Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2024 Adult Nonfiction

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD de David George Haskell

Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world. Almost all of nature now depends on them. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their beauty, not their world-changing power. In this revealing new book, internationally renowned nature writer David Haskell puts flowers back where they belong, at the center of the story about how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD:
Revolutions of Cooperation, Beauty, and Illusion
by David George Haskell
Viking, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Flowers are innovators. They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through genetic nimbleness, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.

Flowers create opportunities for others. Butterflies and bees would not exist without them. Modern birds diversified in lockstep with flowers. Flowers shaped our species’ history, too. Grasses caused our ape ancestors to come down from the trees. Agriculture, with flowering plants at its heart, is the foundation of all modern civilizations.

Although flowers lack nerves, they created a language of beauty to converse with animals. We draw this conversation into human social networks, using cut blooms, floral aromas, and flower symbolism to mediate our signals to one another. Illusion is beauty’s companion. Flowers dupe many pollinators, and we use flowers to conceal, mask, or deflect. By breeding and growing flowers, we create both beauty and illusions: paradoxically, flowers produced by horticulture can be dangerous to pollinators.

The study of flowers revolutionized science and was a foundation of the horrors of colonialism. Today, we look to the resilience and genetic flexibility of flowering plants to help us face the crises of climate change and extinction. Flowers thrived in the face of past calamity and can do so again.

Flowers are the among most consequential creatures ever to have evolved, but no book to date centers and elevates this story, much of which has been discovered only in the last decade. Today, interest among the reading public in the wonders of plants is high, as is our need to learn from them. Now is a perfect time to celebrate the story of how flowers made our world.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen and 2022 book Sounds Wild and Broken were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and were shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN de Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder

Luminous nonfiction about the natural world from essayist Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, who asks: what can other-than-human creatures teach us about mothering, belonging, caregiving, loss, and resiliency?.

MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN:
What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling
by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Broadleaf, March 2025
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

What does it mean to be a mother in an era of climate catastrophe? And what can we learn from the plants and creatures who mother at the edges of their world’s unraveling?

Becoming a mother in this time means bringing life into a world that appears to be coming undone. Drawing upon ecology, mythology, and her own experiences as a new mother, Steinauer-Scudder confronts what it means to « mother »: to do the good work of being in service to the living world. What if we could all mother the places we live and the beings with whom we share those places? And what if they also mother us?

In prose that teems with longing, lyricism, and knowledge of ecology, Steinauer-Scudder writes of the silent flight and aural maps of barn owls, of nursing whales, of real and imagined forests, of tidal marshes, of ancient single-celled organisms, and of newly planted gardens. The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future. Rooted in wonder while never shying away from loss, MOTHER, CREATURE, KIN reaches toward a language of inclusive care learned from creatures living at the brink.

Writing in the tradition of Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Rush, and Margaret Renkl, Steinauer-Scudder invites us into the daily, obligatory, sacred work of care. Despair and fear will not save the world any more than they will raise our children, and while we don’t know what the future holds, we know it will need mothers. As the very ground shifts beneath our feet, what if we apprenticed ourselves to the creaturely mothers with whom we share this beloved home?

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder writes at the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. She has a masters of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and has worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, a publication exploring the intersection of ecology, culture, and spirituality. Her work has also been featured in The Common, The Slowdown, Crannóg Magazine, From the Ground Up, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees. Having grown up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma, she and her family live in northern New England.

THE WIREGRASS de Matt Kessler

A vital and propulsive true crime narrative of corruption, injustice, and two young women’s murder in a little-known corner of the American Deep South.

THE WIREGRASS:
A Tale of the Murder and Retribution
by Matt Kessler
Grand Central, Spring 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In 1999, in the rural Alabama town of Ozark, high schoolers Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley were found shot in the trunk of their car, weeks before the start of their senior year. The night of their murder remains shrouded in mystery. They were driving between field parties. They were lost. But why were their jeans muddy, soaked to the bone? And what drove someone to kill them?

Twenty years passed, but locals could not forget the girls’ deaths. Suspicions of a police cover-up reached a fever pitch until, out of the blue, a softspoken Black man named Coley McCraney—a long-haul trucker and ordained deacon—was arrested for the crime. The dramatic trial and controversial conviction that followed would tear this small farming community in two.

THE WIREGRASS is an under-documented region of the American Deep South, known for its peanuts. Religiously conservative and historically poor, it stretches from Montgomery, Alabama to Macon, Georgia and south to the Florida Panhandle. Cut off from major highways, effectively run by local law enforcement, it’s a place where America’s fundamental prejudices present themselves without veneer; inequality, violence and racism run bone-deep.

