Bookshelf

Join naturalist Scott Weidensaul on his travels to find the Tasmanian wolf, the black-footed ferret, and the Indian forest owlet in The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species (North Point Press). Some of these species, of course, have been elbowed out of existence by introduced ones, and the fallout has been chronicled in Yvonne Baskin's A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions (Island Press). But if you'd prefer to tune out such economic and ecological bad news, Stephanie Mills recommends Epicurean Simplicity (Island Press). Her book is a call for living prudently (but intensely) in harmony with the natural world. In Lewis & Clark Among the Grizzlies: Legend and Legacy in the American West (Falcon/Globe Pequot Press), naturalist Paul Schullery has sifted through journals from the Corps of Discovery, 1804-1806, to document expedition members' first (and increasingly frequent) encounters with the "white" bear and to revisit a "former grizzly bear kingdom now lost under cities, ranches, and civilized landscapes."

On another important theme, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould offers a rigorously scientific, scholarly, and elegant interpretation of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Harvard University Press), including the fierce and ongoing debates that surround the topic. A masterpiece of evolution is the human eye, and in the beautifully illustrated Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (Abrams), neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone explains how the eye processes light. In Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth (Harvard University Press), biopsychologist Mark S. Blumberg explains another mechanism driven by the evolutionary process--the way animals find (or avoid) heat and regulate their temperature as efficiently as possible. Still on the subject of evolution, Steve Olson, in Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Houghton Mifflin), argues that DNA provides "a sort of molecular parchment on which an account of our species has been written."

Among the new crop of memoirs is John Tyler Bonner's Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science (Harvard University Press), in which he chronicles an illustrious career devoted in large part to studying the life cycles of slime molds. Or check out astrophysicist Janna Levin's How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space (Princeton University Press), made up of journal entries to explain (to her mother) her abstruse work on such topics as infinity, relativity, black holes, and topology.

For unusual guidebooks, try Tim Fitzharris's National Park Photography (AAA Publishing), filled with helpful maps indicating the best views, professional pointers on technique, and advice on taking outstanding photographs of natural wonders. In Animals & Plants of the Ancient Maya: A Guide (University of Texas Press), Victoria Schlesinger wants to "bring to life the interaction between an ancient people and their environment." Finally, for a beautifully illustrated tour of our solar system's planets, see F. W. Taylor's The Cambridge Photographic Guide to the Planets (Cambridge University Press).

The books mentioned are usually available in the Museum Shop, (212) 769-5150, or through www.amnh.org.