Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...

"In an era of cell phone addiction and ever-expanding cities, many of us fear we've lost our connection to nature--but Peter Wohlleben is convinced that age-old ties linking humans to the forest remain alive and intact. Whether we observe it or not, our blood pressure stabilizes near trees, the color green calms us, and the forest sharpens our senses. Drawing on new scientific discoveries, The Heartbeat of Trees reveals the profound interactions humans...

Have you ever wondered why we stop to watch the orange glow that arrives before sunset, or why we flock to see cherry blossoms bloom in spring? Is there a reason that people -- regardless of gender, age, culture, or ethnicity -- are mesmerized by baby animals, and can't help but smile when they see a burst of confetti or a cluster of colorful balloons? We are often made to feel that the physical world has little or no impact on our inner joy. Increasingly,...

" How we come to feel at home in our towns and cities is what Warnick sets out to discover in This Is Where You Belong. She dives into the body of research around place attachment--the deep sense of connection that binds some of us to our cities and increases our physical and emotional well-being--then travels to towns across America to see it in action. Inspired by a growing movement of placemaking, she examines what its practitioners are doing to...

In 2019, the ship the Nathaniel B. Palmer set out for Thwaites Glacier, never before visited by humans. The crew's goal: to learn as much as possible about the deterioration of the "Doomsday Glacier" and its potentially catastrophic impact on rising sea levels. Rush provides an astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change-- and motherhood in a time of radical planetary change. -- adapted from jacket "An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica,...

In The Great Divide, acclaimed author and historian Peter Watson explores the development of humankind between the Old World and the New, and offers a groundbreaking new understanding of human history.
By 15,000 BC, humans had migrated from northeastern Asia across the frozen Bering land bridge to the Americas. When the last Ice Agecame to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water, dividing America from Eurasia. This division continued

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"An historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are--our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have...

"In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields-walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing-play central roles in the sweeping panorama of world history and in the lives of individuals. In Dee's telling, a field is never just a setting...

In this work, the author, a field biologist explains the rules by which ecosystems thrive, shining light on a set of ecological balancing acts that he calls "green equilibria," rules which keep our world vibrant, verdant, and ecologically intact. To explain the idea of "green equilibrium," he draws on a range of examples, including coral reefs off the densely populated Philippines, the isolated and thickly forested valleys of Papua New Guinea, the...