This year, millions of viewers looked to the sky during a momentous day in April to view a stunning total solar eclipse. During select nights throughout the year, they gazed at spectacular auroras. As record heat spread over our planet again this year, Atlantic hurricanes fueled by warm waters hit the United States hard. And in Iceland, eruptions that spewed vibrant lava captivated audiences around the world.
Aside from writing and editing stories about these events and others, our editors read a lot this year—and so did our contributors. We asked our writers what books moved them the most, and they had plenty of suggestions. After a lot of back and forth, and a really hard time narrowing down the selections, we picked ten favorites. You can read reviews of these titles below—which include works about whether the Earth is alive, our relationship to the moon, and how and why we remember.
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
Plants surround us, yet their lives are so different from ours that even a dandelion can seem alien. Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters looks beyond the leaves and branches to how our verdant neighbors perceive our world, offering a plant’s eye view of life.
“No one yet really knows the limits of what a plant can do,” Schlanger writes early in the book, or even what plants truly are. Green life has often felt closer to the abiotic worlds of weather and geology, what we often lump under the broad label of “nature.” But Schlanger’s conversations and explorations with botanists seek to understand plants on their own terms. Plant seeds, for example, don’t only need soil, sun and water, but also have cells that are assessing the outside world and decide when the time is right for the new plant to begin emerging. Such a “decision-making center,” Schlanger writes, was unknown until 2017. From such examples, The Light Eaters unfolds as an anthropology of plant life, exploring debate and discussion about what senses plants have and what they might discern.
Ultimately, Schlanger acknowledges that the concept of plant intelligence remains contested. The Light Eaters nevertheless shines for exploring the question of whether plants can be said to communicate, have social lives and even move with intent. Schlanger’s personal and curious quest to ask these questions is the core of the book, an effort to see what might be discovered if we look at plants as more than just houseplants and forests. “Perhaps this amorphous quality of ‘plant intelligence’ I’m trying to grasp,” she writes, “is as much to do with plant trying, plant testing, plant failing.” —Riley Black
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Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
For millions of students across the United States, January 28, 1986, became an unsettling day they would remember vividly for the rest of their lives. Many sat in classrooms and auditoriums watching televisions to see the launch of Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher set to go to space, aboard the space shuttle Challenger. But just 73 seconds after liftoff, the craft lit up, broke apart and crashed down into the Atlantic Ocean, killing the seven people on board. The explosion replayed again and again on news coverage, leaving people of all ages wondering what happened and why.
In Challenger, Adam Higginbotham answers those questions thoroughly in an engaging narrative. The book delves into the history of spaceflight—including the prior Apollo 1 tragedy—that led up to Challenger’s fatal mission. Higginbotham brings readers into the lives of astronauts, engineers and bureaucrats involved with NASA’s space program. He shares the stories of the crew members who died and the engineers who tried to warn higher-ups that launching Challenger on that cold January morning was not safe. Higginbotham details how the families reacted after the explosion, how whistleblowers and leakers made sure the truth was revealed, and how a 230-page report on the disaster came together. That report revealed the accident was a result, as Higginbotham writes, of “cost cutting, faulty design, management blunders and institutional hubris.” And yet, NASA did not entirely learn from that lesson, as Higginbotham details with the story of another fatal mishap, the 2003 disintegration of the shuttle Columbia, showing how history was once again doomed to repeat itself. —Joe Spring
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Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters by Charan Ranganath
People who meet neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath tend to ask him the same question: “Why am I so forgetful?” In Why We Remember, Ranganath turns that question on its head, drawing on 25 years of experience studying the mechanisms of human memory to explain how remarkable it is that we remember anything at all. We are designed, Ranganath writes, to forget. Malleability and flexibility were more useful than photographic accuracy to our ancestors navigating a constantly changing, dangerous world. Our brains are not memorization machines; they are thinking machines, optimized by evolution to help us survive.
Using everyday examples—losing your keys, failing to remember why you entered a room, forgetting the name of someone you just met at a conference—and anecdotes from years of lab experiments, Ranganath explains exactly what’s happening inside your brain when you form memories and try to recall them. We meet a cast of recurring characters—the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala—and learn how these key players work together to wire the connections across our brains that make remembering possible. Memory is “less like a photograph and more like a painting,” he writes. Ranganath touches on hot-button issues—how digital media affects memory, the root cause of “brain fog” in long Covid, where neural networks fall short of mimicking human thinking—but the book’s key message is that, although we inevitably forget much throughout our lives, what we do remember defines who we are. “Memory is much, much more than an archive of the past,” Ranganath writes. “It is the prism through which we see ourselves, others and the world. It’s the connective tissue underlying what we say, think and do.” —Christian Elliott
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How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense by Robin George Andrews
Welcome to the badass business of planetary defense, where scientists safeguard Earth from the threats of asteroid strikes. In How to Kill an Asteroid, Robin George Andrews chronicles the roughly three-decade-long existence of the field that gained fame with the DART mission, or the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, in 2022. During that mission, a sacrificial spacecraft bumped the asteroid Dimorphos from its original orbit as a demonstration of one of humankind’s plans to deal with impending cosmic missiles. In the book, Andrews entwines two main suspenseful narratives. First, Andrews leans on the scientific research to describe the doomsday scenario that would result from an asteroid strike. Second, he details the nail-biting journey of DART sailing across space to meet its target, including some of the hiccups it faced that forced scientists to troubleshoot and problem-solve by the seat of their pants.
