Books like Something New Under the Sun by John Robert McNeill

Bill Bryson turns the universe into a conversational guide, tracing science from the Big Bang through evolution, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and particle physics with humor and clarity.

A powerful and terrifying warning about the dire consequences of global warming, from the acclaimed author of The Seven Obstacles to Climate Change.

Alan Weisman’s Countdown asks how many humans Earth can sustain, blending field research with ecological science to chart a path toward a balanced, prosperous future for people and nature.

Jack Emerson Davis chronicles the Gulf’s evolution from a bountiful marine cradle to a region reshaped by oil, real estate, and climate change, weaving untold stories from fishermen to presidents to illuminate humanity’s impact on this Gulf ecosystem.

An inquiry into humanity’s relationship with nature, the book reexamines environmental challenges and offers a forward-looking vision in which humans learn from nature—creating a harmonious, resilient future.

Preserving the environment, saving the rain forests, and preventing the extinction of species may seem like fairly recent concerns, but in Man and the Natural World, Sir Keith Thomas explores how these ideas took root long ago. In this entertaining and illuminating history, Thomas aims not just to explain present interest in preserving the environment and protecting the rights of animals, but to reconstruct an earlier mental world as well. Throughout the ages humankind has attempted to rationalize its place in nature. At no time was the idea of exploiting the earth for our own advantage so sharply challenged as in England between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. For it was during these years that there occurred a whole cluster of changes in the way in which men and women, at all social levels, perceived the natural world around them. Thomas seeks to expose the assumptions which underlay the views and feelings of the inhabitants of early modern England toward the animals, birds, vegetation, and physical landscape among which they spent their lives. The issues raised here are even more alive today than they were just ten years ago. This fascinating work deftly shows that it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves.