The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 17

Jim Carrier is an award-winning journalist, civil rights activist, and filmmaker. In a forty-year career, Jim has written nine books, been published in National Geographic and the New York Times, written Denver Post series on the legacy of the atomic bomb and on the Marlboro Man, and produced multimedia projects for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has roamed by Jeep through the American West and by sailboat across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Now based in Madison, Wisconsin, he is at work on a film about the racial history of the banjo.

John Colapinto is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the nonfiction book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl and the novel About the Author. He is married and has an eleven-year-old son.

In the fifteen years that Andrew Corsello has been writing for GQ, his work has been nominated five times for the National Magazine Award, winning once, and anthologized three times in The Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, an Episcopal priest, and their two young sons.

Timothy Ferris has written a dozen booksa"among them The Science of Liberty, The Whole Shebang, and Coming of Age in the Milky Waya"and made three nonfiction films: The Creation of the Universe (1986), Life Beyond Earth (1999), and Seeing in the Dark (2007). He produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar s.p.a.cecraft; now exiting the solar system, the Voyagers are the most distant probes ever created by humans. Called "the best popular science writer in the English language" by the Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by the Washington Post, Ferris has received the American Inst.i.tute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A fellow of the American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, Ferris has taught in five disciplinesa"astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophya"at four universities. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tim Flannery has published more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His books include the landmark works The Future Eaters and The Weather Makers, which has been translated into twenty-five languages. In 2006 the book won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Prize, the O2 (a German environmental prize), and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. In 2007 he cofounded and was appointed the chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, a coalition of community, business, and political leaders who have come together to confront climate change.

Jane Goodall, Ph.D., DBE, the founder of the Jane Goodall Inst.i.tute and a UN Messenger of Peace, began her landmark study of chimpanzee behavior in what is now Tanzania in July 1960 under the mentorship of the famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey. Her work at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve became the foundation of primatological research and redefined the relationship between humans and animals. In 1977 she established the Jane Goodall Inst.i.tute (JGI), which is now a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It also is widely recognized for establishing innovative community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa and Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots, a global environmental and humanitarian youth program, which has groups in more than 120 countries. For more information, please visit www.janegoodall.org.

Philip Gourevitch, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), A Cold Case (2001), and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, and the Guardian First Book Award. His books, short fiction, essays, and reportage have been translated into a dozen languages. From 2005 to 2010 he was the editor of the Paris Review. He is writing a new book from Rwanda.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, "The Climate of Man," from which the book was adapted, won a National Magazine Award and a National Academies Communications Award. She lives with her husband and three sons in Williamstown, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Robert Kunzig is a senior environment editor at National Geographic and has been a science writer for nearly thirty years, including fourteen on the staff of Discover. He is the author of two books: Mapping the Deep, about oceanography, which won the science-writing prize of the Royal Society in 2000; and Fixing Climate, written with the climate scientist Wallace Broecker, which was published in 2008. Kunzig lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Karen Fitzpatrick.

Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He has also written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Nature, McSweeney's, and Outside.

Richard Manning is the author of eight books, including One Round River, which was named a significant book of the year by the New York Times in 1998. He has worked as a consultant on agriculture, poverty, and the environment to the McKnight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He has written for Harper's Magazine, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Wired, Men's Journal, OnEarth, the Los Angeles Times, The American Scholar, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and many other publications. Among his several awards are the University of Montana's Mansfield Center's Lud Browman Award for science writing and the C. B. Blethen Award for investigative journalism.

Kathleen McGowan is a contributing editor at Discover. She writes about neuroscience, genetics, and other subjects in science and medicine for publications such as Psychology Today, Self and Redbook. She lives in New York City.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He is the magazine's correspondent in China, where he has lived since 2005. Previously he worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Before his appointment in China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq.

David Quammen is a freelance journalist and author whose eleven books include fiction, essay collections, and the nonfiction t.i.tles The Song of the Dodo, Monster of G.o.d, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. His short work has appeared in a range of journals, from Rolling Stone and Outside to the New York Times Book Review and Harper's Magazine. Presently he is a contributing writer for National Geographic. His current book project involves the ecology and evolution of scary viruses. Quammen lives in Montana with his wife, Betsy Gaines, a conservationist, and travels on a.s.signment, by preference to jungles, deserts, and swamps.

Matt Ridley is the author of several books on genetics, evolution, and economics, including The Red Queen, Genome, and The Rational Optimist. He did research in zoology at Oxford University before becoming a journalist with The Economist and then as a freelance. He lives near Newcastle in northern England.

Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters.

Michael Specter, who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1998, writes frequently about science, public health, and the impact of new technologies on society. His book Denialism is out in paperback this fall.

Don Stap is the author of two works of natural historya"Birdsong and A Parrot Without a Namea"and a collection of poems, Letter at the End of Winter. He is a frequent contributor to Audubon and has written as well for such publications as National Wildlife, Smithsonian, Orion, Living Bird, the North American Review, and the New York Times. In addition, he is the recipient of a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of Michigan, Stap has taught at the University of Central Florida since 1985, where he is a professor of English.

Dawn Stover is a freelance science and environmental writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She is an editor at large for Popular Science, where she was a staff editor for nineteen years. Previously she worked at Harper's Magazine and Science Digest. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science Ill.u.s.trated, Conservation, Outside, and Backpacker. She is a charter member of the Society of Environmental Jour nalists and a longtime member of the National a.s.sociation of Science Writers.

Steven Weinberg is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas. His honors include the n.o.bel Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science, election to numerous academies, and sixteen honorary doctoral degrees. He has written more than three hundred articles on elementary particle theory, cosmolology, and other scientific topics, and twelve books; the latest, Lake Views: This World and the Universe, is a collection of his essays from the New York Review of Books and other periodicals. Educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, he taught at Columbia, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard, where he was the Higgins Professor of Physics, before coming to Texas in 1982.

Tom Wolfe has established himself as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy.

Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2009.

Selected by Tim Folger

MARCIA ANGELL.

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. New York Review of Books, January 15.

NATALIE ANGIER.

The Art of Deception. National Geographic, August.

JOEL ACHENBACH.

Will Yellowstone Blow Again? National Geographic, August.

ANTHONY AVENI.

Apocalypse Soon? Archaeology, November/December.

CHARLES BOWDEN.

Unseen Sahara. National Geographic, October.

Contested Ground. Orion, November/December.

OLIVER BROUDY.

Dead Man Driving. Men's Health, December.

What If the Sun Could Kill You? Men's Health, July/August.

ALAN BURd.i.c.k.

The New Web of Life. OnEarth, Fall.

LESTER R. BROWN.

Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? Scientific American, May.

ANDREW CURRY.

Rituals of the Nasca Lines. Archaeology, May/June.

FRANS DE WAAL.

The Empathy Instinct. Discover, October.

MARK DOWIE.