As Andrews writes, asteroid deflection is the most successful tactic humanity has against asteroids. But planetary defense is about more than just deflection—it also involves monitoring the heavens for suspicious-looking asteroids long before they reach Earth’s doorstep. Unfortunately, Andrews notes, funding has been progressively cut for developing and maintaining tools such as asteroid-detecting observatories. With such insights, Andrews’ book isn’t just a thrilling read, but also an urgent call from the author for a reinvestment in planetary defense. —Shi En Kim
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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel Levitin
Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and musician whose 2006 book This Is Your Brain on Music spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list, has now turned his attention to the myriad ways in which music can help to heal our bodies and our minds. His new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, looks at the ways music can help us cope with trauma and depression, relieve pain, strengthen our immune systems, and aid in the treatment of movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and ALS. Even in the case of Alzheimer’s disease, for which no cure currently exists, Levitin shows how music can loosen the disease’s grip by relieving anxiety and agitation.
Levitin has had personal relationships with many of the musicians whose stories he recounts. We hear for example, how he helped his longtime friend Joni Mitchell, who was hospitalized after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. On Levitin’s instruction, Mitchell’s nurses played a CD of tracks that she herself had previously cited as her favorites. It worked wonders, and her condition gradually improved. We also hear stories from Glen Campbell, Bruce Springsteen, Quincy Jones and others. These musicians’ anecdotes give the book a warmth it might otherwise lack.
Plenty of the book will appeal to both music fans and science buffs, but Levitin also recognizes that some degree of mystery will always surround music’s ability to move us. He argues, for example, that part of music’s appeal rests on its inherent ambiguity. Unlike books or movies, music doesn’t have a narrative structure; rather, as Levitin puts it, music “offers a dynamic interplay of sound, structure and meaning” that our brains interpret moment by moment. “Ultimately,” he writes, “music can do so many things because it can mean so many things.” —Dan Falk
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What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
In What If We Get It Right?, marine biologist and policy expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson presents interview transcripts, poems, factsheets and personal essays to discuss the many ways society has to reinvent itself to tackle the climate crisis. Johnson lets readers hear directly from activists, farmers, urban planners, artists, journalists and lawyers on myriad solutions. Climate change “touches all aspects of society,” says Kendra Pierre-Louis, a climate journalist Johnson interviews in the book. Thus, fixing climate change, Johnson shows, calls for an all-hands-on-deck approach, because there’s no silver bullet to this massive, multifaceted problem.
Refreshingly, the book offers an optimistic outlook on our climate future. Society already has the tools to fix the climate, Johnson says, so she calls on readers to put pressure on the government to formalize and hasten the use of those tools in policy. Solving climate change might seem like an insurmountable challenge, but the book reminds readers that each of us can bring meaningful change by finding where our individual talents and passions intersect, and contributing in our own unique ways. —Shi En Kim
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Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future by Daniel Lewis
Trees are “the heartbeat of the world,” writes Daniel Lewis in Twelve Trees, his love letter to the ancient, life-giving beings with which we share this planet. In 12 chapters, each paired with a beautiful illustration, Lewis takes readers on an arboreal journey around the world and through time. The characters—ebony, sandalwood, ceiba, redwood and so on—quickly come to feel like old friends, their long life histories carefully told and the stakes of their uncertain futures in the Anthropocene clearly laid out. Each tree raises big questions—how should conservationists balance the bulbous baobab’s survival against that of the thirsty endangered elephants that destroy it for water? Is an invasive tree inherently bad, in a world so thoroughly transformed and reshuffled by humans? For instance, the non-native blue gum eucalyptus, omnipresent across California, is highly flammable, but it also provides critical habitat for the endangered monarch butterfly.
