Book Recommendations

I like to read. A lot. I always have a book on me, and am usually listening to an audiobook while driving or doing chores. And I love sharing those books with people - my friends probably get a little tired of me saying, “I just read this book about…”. But even more than monologuing about my latest favorite book, I get immense satisfaction out of recommending a book to someone that I think they’d enjoy. A good book rec isn’t just about whether something is a good read, but the interests and preferences of the person. If I can give you a book you love, it means I know you and like you, just as much as I know and like the book.

Obviously, I don’t know everyone who will stumble across my site, but I do want to share some of my favorite books - and maybe you’ll be able to decide whether any of these generalized recommendations are a good fit for your next read!

Below are lists of books broken into several different categories - Biogeochemistry, Ecology and Evolution, Climate Change, Equity in Academia. They’re a mix of popular science reads, academic books, and textbooks for courses. It’s by no means comprehensive, of course, and I’m going to continually add to the list. These are just a few titles to get things going!

Biogeochemistry

Biogeochemistry by Schlesinger and Bernhardt, 3rd Edition

I used this textbook in my Biogeochemical Processes course in 2017, and thought it excellent! Well organized, thorough, clear text. I still refer to it sometimes when reminding myself of general principles in my own work.

The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen

Why is a book about mass extinction in the biogeochemistry section, not ecology and evolution? Because it is really a story about carbon, and how massive upheavals to Earth’s carbon cycle led to equally massive disruptions in life history (yes, even in the case of the dinosaurs). Brannen ties these geological events to our own current carbon experiment in provocative, digestible ways. A well-researched popular science book, I hesitate to call it fun, but it’s certainly engaging.

Climate Change

Frozen earth: the once and future story of ice ages by doug macdougall

This is the book that made me want to be an cold regions researcher, way back in freshman year of college! Macdougall ties together this history of discovering the recent Ice Ages in the 19th C with the story of the unusual times in Earth’s history that the planet has been locked in ice. That story stretches from Snowball Earth, 650 million years ago, to the potential end of today’s glacial cycles as humans pump more and more ancient carbon into the atmosphere.

Field notes from a catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert

If the above book made me want to study cold environments, this book was one of the things that pushed me to work on modern environmental change, rather than paleoclimates. Kolbert’s excellent, concise story weaves together threads from northern Alaska, post-Katrina New Orleans, and the engineered landscapes of the Netherlands. The book is somewhat out of date, originally published in 2006, but the environmental problems detailed within it remain urgent. Our understanding of the climate change risks has improved, but we unfortunately haven’t done nearly enough to mitigate the threats.

Ecology and Evolution

Spillover by david quammen

One of my all time favorites, Spillover chronicles how ecological disruption and gloriously complicated evolutionary forces combine in “spillover” events, where a pathogen that is harmless in a reservoir species is transmitted to a new host - and wreaks havoc. Quammen details how researchers are piecing together to histories of emerging zoonotic viruses like nipah, SARS, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS. I can’t recall any other nonfiction science book that has every read, in parts, more like a horror novel - without resorting to hyperbole.

Song of the dodo by david quammen

Ok, so David Quammen might be my favorite science writer? Song of the Dodo is a classic, about island biogeography. It stretches from the “shitstorm” that Darwin and Wallace unleashed on Victorian England with their theory of evolution, to the classic studies on island biodiversity by E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur from the 1960s, to the artifical islands created as habitats fragment all over the world. A seriously fantastic read.

Equity in Academia

The only woman in the room by eileen Pollack

You might know Eileen Pollack as an author of fiction and creative nonfiction, but she started off her academic career in physics at Yale. She was disheartened, forty year later, when Larry Summers (then the president of Harvard) made a statement about women being generally not as brilliant at math as men. She delves back into her own past, to reflect on what pushed her away from science and towards writing, despite promising experiences at national labs and good grades. The last part of the book focuses on now - why so much hasn’t changed in the culture of science (astronomy and physics, particularly) and what progress we might make moving forward.