Series: Non-fiction

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

If your view of a Neanderthal is a sloped-head, grunting, not-so-bright guy hunched against blowing snow while he tracks a mammoth, unaware of his impending extinction and eventual supplantation by his far-smarter and much smugger cousins (that would be us), it’s time to update that image. And archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes has just the method of doing so: her fascinating, detailed, and vivid recreation of our ancestor: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art (2020).

For the longest time Neanderthals were seen as a failed species: brutish,

Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World by Tim Gregory

Meteorite: The Stones from Outer Space That Made Our World (2020), by Tim Gregory, does what the best popular science books do — uses a vibrant, engaging and distinctive voice to both broadly and deeply inform the lay reader without dumbing down the science down too much while placing it in historical context. Check, check, and check. I already can’t wait for what Gregory turns to in his next non-fiction work.

The title tells you all you need to know about the subject matter.

The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque

In the very beginning of The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers (2020), Emily Levesque notes that “of the 7.5 billion people on our planet, fewer than fifty thousand are professional astronomers.” As the title implies, and as Levesque explains toward the end of her book, the number is perhaps more likely to shrink rather than rise. Luckily for us, Levesque is one of that select group, and so is able to fill the pages in between beginning and end with a number of entertaining stories about her own experiences,

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

In case these times weren’t providing enough anxiety, astrophysicist Katie Mack has arrived on the scene with something else for you to worry about — the end of the universe. More precisely, in The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020), Mack explores five ways the universe might die: The Big Crunch, Heat Death, The Big Rip, Vacuum Decay, and a Bounce. Luckily, most won’t be coming along for some billions of years, so you can probably still get in everything you’ve been planning on — cleaning out the garage,