Authors Like Ed Yong

Merlin Sheldrake

British · Entangled Life (2020)

Entangled Life is about fungi: the mycorrhizal networks trading nutrients with tree roots, the yeasts that made bread and beer, the fungus that makes an ant climb a stem and clamp on before dying, and the question of whether an organism without a brain can be said to make decisions. Sheldrake has a doctorate in tropical ecology from Cambridge, and the book became an international bestseller and a documentary. He is also a fermentation enthusiast, and grew oyster mushrooms on a copy of his own book.

Carl Zimmer

American · She Has Her Mother's Laugh (2018), Life's Edge (2021), Air-Borne (2025)

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a six-hundred-page history of what people have believed about heredity, from royal bloodlines through the American eugenics movement to chimeras and the microbes we pass on. Life's Edge asks what actually distinguishes the living from the not-living, and Air-Borne (2025) is about the living things we breathe in and out all day. He has written a science column for The New York Times for years, and Yong has publicly praised his work.

Every book by Carl Zimmer →

Elizabeth Kolbert

American · The Sixth Extinction (2014), Under a White Sky (2021)

The Sixth Extinction travels to the field sites where species are disappearing — Panamanian frogs, corals, a rhino in Cincinnati — and won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2015. Under a White Sky is about the interventions built to fix earlier interventions: electrified rivers, engineered corals, proposals to dim the sun. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999.

Every book by Elizabeth Kolbert →

Authors like Elizabeth Kolbert →

Mary Roach

American · Stiff (2003), Packing for Mars (2010), Fuzz (2021)

Roach reports the subjects other writers avoid: what happens to donated bodies, the digestive tract end to end, the engineering of keeping humans alive in orbit, and in Fuzz what to do about wildlife that breaks human law — bears raiding houses, elephants killing farmers, gulls stealing lunches. She turns up at the labs and field stations herself and keeps the footnotes funnier than most writers' best lines.

Every book by Mary Roach →

Authors like Mary Roach →

Helen Macdonald

British · H is for Hawk (2014), Vesper Flights (2020)

H is for Hawk is about training a goshawk after the sudden death of her father, braided with the life of T. H. White, who trained one badly. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year. Vesper Flights collects shorter essays on swifts, mushrooms, nests, migraines, hares and the strange business of watching wildlife at all. She has worked as a falconer, a historian of science and a research fellow at Cambridge.

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Authors like Helen Macdonald →

Sy Montgomery

American · The Good Good Pig (2006), The Soul of an Octopus (2015)

The Soul of an Octopus comes out of years spent with octopuses at the New England Aquarium and in the wild, taking seriously the question of what they experience; it was a National Book Award finalist. The Good Good Pig is about the runt she and her husband raised for fourteen years in New Hampshire, and How to Be a Good Creature is a memoir told through thirteen animals she has known.

Every book by Sy Montgomery →

Authors like Sy Montgomery →

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Australian · Other Minds (2016), Metazoa (2020)

Other Minds is a philosopher of science, and keen diver, working out what an octopus is: a creature whose most recent common ancestor with us was probably a flattened worm six hundred million years ago, with most of its neurons in its arms, and which nonetheless behaves in ways that look unmistakably like curiosity. Metazoa traces the emergence of subjective experience across animal life more broadly. He teaches at the University of Sydney.

Frans de Waal

Dutch-American · Chimpanzee Politics (1982), Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016)

De Waal spent decades observing chimpanzees and bonobos, first in Arnhem and then at Emory University in Atlanta, and spent much of his career arguing that morality, empathy, politics and fairness have evolutionary roots visible in other primates. Are We Smart Enough argues that most experiments showing animals to be stupid were badly designed for the animal in question. Mama's Last Hug (2019) is about emotion in animals. He died in 2024.

Henry Beston

American · The Outermost House (1928)

Beston built a small house on a dune on Cape Cod, intended to stay a fortnight and stayed a year, and wrote about the surf, the birds, the coastguard patrols and the winter. The book contains the passage Yong quotes in An Immense World: that animals move gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, that they are not brethren and not underlings, but other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

Peter Singer

Australian · Animal Liberation (1975), Animal Liberation Now (2023)

Animal Liberation argued that the capacity to suffer, rather than intelligence or species membership, is what places a creature within our moral consideration, and it became the founding text of the modern animal movement; he revised it entirely as Animal Liberation Now in 2023. Singer is a utilitarian philosopher who taught for decades at Princeton. His positions on severe disability and end-of-life decisions have drawn sustained protest, including cancelled lectures, and remain genuinely contested.