Want to know what books Sarah Dry recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Sarah Dry's favorite book recommendations of all time.
1
Sarah DryIt’s a little bit perverse of me to include this little pamphlet of two essays in a roundup of the best books of 2019, because they were first published in 1990, but I guess wanted to make the point that we can learn new things from old writings. Snyder is best known as a poet, but he’s a powerful essayist as well. These two essays are irreducible in a way that reminds me of poetry: you can’t... (Source)
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Naomi Oreskes, Stephen Macedo, Ottmar Edenhofer, Jon Krosnick, Marc Lange, M. Susan Lindee, Martin Kowarsch | 4.12
Why the social character of scientific knowledge makes it trustworthy
Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength--and the greatest reason we can trust it.
Tracing the history and philosophy of... more Why the social character of scientific knowledge makes it trustworthy
Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength--and the greatest reason we can trust it.
Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, Oreskes explains that, contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted. This process is not perfect--nothing ever is when humans are involved--but she draws vital lessons from cases where scientists got it wrong. Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy.
Based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, this timely and provocative book features critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.
-- "Kirkus Reviews" less Sarah DryOreskes adds a novel twist—novel to the philosophy of science in the 20th century, that is—which is that it is the social character of science that provides a warrant for its trustworthiness. The fact that science is a collective activity that depends on open debate and criticism, and relies on tools like peer review and conferences and workshops where differences of opinion are aired, means that... (Source)
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3
From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped an extraordinary life.
Taking us nearly from pole to pole--from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth--and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "one of our finest writers," gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively,... more From the National Book Award-winning author of the now-classic Arctic Dreams, a vivid, poetic, capacious work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped an extraordinary life.
Taking us nearly from pole to pole--from modern megacities to some of the most remote regions on the earth--and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez, hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as "one of our finest writers," gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves indelibly, immersively, through his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.
As he takes us on these myriad travels, Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. Throughout his journeys--to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe--and via friendships he forges along the way with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
Horizon is a revelatory, epic work that voices concern and frustration along with humanity and hope--a book that makes you see the world differently, and that is the crowning achievement by one of America's great thinkers and most humane voices. less Sarah DryThis book is the culmination of a lifetime of travel, not just to the polar extremes but all over the world. It takes the form of a series of layered reminiscences and retellings. Meaning emerges in recollection and in revisiting. Part of what Lopez wants to say is that we can never come to the end of our knowledge of a place, no matter how often we revisit it. But the implication is also that we... (Source)
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Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland--at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future.... more Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland--at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenland's ice doesn't just tell us where we've been. More urgently, it tells us where we're headed.
In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth's last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland's ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century--first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds--and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland's seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling--one mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth's past, going back hundreds of thousands of years.
Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island before it's too late. As Greenland's ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns.
Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arctic's explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style--and a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left. less 
Elizabeth KolbertJon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book. (Source)
Sarah DryThis book is a history of both the exploration of Greenland, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then it becomes, from the mid-20th century onwards, a story of scientific investigation in Greenland. One of the things that Gertner does really well is show how hard-earned our knowledge of climate is and therefore how robust. (Source)
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5
The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that... more The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
A New York Times Bestseller. less 
Kwame Anthony AppiahFeels at the beginning like a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees. (Source)
Sarah DryI had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space. (Source)
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