Books like Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

01

The Hidden Life of Trees

Peter Wohlleben · Science

Peter Wohlleben spent decades as a forester in the Eifel mountains of Germany, and The Hidden Life of Trees is his account of what scientific research and sustained observation have revealed about trees as social organisms.

Both dig into forest ecology.

02

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake · Science

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist who has spent his career studying fungi, and Entangled Life is his account of what fungi are, what they do, and why most people who think they know something about the natural world understand almost nothing about this kingdom of life.

Both dig into mycorrhizal networks.

03

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · Science

The Sixth Extinction is Elizabeth Kolbert's account of the mass extinction event currently underway — the sixth in Earth's history, and the first caused by a single species.

A kindred science read.

04

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

A kindred science read.

05

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

06

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

Sam Kean · Science

The Disappearing Spoon is Sam Kean's account of how the periodic table of elements came to be — not as a dry exercise in classroom science, but as a record of obsession, accident, rivalry, and the occasional poisoning.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

07

The Song of the Cell

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Song of the Cell is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of how the cell — the basic unit of life — was discovered, decoded, and eventually harnessed to rebuild and repair the human body.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

08

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen · Science

The Tangled Tree is David Quammen's account of how molecular biology overturned the traditional picture of the tree of life — the branching diagram, familiar since Darwin, that represents the evolution of all living things from a common ancestor.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

09

An Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison · Psychology

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychiatrist and professor who has manic-depressive illness.

Both dig into memoir.

10

In Search of Memory

Eric R. Kandel · Memoir

In Search of Memory is Eric Kandel's autobiography interleaved with the history of neuroscience, organized around his own central scientific achievement: the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory storage in the sea slug Aplysia.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

11

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir · Science fiction

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he's there.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

12

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes · History

Richard Holmes is a British literary biographer best known for his two-volume life of Shelley, and The Age of Wonder brings that literary sensibility to the history of science during the Romantic period — roughly 1769 to 1832.

Both dig into scientific discovery.