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James Sowerby
The Enlightenment's Natural Historian
Paul Henderson
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2015
The mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century was a time of illustrious achievements in the world of botanical art. Artists who once sought to please the whims of wealthy patrons were turning to scientists for inspiration, and they now had access to countless new botanical specimens thanks to prolific explorers and plant hunters. One of the best botanical artists and most knowledgeable natural historians of this era was James Sowerby (1757–1822). Talented and prolific, his crowning achievement was Sowerby's Botany, a thirty-six volume work on the botany of England that contained 2,592 hand-colored botanical engravings. Despite Sowerby’s place in the pantheon of botanical artists, no full biography of the artist exists. Paul Henderson remedies this with a thoroughly researched and wholly fascinating look at Sowerby’s life and legacy.

Henderson explores Sowerby’s artistic achievements as well as his place at the center of a thriving network of artists and scientists. Sowerby worked closely with key botanists of the time, influencing the likes of Sir Joseph Banks and James Smith, as well as Dawson Turner, James Dickson, Aylmer Lambert, and William Woodville. He also contributed illustrations to the earliest volumes of The Botanical Magazine (later known as Curtis's Botanical Magazine). Specimens from his collection round out the holdings of museums around the world, and he has become the paterfamilias of a talented line of botanical and natural science illustrators.

Henderson’s Sowerby’s Botany is beautifully illustrated with Sowerby’s artwork and includes extracts from letters, manuscripts, and natural history publications. It is a fascinating story of an influential artist working at the intersections of art and nature at a time of unprecedented scientific enlightenment.
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Java Man
How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution
Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis, and Roger Lewin
University of Chicago Press, 2001
"'Garniss, lend me your knife for a second, will you,' I whispered." So begins Java Man, the inside story of how one discovery—a human skull found on the island of Java—by two geologists shook the foundations of science. By uncovering new evidence about the hominid known as Java man, Carl C. Swisher and Garniss H. Curtis were able to date his fossil remains at 1.7 million years, an age that stunned the scientific community because it pushed back the time when humans migrating out of Africa first reached Eurasia by nearly one million years. Cowritten by the popular science writer Roger Lewin, this is a gripping and informative account of the discovery that breathed new life into the human origins debate.

Originally published by Scribner
2000 ISBN: 0-684-80000-4
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Jellyfish
A Natural History
Lisa-ann Gershwin
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Jellyfish, with their undulating umbrella-shaped bells and sprawling tentacles, are as fascinating and beautiful as they are frightening and dangerous. They are found in every ocean at every depth, and they are the oldest multi-organed life form on the planet, having inhabited the ocean for more than five hundred million years. In many places they are also vastly increasing in number, and these population blooms may be an ominous indicator of the rising temperatures and toxicity of the world’s oceans.

Jellyfish presents these aquarium favorites in all their extraordinary and captivating beauty. Fifty unique species, from stalked jellyfish to black sea nettles, are presented in stunning color photographs along with the most current scientific information on their anatomy, history, distribution, position in the water, and environmental status. Foremost jellyfish expert Lisa-ann Gershwin provides an insightful look at the natural history and biology of each of these spellbinding creatures, while offering a timely take on their place in the rapidly changing and deteriorating condition of the oceans. Readers will learn about immortal jellyfish who live and die and live again as well as those who camouflage themselves amid sea grasses and shells, hiding in plain sight.
 
Approachably written and based in the latest science and ecology, this colorful book provides an authoritative guide to these ethereal marine wonders.
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The Jewel Box
How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules
Tim Blackburn
Island Press, 2023
A plastic box with a lightbulb attached may seem like an odd birthday present. But for ecologist Tim Blackburn, a moth trap is a captivating window into the world beyond the roof terrace of his London flat. Whether gaudy or drab, rare or common, each moth ensnared by the trap is a treasure with a story to tell. In The Jewel Box, Blackburn introduces these mysterious visitors, revealing how the moths he catches reflect hidden patterns governing the world around us. 

