Science & Nature


 

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Modern Nature By Derek Jarman Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780816665945
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Univ Of Minnesota Press - October 5th, 2009

Derek Jarman, the British artist and director, found out he was HIV positive in the late 1980s, bought a house by the sea with a view of a nuclear power station, and planted a garden. This journal, spanning 1989 and 1990, documents the planting of the garden and his gradual descent into serious illness, and it is a rarely perfect reading experience, full of flowers, memories, sex and death. Reading Jarman's book is comparable to the writings of David Wojnarowicz and Herve Guibert, but he's more restrained, more influenced by a somber, English romanticism, like E.M. Forster or D.H. Lawrence.

— Madeleine


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Rising from the Plains (Annals of the Former World #3) By John McPhee Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780374520656
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - November 1st, 1987

This book is about Wyoming, a state of geothermal mystery and the only place in the world in whose landscape every geological age is represented. With poetry and precision, McPhee distills complex science for a literary audience. Over the course of the book, plate tectonics are likened to the formation and reformation of the complexes in the psyche, and Wyoming is presented as a most complicated individual, if an arbitrarily defined state can be called such (but what is an individual if not an arbitrarily defined state?). The foreshadowing of fracking is particularly wrenching. There's history and politics and a love story, too. In them we understand how the "lonesome cowboy" is shaped by the mountains around him, and how a writer and perhaps we ourselves could be likewise entranced by nothing, really, other than just land.

— Nora


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The New Plant Parent: Develop Your Green Thumb and Care for Your House-Plant Family By Darryl Cheng, Darryl Cheng (By (photographer)) Cover Image
By Darryl Cheng, Darryl Cheng (By (photographer))
$27.50
ISBN: 9781419732393
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Abrams Image - March 19th, 2019

As a broke millennial, my favorite way to acquire a new plant is to casually admire the greenery in a park/cafe/neighbor's yard and slip a stem or two up my sleeve. Most plant books have no information about how to propagate from clippings; this one does, while helping to manage your expectations (some leaves are supposed to fall off!) and reminding you what's important (the plant's happiness, not yours).

— Bekah


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My Chickens and I By Isabella Rossellini, Patrice Casanova (By (photographer)) Cover Image
By Isabella Rossellini, Patrice Casanova (By (photographer))
$24.99
ISBN: 9781419729911
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Abrams Image - March 13th, 2018

Like many a film star, Isabella Rossellini occasionally retires from the spotlight to live a quiet life in the countryside. My Chickens and I documents her first year with her first flock. A perfect gift for the tired film student who daydreams about running a farm upstate, and pairs perfectly with Lydia Davis’s Cows.

— Laura

 

One of the purest books in the store.

— Gleb


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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition By Marc Reisner Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780140178241
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Penguin Books - June 1st, 1993

Do you find yourself thinking sometimes that the American west is a beautiful and seemingly impossible place? Have you noticed the apocalyptic weather that corner of the country is ever-more frequently aflicted by? Do you often feel a swell of trembling emotion when you think about the folly of manifest destiny and how the West is almost certainly set to run out of water in not too long? Are you afflicted by daydreams of drained valleys, diverted rivers, posioned lakes, and drowned canyons? Do you understand already that it's humans that belong to the natural world, and not the other way around? Then read Cadillac Desert and come get drinks with me, because it's just about all I can talk about.

— Madeleine


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Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout By Philip Connors Cover Image
$17.99
ISBN: 9780061859373
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Ecco - February 28th, 2012

If you don't already want to quit your job, move out west, and post up in a lookout tower high above the forest to contemplate solitude and the wilderness (our place in it, the hubris and idiocy with which we change it), this book will make you want to do that. Be careful.

— Sam


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By Richard P. Feynman, Bill Gates (Introduction by), Ralph Leighton (Editor)
$15.95
ISBN: 9780393355628
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - February 6th, 2018

This book is a hilarious and impassioned reminder that the laboratory, really the whole project of scientific inquiry, is a matter not of dry, clinical analysis, but a form of play. Feynman is a disarming guide through the cosmos, and a comic poet of the wonders of terrestrial life.

