keyword results for The Bird Book: The Stories, Science, and History of Birds

The Bird Book

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Birds are dinosaurs with a history going back millions of years. Our fascination with them runs deep in history, and our close association is reflected in creation stories, myths, legends, songs, and children's stories.

The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard

Ballard, J. G. — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

With 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks. Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. Depicting the human soul as "being enervated and corrupted by the modern world", Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in "Billenium," a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media, as in the classic "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan's face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Given Ballard's heightened powers of perception, it is astonishing that the dehumanized world that he apprehended so acutely neither diminished his own febrile imagination nor his engagement with mankind, evident in every story, including two new ones for this American edition.

The Story of Birds

Brusatte, Steve — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the renowned paleontologist and bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a sweeping evolutionary history of birds, from their dinosaur origins to the 10,000+ extraordinary species alive today.

Tens of billions of birds share the planet with us, an astonishingly diverse array of species that are present nearly everywhere humans call home—and many places we do not. With their flamboyant plumage, joyous dawn serenades, extraordinary aerial feats, they have captivated human imagination for millennia. Undeniably delicate creatures with hollow bones and thin skin protected by downy feathers, how did such a seemingly fragile species break the bounds of Earth and begin to fly, how have they survived millennia, and how does their legacy shape our world?

Hailed as "one of the stars of modern paleontology" (National Geographic), Steve Brusatte now tells the extraordinary story of the dinosaurs' living legacy: birds. He begins by exploring how dinosaurs gradually developed the trademark features of birds one-by-one—feathers, wings, beaks, big brains, keen senses, and warm-blooded metabolisms. He investigates why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago and chronicles how these survivors rapidly proliferated to produce the diversity of avian species we know today.

Along the way, we meet a variety of remarkable – now extinct – species:

10-foot-tall terror birds with beaks that sliced flesh

Elephant birds that lived on Madagascar and laid eggs the size of footballs

Pelagornithid seabirds with 20-foot wingspans

A ferocious Jamaican ibis that used its wings as clubs to attack rivals

Yet, Brusatte also urges us to appreciate the extraordinariness of birds alive today – penguins that literally fly underwater, parrots that can mimic human speech and crows that can make tools and are smarter than most mammals.

A fascinating scientific history that unearths the origins of birds, The Story of Birds establishes the living legacy of this remarkable species.

A New Yorker Best Books of 2026!