Andrew Scott's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Andrew Scott recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Andrew Scott's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

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The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History

David Beerling

4.1

Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2C or 8C over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking into the distant past, for a comparison with the world long before the rise of mankind. We

Recommended by Andrew Scott and Jonathan Silvertown.

Andrew Scott

Beerling clearly shows that plants shaped the world in which we live and played a more important role on the evolution of our planet that is often acknowledged. [source]

Jonathan Silvertown

The Emerald Planet is a serious talking to about why plants must not be ignored. [source]

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Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth - Updated Edition

Andrew H. Knoll

4.2

Australopithecines, dinosaurs, trilobites--such fossils conjure up images of lost worlds filled with vanished organisms. But in the full history of life, ancient animals, even the trilobites, form only the half-billion-year tip of a nearly four-billion-year iceberg. Andrew Knoll explores the deep history of life from its origins on a young planet to the incredible Cambrian explosion, presenting a

Recommended by Andrew Scott, Paul Falkowski, and Richard Fortey.

Andrew Scott

Knoll shows the intimate relationship between the evolution of life and the evolution of the planet. [source]

Paul Falkowski

What Andy has done is really exposed us to the world before animals and plants, when there was strong evidence of life but the world was totally controlled by single celled organisms, the protists. [source]

Richard Fortey

It’s very important, when we muck around with the atmosphere as we’re doing, to realise that what we have is actually a product of this ineffable and long period of planetary evolution. [source]

The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey Into Earth's Deep History

Jan Zalasiewicz

4.2

This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.

This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal r

Recommended by Andrew Scott.

Andrew Scott

The book is a real gem. It illustrates not only how all the sciences are involved in unraveling the history of our planet but the sheer excitement of the discoveries and that there is a story for us all to unravel. [source]

The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart

Mark Maslin

4.2

One of the fundamental questions of our existence is why we are so smart. There are lots of drawbacks to having a large brain, including the huge food intake needed to keep the organ running, the frequency with which it goes wrong, and our very high infant and mother mortality rates compared with other mammals, due to the difficulty of giving birth to offspring with very large heads. So why did ev

Recommended by Andrew Scott.

Andrew Scott

integrates not only geology, palaeontology and archeology but also climate and vegetation change. An excellent summary of how much we have learned over the past forty years [source]