— John


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Time Travel: A History By James Gleick Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780804168922
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Vintage - September 5th, 2017

Part compendium of sci-fi plot summaries, part digest of theories about the nature of time—ancient to contemporary—this book will spark your curiosity about dozens of different subjects (Schrödinger's cat? Special relativity? Predestination?) as well as make you question some of the defining features of your lived experience. Is time a "river" that carries us along, or is it something we possess, to save or squander at our discretion? How can it "flow" or "pass" when it is itself a fundamental condition of motion? From H.G. Wells's seminal novella through its early pedantic critics to its many derivatives, from Borges through Philip K. Dick to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the variations on the theme of time travel multiply before our eyes in Gleick's petri dish of literary history and quantum physics.

— Cosmo


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The Periodic Table (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) By Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal (Translated by) Cover Image
By Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal (Translated by)
$16.00
ISBN: 9780805210415
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Schocken - April 4th, 1995

Levi’s writing is as surprising and necessary as a chemical reaction, possessing the simultaneous harmony and disruptive force of a natural phenomenon. Nothing in this autobiographical book is superfluous, everything has meaning and purpose— yet each word burns with the energy that binds matter together. Devastatingly graceful, the life of a giant of Italian literature.

— Edoardo


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Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner By Judy Melinek, MD, T.J. Mitchell Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9781476727264
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Scribner - June 16th, 2015

I'd never even heard of the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York until someone put this book in my hand. Judy Melinek's memoir of her two-year fellowship there is a mix of hair-raising war stories, detailed descriptions of autopsies, and intimate reflections (Melinek was pregnant during part of her fellowship). Learn about rare transfusion-related complications and bizarre ballistic trajectories (such as the fantastic "bullet embolus") and discover how rewarding an often brutal profession can be

— Cosmo


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Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer By Matthew Gavin Frank Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9781631490569
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Liveright - June 29th, 2015

Frank takes lots of seemingly unrelated topics and facts and weaves a beautiful but lumpy and misshapen rug out of them, and then spills ice cream on it. Actually, this book, purportedly about a giant squid, is a lot more about ice cream than I thought it would be.

— Bekah

Preparing the Ghost uses the figure of the Rev. Moses Harvey, the first man to photograph the giant squid, as the core of an essay which tentacles madly outwards, addressing, amongst other things: the giant squid itself, the madness and obsession of men, the author's grandfather, a love of ice cream, Newfoundland culture in the late 1800's, the power of myth, other sea creatures, whether Harvey's wife loved to eat potatoes, how to transport squid tentacles, whether dog's will eat squid tentacles (they will), and so forth. The freneticism and narrative hum of its structure creates a jittery energy and fictive sense of wonder. 

— Madeleine


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The Order of Time By Carlo Rovelli Cover Image
$22.00
ISBN: 9780735216105
Availability: Not On Our Shelves - Available to Order
Published: Riverhead Books - May 8th, 2018

From a world-class scientist and true humanist, the physics of time for the literary minded.

— Edoardo


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After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene By Jedediah Purdy Cover Image
$21.00
ISBN: 9780674979864
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Harvard University Press - February 19th, 2018

I have read this book by legal scholar Jedediah Purdy every year since it came out in 2015. My copy is now lousy with notes and underlinings, because each re-reading, and every year which draws us deeper into the sense of environmental apocalypse, only strengthens its relevance. Purdy traces the idea of 'nature' in America, from its first days up to the present, the Anthropocene, when it is no longer possible - if indeed it ever was - to divorce nature from human influence. He asks what our environemntal politics might look like in the coming years, and whether those politics will be democratic, or just as apocalyptic-feeling as they might right now seem.

— Madeleine


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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition By Thomas S. Kuhn, Ian Hacking (Introduction by) Cover Image
By Thomas S. Kuhn, Ian Hacking (Introduction by)
$15.00
ISBN: 9780226458120
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: University of Chicago Press - April 30th, 2012

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of those books that fundamentally changes the way you perceive the world around you. Kuhn speaks of language as inherently flawed and in many ways, a barrier to perceiving change, hindering us when we try to document new discoveries. Kuhn's exploration of paradigm shifts will affect the way you look at historical documentation and our comprehension of language.

— Emma


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About a Mountain By John D'Agata Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9780393339017
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - February 7th, 2011

A book for anybody who has had mixed feelings about their visit to Las Vegas, and for anybody who views their upcoming trip to that insane and incredible city with trepidation and alarm. Also for fans of excellent writing about the West, nuclear disaster, and all varieties of American apocalypse.

