2022 Holiday Gift Guide: Science, History, and Current Events
If you have a life-long-learner on your gift list, someone who’s always recounting the last podcast they listened to or article they read, these inventive and fascinating nonfiction picks including hidden histories, mind-blowing science, and incisive social commentary are sure to keep them turning pages, even during the holiday party.
A Movement in Words and Images
Award-winning photographer Devin Allen has devoted the last six years to documenting the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, from its early days in Baltimore, Maryland, up to the present day. The riveting images in No Justice, No Peace provide a lens on the resistance that has empowered Black lives generation after generation. Allen’s signature black-and-white photos bear witness to the profound history of African Americans and allies in the fight for social justice and portray the collective action over decades in stunning, timeless portraits.
Allen’s remarkable photos of today’s Black Lives Matter protests, which have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and twice on the cover of Time magazine, were inspired by Gordon Parks of the Civil Rights Movement, and create a vision of the past and future of Black activism and leadership in America. With contributions from twenty-six bestselling and influential writers and activists of today such as Clint Smith, DeRay Mckesson, D. Watkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Emmanuel Acho, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and more, alongside the words of past writers and activists such as Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and John Lewis, No Justice, No Peace is a reminder of the moral responsibility of Americans to break unjust laws and take direct action.
In words and pictures, No Justice, No Peace honors the connection between activism today and that of the past. If indeed hindsight is 20/20, this artistic look back is a lens on history that enlarges our understanding of the lasting predicament of racism in the United States of America. At once deeply intimate and profoundly uplifting, No Justice, No Peace is a visual tribute to Black resistance and a stern missive on the tough, but necessary, road that lies ahead.
From celebrated anthropologist Jennifer Raff comes the untold story—and fascinating mystery—of how humans migrated to the Americas.
ORIGIN is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. ORIGIN provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution.
20,000 years ago, people crossed a great land bridge from Siberia into Western Alaska and then dispersed southward into what is now called the Americas. Until we venture out to other worlds, this remains the last time our species has populated an entirely new place, and this event has been a subject of deep fascination and controversy. No written records—and scant archaeological evidence—exist to tell us what happened or how it took place. Many different models have been proposed to explain how the Americas were peopled and what happened in the thousands of years that followed.
A study of both past and present, ORIGIN explores how genetics is currently being used to construct narratives that profoundly impact Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It serves as a primer for anyone interested in how genetics has become entangled with identity in the way that society addresses the question "Who is indigenous?"
New York Times bestselling author William Alexander provides "an entertaining, broad-ranging history of the tomato" (Mark Pendergrast) in this fascinating and erudite microhistory.
The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Lost in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato has become the avatar for our disaffection with industrial foods — while becoming the most popular vegetable in America (and, in fact, the world). Each summer, tomato festivals crop up across the country; the Heinz ketchup bottle, instantly recognizable, has earned a spot in the Smithsonian; and now the tomato is redefining the very nature of farming, moving from fields into climate-controlled mega-greenhouses the size of New England villages.
Supported by meticulous research and told in a lively, accessible voice, Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World seamlessly weaves travel, history, humor, and a little adventure (and misadventure) to follow the tomato's trail through history. A fascinating story complete with heroes, con artists, conquistadors, and—no surprise—the Mafia, this book is a mouth-watering, informative, and entertaining guide to the food that has captured our hearts for generations.
Our predictions of the future are a wild fantasy, inextricably linked to our present hopes and fears, biases and ignorance. Whether they be the outlandish leaps predicted in the 1920s, like multi-purpose utility belts with climate control capabilities and planes the size of luxury cruise ships, or the forecasts of the ‘60s, which didn’t anticipate the sexual revolution or women’s liberation, the path to the present is littered with failed predictions and incorrect estimations. The best we can do is try to absorb the lessons from futurism's checkered past, perhaps learning to do a little better.
In THE SKEPTICS' GUIDE TO THE FUTURE, Steven Novella and his co-authors build upon the work of futurists of the past by examining what they got right, what they got wrong, and how they came to those conclusions. By exploring the pitfalls of each era, they give their own speculations about the distant future, transformed by unbelievable technology ranging from genetic manipulation to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Applying their trademark skepticism, they carefully extrapolate upon each scientific development, leaving no stone unturned as they lay out a vision for the future.
Nautilus Book Awards' Better Books for a Better World | Axiom Business Book Award Winner
GrubHub founder Mike Evans reveals the inside story of how he grew a multibillion-dollar behemoth that changed the way we eat.
GrubHub’s journey from Mike’s bedroom to Wall Street doesn’t fit into how business schools teach entrepreneurship. In Hangry, he details step-by-step the grind of building an innovative business, with each chapter including sharp lessons for entrepreneurs and startups that Mike learned on the fly as he piloted GrubHub by the seat of his pants. Hangry reveals a decade of eighty-hour work weeks, detailed steps of how Mike garnered his first customers, his hunt for financing dollars, cliffhanger acquisitions, the near collapse of his marriage, a brutally difficult merger, and a pair of tumultuous quit/unquit moments, all to steer the company to become one of the most successful startups in the world. With a razor-sharp wit, Mike reveals hard-won truths about how startups succeed—and even harder-won truths about how startups fail.
Shocking everyone, at the pinnacle of startup success, Mike leaves it all behind, quitting the company he started to bike across the United States in search of balance. But eventually, the grand vistas of America bring the lessons of the past into focus, driving the realization that for entrepreneurs a hunger for success doesn’t end, and he starts another company, even more ambitious than the first.
After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it.
It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born. Since then, the galaxy has watched as dark energy pushed away its first friends, as humans mythologized its name and purpose, and as galactic archaeologists have worked to determine its true age (rude). The Milky Way has absorbed supermassive (an actual technical term) black holes, made enemies of a few galactic neighbors, and mourned the deaths of countless stars. Our home galaxy has even fallen in love.
After all this time, the Milky Way finally feels that it's amassed enough experience for the juicy tell-all we've all been waiting for. Its fascinating autobiography recounts the history and future of the universe in accessible but scientific detail, presenting a summary of human astronomical knowledge thus far that is unquestionably out of this world.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND SCIENCENET
NAMED A BEST AUDIOBOOK OF 2022 BY BOOKPAGE
NAMED A BEST AUDIOBOOK OF 2022 BY BOOKPAGE
After the end of World War II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer—better known as the ENIAC—even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. While most students of computer history are aware of this innovative machine, the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told—until now.
Over the course of a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded extensive interviews with the women about their work. Proving Ground restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC Programmers' groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before, and Proving Ground is the celebration they deserve.
An intimate and revelatory dive into the world of the beaver—the wonderfully weird rodent that has surprisingly shaped American history and may save its ecological future.
From award-winning writer Leila Philip, Beaverland is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”.
What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Beaverland reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment.
The New York Times Editors' Choice
NPR Science Friday Book Club Selection