Throughout the book, Lewis weaves in memoir, connecting his own roots with those of the trees he profiles. The toromiro, extinct on its home island of Rapa Nui but preserved in a diaspora of botanical collections around the world, reminds the author of his own migration from Hawaii to the mainland United States—like a buoyant, salt-resistant seed on the waves. His experience as curator and historian at the famed Huntington Library comes in handy on a visit to an archive of another sort, the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Arizona—where he comes face to face with Prometheus, a 5,062-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine that gave its life to transform dendrochronologists’ understanding of the ancient past. It’s hard to read Twelve Trees, to flip through its wood-pulp pages, and not see the world differently after. Lewis puts it best: “Trees are Earth’s reporters, chronicling life and change over the long, elastic curve of history. All we need to do is listen up.” —Christian Elliott
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Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle
In her debut book, Our Moon, Rebecca Boyle sheds new light on our familiar nighttime companion. Despite having a vast ground to cover, given the moon’s 4.5-billion-year entwined history with Earth, Boyle writes with clarity and wonder. The book is part encyclopedia, part lunar biography and even part travelogue. In vivid detail, Boyle describes the sights and sensations that a person setting foot on the moon’s dusty exterior would experience, thereby bringing the moon closer to readers than ever before.
The book covers familiar ground, such as the Apollo missions that brought astronauts to the lunar surface. Yet readers will still find factoids that surprise: Scientists hypothesize that the moon coaxed prehistoric marine life to colonize land, for example. Culturally, humankind has the moon to thank for inspiring the birth of religions, helping civilizations keep time and tipping the outcomes of brutal wars. As humans draw up plans to return to the moon—for scientific, geopolitical and economic reasons, Boyle notes—this book reminds us that our celestial neighbor is part of our world, our culture and our identity, and always has been. —Shi En Kim
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The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved by Steven Mithen
Birds and whales sing, and vervet monkeys use alarm calls—but only humans have full-blown symbolic language. How did we get here? In The Language Puzzle, archeologist Steven Mithen draws on the latest research from linguistics, anthropology, psychology and genetics to guide the reader through some 1.6 million years of hominin evolution.
A comparison with the Neanderthals, with whom we shared large swaths of Europe and Asia for tens of thousands of years, offers some insight. Neanderthals buried their dead and likely had complex cultural rituals, but they never developed symbolic art, and they used the same kinds of stone tools for millennia—perhaps, Mithen argues, due to their lack of linguistic ability, which in turn may stem from cognitive limitations. While Neanderthals may have been able to talk about what they could see in front of them, they likely had little or no capacity for abstract thought—an ability that eventually gave our own species planet-changing powers. Mithen also discusses how language evolved from gestures, and he ponders what kinds of words were the first to appear. (So-called iconic words, which include onomatopoeias such as “bang” and “quack” and appear across cultures, may have been among the earliest.) He also looks at how language abilities are distributed in the brain, and the possible role that a genetic mutation may have played in giving Homo sapiens a linguistic edge over other hominins. Parts of The Language Puzzle, especially the chapters on human biological and cultural evolution, will be familiar to those who read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or Leonard Mlodinow’s The Upright Thinkers. Still, Mithen’s detailed and engaging book, with its laser-like focus on the role of language, offers a fresh perspective on the human story. —Dan Falk
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Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life by Ferris Jabr
In the 1960s, British scientist James Lovelock asserted something that was both familiar and novel: Earth, he theorized, was a living organism. While different religions and ancient cultures had described the planet as animate for eons, Lovelock’s contemporaries in the scientific community were more apt to shun this notion, preferring a Darwinian stance that species adapted to their environments, but not vice versa. With the help of American biologist Lynn Margulis, however, Lovelock would develop and sustain the idea that organic and inorganic elements of the planet contributed to a global, self-regulating being. By the time Lovelock died in 2022, at the age of 103, different iterations of what became known as the Gaia hypothesis had gained supporters, while still attracting much skepticism.
Science journalist Ferris Jabr’s first book, Becoming Earth, is both a testament to and modern evolution of Lovelock’s theory. Jabr accompanies scientists on research expeditions, zooming in and out on the world’s diverse ecosystems to demonstrate how their occupants influence the environments around them. In the depths of a former mine in South Dakota, the journalist learns how microbes carve the Earth’s crust. From the perilous peak of a 1,066-foot observatory tower in the Amazon, he sees how the rainforest creates clouds. Shifting environments, such as those affected by climate change, of course, force species to adapt. But Jabr details how that change doesn’t always work in one direction. A kelp forest, for example, sequesters carbon and thus influences the atmosphere. “Again and again,” Jabr writes, “life and environment alter each other through feedback loops.” Through precise reporting and lyrical reflections, Jabr’s book explores a question as soulful as it is scientific: What does it mean to be alive? —Benjamin Cassidy
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Filed Under: Asteroids, Books, Botany, Brain, Climate Change, Conservation, Earth Science, Environment, Language, Moon, Music, Nature, Outer Space, Plants, Trees