— Madeleine


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Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West By Rebecca Solnit Cover Image
$26.95
ISBN: 9780520282285
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: University of California Press - June 6th, 2014

This book travels across the course of American landscape history, through Manifest Destiny to the foundation of the national park’s system and up to the nuclear crisis. This book felt so vital, to important to the present moment, has stayed with me ever since.

— Madeleine


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Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History By Bill Schutt Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781616207434
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Algonquin Books - January 30th, 2018

If, like me, you are constantly informing your inferiors and enemies that you could eat them for breakfast, this field guide will prove to be invaluable.

— Cristin


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My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs By Brian Switek Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780374534264
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giro - March 4th, 2014

Not sure if I've ever brought this up in conversation at the bookstore, but I am kind of into dinosaurs? I came into this obsession as an adult and have since been frequently devastated by new (to me) learnings that upended the previously-held dinosaur beliefs I formed lazily as a child—beliefs which were not merely "wrong" but, I now know, recklessly ignorant—none more so than the news that my childhood favorite, the brontosaurus, is not only currently extinct but in fact never existed at all. Everything you, everyone you love, and all paleontologists previously thought to be a Brontosaurus is actually an Apatosaurus; if you want to live a life of scientific integrity you have to run a Find & Replace in your mind palace and replace all the Brontosauruses with Apatosauruses. I have a lot of feelings about that. This book really helped me work through them.

— Cristin


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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating By Elisabeth Tova Bailey Cover Image
$14.95
ISBN: 9781616206420
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Algonquin Books - September 6th, 2016

Felled by a mysterious debilitating illness, the naturalist Elizabeth Tova Bailey can not even raise her head. She only has enough strength to observe the activity of a wild snail placed on her bedside table by a loving carer. Watching the deliberate slow activity of her resilient terrestrial companion becomes both her meditation and her life source as her world narrows to the universe of illness. Written over the course of her recovery, this profound and lyrical book is as delicate and beautiful as a Faberge egg.

— Cheryl


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H Is for Hawk By Helen MacDonald Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780802124739
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Grove Press - March 8th, 2016

I did not think I would be into a book about a woman training a goshawk, I really didn't. But this is truly one of the best nature books you will ever read, truly moving, beautifully written, and by no means for bird-fans only. The best exploration of the idea of 'wildness' you're likely to ever encounter.

— Madeleine


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Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife By Mary Roach Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9780393329124
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - October 17th, 2006

Extraordinary fun. Part snark (lots of snark) and some science. Roach scrutinizes the absurd with such acerbic enthusiasm that I know I'd wither in her presence. But gosh, she's a delightful read! Anyhow, these ghost people have it coming. They are the most ridiculous of her subjects, even if you count yourself among them (and I do).

— Allison


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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek By Annie Dillard Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780061233326
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Harper Perennial Modern Classics - September 10th, 2013

I realized I never read Dillard's transcendentalist theodicy all the way through (despite calling it one of my favorites), and that I needed a dose of nature writing since moving to New York. What I learned this time was how right I was in loving my goldfish, how susceptible I am to the poet's side of agnosticism, and—even though there's got to be more of a complex ecosystem in this city than just "acres of rats"—how I still need to somehow make enough money to get to the country with some free time on my hands.

— Audrey


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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History By Elizabeth Kolbert Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781250062185
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: Picador - January 6th, 2015

Environmental journalists often bemoan the problem of making readers care about climate change - which often moves imperceptibly if all too quickly. Not Elizabeth Kolbert. She unspools the history of the Earth in episodic essays, which come together like a novel, its creatures—the ill-fated Panamanian golden frog, the doomed auk, the persecuted rhino—the characters, such that we care deeply, deeply about their fates.

— Maddie


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The Peregrine By J. A. Baker, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction by) Cover Image
By J. A. Baker, Robert Macfarlane (Introduction by)
$16.95
ISBN: 9781590171332
Availability: On Our Shelves
Published: NYRB Classics - December 31st, 2004

This is one of the most captivating books I've read in a long, long time. I was as spellbound by the patience and thoroughness J.A. Baker brings to observing these fascinating birds as I was by his capacity for literary expression. A beautiful, beautiful book.

— David W.