#nonfiction books
I really enjoy these sorts of popular science books, particularly ones about math or statistics. I’m not a big math person but I am a social science person who has an appreciation of statistics, especially where the fields overlap
For all who are interested in keeping the planet safe and healthy, I recommend reading nonfiction (and a lot of it!). As a young person (who may not be immediately taken seriously) it will help you educate people on important topics in a way that is factual and sophisticated!
Here are some of my all time favorite nonfiction booksabout our planet, where the future is heading, and what we as a collective can do to take action!
- The Ends of The World by Peter Brannen (10/10!!)
- This is a FANTASTIC, funny, and highly informative book that came out this year about the historic effects of global warming, and where we might be heading as a result. It reads like a narrative, and gives a really interesting perspective on global warming from a historical, geological and biological perspective! In the words of Michael Pye “This is a book about rocks: a vivid, fascinating, sometimes horrifying book about rocks and the story they tell about all the past and future lives of our planet”.
- Things you’ll learn about: climate change, global warming, geology, the past 5 mass extinctions, paleontology, gigantic boney fishes, climate change, dinosaurs, and coral bleaching!
- Spineless by Juli Berwald (8/10)
- Spineless is an informative, beautifully written book about jellyfish and their effects on the oceans and ourselves. Berwald tells her personal journey studying jellyfish from start to finish in a way that is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating, and always incredibly interesting!
- Things you’ll learn about: jellyfish (literally everything about them, how to catch them, how to eat them, how to raise them, the big, the small, how they broke a nuclear reactor, eating habits, mating, EVERYTHING), global warming, the scientific community, japan, etc. etc.
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (10/10)
- A classic. Just a classic cornerstone environmentalism book. Everyone should read it sometime in their lives. Rachel Carson is a badass environmentalist who paved the way for female scientists and wrote a startling, unflinchingly honest book about the effects of DDT on wildlife (in the 1960s no less!). I love this book to pieces, please read!
- Things you’ll learn about: effects of pesticides on the environment, history, and the effects of widespread human ignorance
- the LOST species by Christopher Kemp (7/10)
- This book is incredibly unique! It focuses on the importance of natural history museums and collections, and how many species are discovered in the musty boxes and crates of huge natural history collections. The book is broken into small sections, each talking about a different species found in this way. Its full of surprises and narratives!
- Things you’ll learn about: endangered species, how natural history collections are built, how said collections are incredibly important and are falling into disrepair because no one cares about them, mass frog extinctions, and 30 ft. parasites that live in the stomachs of sperm whales!
Jill Gutowitz is a voice I recognize. She knows that New Jersey aughts life, a time of Z100 and gossip magazines and normalized homophobia. In Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays, Gutowitz breaks down what it was like to grow up in a time when queerness was great as long as it was for the male gaze, when otherwise being a “dyke” was the worst possible thing you could be, and what it’s meant to her to watch our pop culture shift from that to a generation of out queer pop stars, online lesbianism, and queerness being “cool."
Gutowitz’s cultural commentary is funny, heartfelt, and earnest. She writes about why sapphics are so into "step on my neck” mommy culture; she writes about lesbian yearning and that time she was visited by the FBI for making an “Arya Stark” list of the senators who confirmed Kavanaugh. . I didn’t agree with all of her takes. She leans a little too hard into the idea that queerness is cool now, so we’re all ok. I struggle with the claim that insisting that celebs are secretly gay is fine nowadays because it’s no longer as big a deal to come out, and because the people doing the speculating are queer. I’ve ranted about this topic, and her arguments weren’t convincing.
But all around, I really enjoyed this essay collection. It was funny and honest, Gutowitz baring her most vulnerable moments with a rich dollop of queer-ass millennial humor on top, digging into the gayest paparazzi photos of all time or picking apart her childhood desire to be a celebrity. It’s a vivid window into millennial queer culture as well as the current lesbian canon, and is relatable, touching, and a lot of fun.
Content warnings for homophobia, emotional abuse, sexism, sexual assault/coercion.
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