A native Alabamian, seasoned journalist, and student of Maggie Nelson and Percival Everett (who gave the book its title), Matt Kessler has spent seven years researching the tangled case of the Beasley-Hawlett murders, attending the trial of Coley McCraney, and gaining the trust of the local community—as well as the ire of local police enforcement.

THE WIREGRASS is an atmospheric and utterly compelling true crime narrative, as interested in the rippling effects of murder on a small, tight-knit community as it is on exposing truth in places that are otherwise forgotten and neglected. Calling to mind the work of Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain) and David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager), as well as Michelle McNamara’s legendary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, this is a thrilling yet profound story of race, class, and the corruption of power.

Matt Kessler is a journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. His reporting appears in The Guardian and The Atlantic and has been commended by the Mississippi ACLU. His cultural criticism and award-winning short stories have appeared in Pitchfork, Vice, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

MICRODOSING de James Fadiman & Jordan Gruber

James Fadiman, an early psychedelic researcher, and co-author Jordan Gruber’s MICRODOSING FOR HEALTH, HEALING AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE is the first comprehensive book on microdosing, using new research and extensive reports from individuals to describe the possibilities of the practice.

MICRODOSING FOR HEALTH, HEALING, AND ENHANCED PERFORMANCE
by James Fadiman & Jordan Gruber
St. Martin’s Press, February 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency)

Microdosing is proving to be a safe and powerful approach to a wide range of health conditions and enhanced performance. Partly responsible for modern microdosing’s development and current popularity, the authors answer hundreds of questions, blending extensive research with detailed personal accounts from contributors worldwide. The book also contains wide-ranging microdosing history, research, and science.

People have microdosed successfully:

· to alleviate symptoms of depression, ADHD, chronic pain, and long COVID
· for enhanced focus, mental acuity, and physical abilities (including sports)
· to help taper off pharmaceuticals, especially antidepressants and stimulants
· to improve food habits, sleep, and relationships
· to become more aware of personal habit patterns, others’ feelings, and natural surroundings
· to reduce stress and anxiety
· to help over 30 specific health concerns

This book does not provide medical or legal advice. Readers should speak to their doctor before engaging in any course of microdosing.

James Fadiman was introduced to psychedelics by Ram Dass six decades ago. Fifteen years ago, he began compiling thousands of stories from microdosers who used his protocol and now has the largest qualitative database on microdosing in the world. He’s been the godfather to anyone interested in the field, from Michael Pollan to novelist Ayelet Waldman.

Jordan Gruber has authored, coauthored, or edited many nonfiction books, from forensics and finances to health and psychology, including, with Fadiman, Your Symphony of Selves.

REJUVENATE de David Cox

We are living unhealthier lives, and unleashing planetary devastation in our wake. These two crises are marching inexorably onward, hand-in-hand. But can science help us fight back? And can we live not just better lives, bot longer ones too – just through the power of food?

REJUVENATE:
The New Science of Eating Well, and Living Longer
by David Cox
Fourth Estate, late summer 2025
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Over the course of a lifetime, the average human will chomp their way through around 36 tons of food. Roughly speaking, this is the equivalent of about six whole elephants, each digested, converted into fuel, and working their way through our bodies over the course of the eight decades we can expect to spend on Earth.

The problem, however, is both the source of this food, and its content. Food production is the thin end of the wedge when it comes to the climate crisis – what we eat, and when we eat it, is going to be the most obvious short-term day-to-day change to many living in the global North, protected from the worst of the climate crisis by economic inequities. And the food we eat, in an increasingly globalised manner, is by far the largest driver of another crisis: one of health, which is impacting us all.

The same human ingenuity which has enabled our species to design vaccines and medicines to eliminate disease, and sanitation systems to vastly improve our hygiene, has also created both a land of ubiquitous processed food and an ecosystem of industrial meat production on a colossal, world-changing scale.

In REJUVENATE, science journalist David Cox takes us to the cutting edge of the technological and scientific fightback against these combined crises, and how food can make us live better, longer lives. He argues that we have reached a tipping point in the intersection between food, and our world – both our personal world, and the world we all live in – where the same creative drive, scientific advancements and rampant capitalism which has instigated many of the problems, may now be able to save us.

Through unprecedented access to the movers and shakers at the cutting edge of the food world – from the CEOs of tech start-ups, to the leaders of vast hedge funds, from Middle Eastern princes to policymakers and academics – Cox takes the reader on a journey of discovery, leading her down the rabbit hole in order to explore how the way we eat is changing, how it can make us healthier, live longer, and how perhaps it can save the planet in the process.

Dr. David Cox is a freelance health journalist and broadcaster, and has a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge. He is a regular contributor to the likes of the BBC, the Guardian, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and Sunday Times, The Telegraph, New Scientist and many, many more. He lives in Brighton, England with his partner.