The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines by Vanessa Chang (Nov. 4, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68589-197-8) describes how technologies, from glasses to player pianos to AI, have enhanced or otherwise shaped the capabilities of the human body.
MIT
What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Sept. 16, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-262-04995-5) argues that making predictions is the central function of intelligence and that predictive AI might have consciousness and free will.
Norton
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben (Aug. 19, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-324-10623-4). The environmentalist chronicles ongoing efforts to replace fossil fuels with solar power and speculates on how the renewable energy might transform society.
Penguin Books
Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away by Coltan Scrivner (Oct. 7, $19 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-14-313734-4). Macabre compulsions to look at car accidents or watch true crime documentaries stem from an evolutionary impulse to prepare for dangerous situations, according to this study.
Princeton Univ.
How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past by Steve Ramirez (Nov. 4, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-26668-8) delves into research on altering or inventing memories and meditates on what such capabilities might mean for trauma patients and one’s sense of self.
Prometheus
The Fear Knot: How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears—and How to Get Unstuck by Ruth Defoster and Natashia Swalve (Oct. 14, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4930-8559-0) discusses how culture, media, and psychology shape fears around climate change, serial killers, tainted Halloween candy, and vaccine side effects.
PublicAffairs
Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez (Sept. 9, $32, ISBN 978-1-5417-0549-4) argues that corporate interests, dark money, and irresponsible journalists are
driving a dangerous public mistrust of science.
Seal
Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research by Melanie D.G. Kaplan (Oct. 14, $30, ISBN 978-1-5416-0498-8) explores the plight of lab animals by recounting the journalist’s efforts to uncover the history of a beagle who spent four years in a research facility before she adopted him.
Simon & Schuster
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright (Nov. 18, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-6680-6165-7) contends that the emergence of AI heralds the beginning of an epochal evolutionary leap in human history.
Sourcebooks
What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say by Amelia Thomas (Nov. 4, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4642-1845-3). The journalist meets with zoologists, psychologists, and pet psychics to decode how chimpanzees, octopuses, and other animals might be attempting to communicate with humans.
Stanford Univ.
Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters by Naomi S. Baron (Jan. 20, $25, ISBN 978-1-5036-4394-9) describes the method by which the technology processes text and meditates on how chatbots are changing the way humans read and write.
St. Martin’s
Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story by Jeffrey Kluger (Nov. 11, $32, ISBN 978-1-250-32300-2) recounts how in the early 1960s NASA overcame fatal accidents, a skeptical Congress, and Cold War politics to develop spaceflight technology capable of sending Americans to the moon.
Tarcher
The Social Lives of Birds: Flocks, Communes, and Families by Joan E. Strassmann (Sept. 23, $31, ISBN 978-0-593-85306-1) surveys avian social behavior, including birds that forage alongside flocks of other species, care for other individuals’ chicks, or roost by the thousands.
Yale Univ.
Cannabis: A Natural History by Rob DeSalle, illus. by Patricia J. Wynne (Nov. 18, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-300-27094-5), traces the plant’s evolution, describes how it produces psychoactive chemicals, and charts its place in society over the past 2,000 years.
