David Quammen

“This is a book about the COVID-19 pandemic, but what makes this read unique is that it doesn’t go into the preparedness of countries or how they dealt with COVID-19. Rather, it takes you on a detective-like journey through the science of COVID-19. It looks at the theories on its origins and the scientists who worked relentlessly on understanding the biology of the virus itself and then the development of the vaccines against it. A lot of people think that the vaccine development happened quite fast, me included. However, in reality, RNA-type vaccine technology has been in the works for years. Scientists have been working on mRNA vaccine technology for decades and were then able to take that technology and effectively apply it to COVID-19.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2023: The Royal Society Book Prize

Rebecca Henry, Scientist

“Quammen is one of the great science journalists, and this is a monument of a book—a masterful retelling of how the ‘tree of life’ was recast in the twentieth century by a band of original thinkers.” Read more...

The Best Science Books of 2018

Barbara Kiser, Science Writer

“I don’t think anyone has described the fragmentation of nature in the modern world as brilliantly as Quammen. He likens an ecosystem to a Persian carpet. Cut a beautiful, complex carpet into tiny squares, he says, and you get not tiny carpets, but a lot of useless scraps of material fraying at the edges. That’s what we’ve done to our ecosystems. For the most part, nature now exists only in tiny pockets, oases in a biological desert, fraying at the edges. Species that exist in these little Noah’s arks are increasingly vulnerable to assault by pollution, climate change and predators. Populations that – unlike birds or flying insects – are unable to move and mingle with other populations suffer from genetic impoverishment. This is what happens on small islands in mid-ocean. Islands are where species most commonly go extinct. Quammen’s wondrous peregrination of islands takes us on a journey of evolutions and extinctions in order to illustrate how like islands our continents have become.” Read more...

The best books on Wilding

Isabella Tree,