With names like the Dingy Footman, Jersey Tiger, Pale Mottled Willow, and Uncertain, and at least 140,000 identified species, moths are fascinating in their own right. But no moth is an island—they are vital links in the web of life. Through the lives of these overlooked insects, Blackburn introduces a landscape of unseen ecological connections. The flapping of a moth’s wing may not cause a hurricane, but it is closely tied to the wider world, from the park down the street to climatic shifts across the globe. 

Through his luminous prose and infectious sense of curiosity, Blackburn teaches us to see—and respect—the intricate web of nature in which we’re all caught. The Jewel Box shows us how the contents of one small box can illuminate the workings of all nature. 
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Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
Edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the life sciences and made profound claims about human origins and the human condition, topics often viewed as the prerogative of religion. As a result, evolution has provoked a wide variety of religious responses, ranging from angry rejection to enthusiastic acceptance. While Christian responses to evolution have been studied extensively, little scholarly attention has been paid to Jewish reactions. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the first extended meditation on the Jewish engagement with this crucial and controversial theory.

The contributors to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism—from several academic disciplines and two branches of the rabbinate—present case studies showing how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts. Furthermore, they examine how evolutionary theory has been deployed when characterizing Jews as a race, both by Zionists and by anti-Semites. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism addresses historical and contemporary, as well as progressive and Orthodox, responses to evolution in America, Europe, and Israel, ultimately extending the history of Darwinism into new religious domains.

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Journey to the Ants
A Story of Scientific Exploration
Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson
Harvard University Press, 1994
Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to the Ants combines autobiography and scientific lore to convey the excitement and pleasure the study of ants can offer. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson interweave their personal adventures with the social lives of ants, building, from the first minute observations of childhood, a remarkable account of these abundant insects’ evolutionary achievement.
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Journeys with Emperors
Tracking the World's Most Extreme Penguin
Gerald L. Kooyman and Jim Mastro
University of Chicago Press, 2023
With stunning photographs from the ice edge, a firsthand account of a researcher’s time in Antarctica and of the perilous journeys of the world’s largest penguin species: the iconic emperor.
 
Nearly all emperor penguin colonies are extremely remote; of the sixty-six known, fewer than thirty have been visited by humans, and even fewer have been the subject of successful research programs. One of the largest known emperor penguin colonies is found on a narrow band of sea ice attached to the Antarctic continent. In Journeys with Emperors, Gerald L. Kooyman and Jim Mastro take us to this far-flung colony in the Ross Sea, showing us how scientists gained access to it, and what they learned while living among the penguins as they raised their chicks.
 
The primary mission was to record the birds’ activities at sea, and the data revealed important aspects of emperor penguin behavior and physiology: for instance, that in the course of hunting for food, some of the penguins dive to depths of greater than five hundred meters (a third of a mile, which is deeper than for any other diving bird). The researchers also discovered that, crucially, most of the emperor’s life is actually spent at sea, with fledged chicks and adults making separate, perilous journeys through icy water. When chick nurturing is complete, the fledglings abandon the colony in large groups, heading north to the Southern Ocean. The adults leave at the same time, traveling one thousand kilometers eastward across the Ross Sea to a sea-ice sanctuary for molting. During this journey, they must gain enough weight to survive the month-long molt, when every feather is replaced and the birds cannot enter the water to feed. After the molt, many if not most return to the colony to breed once again. For the males, this means another fast—this time for 120 days as they incubate their eggs. The nearness of the colony to the ice edge spared the penguins the long, energy-draining march for which other colonies are well-known. It also allowed researchers to observe the penguins’ departures to and arrivals from their foraging journeys, as well as their dangerous interactions with leopard seals and killer whales.
 
Featuring original color photographs and complemented with online videos, Journeys with Emperors is both an eye-opening overview of the emperor penguin’s life and a thrilling tale of scientific discovery in one of the most remote, harsh, and beautiful places on Earth.
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