A Hudson Booksellers Staff Pick for the Best Books of 2013

One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Spring Science Books

A Bookshop Santa Cruz Staff Pick

Dinosaurs, with their awe-inspiring size, terrifying claws and teeth, and otherworldly abilities, occupy a sacred place in our childhoods. They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones.

Switek reunites us with these mysterious creatures as he visits desolate excavation sites and hallowed museum vaults, exploring everything from the sex life of Apatosaurus and T. rex's feather-laden body to just why dinosaurs vanished. (And of course, on his journey, he celebrates the book's titular hero, "Brontosaurus"--who suffered a second extinction when we learned he never existed at all--as a symbol of scientific progress.)

With infectious enthusiasm, Switek questions what we've long held to be true about these beasts, weaving in stories from his obsession with dinosaurs, which started when he was just knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Endearing, surprising, and essential to our understanding of our own evolution and our place on Earth, My Beloved Brontosaurus is a book that dinosaur fans and anyone interested in scientific progress will cherish for years to come.

Roy Chapman Andrews led "the most celebrated fossil-hunting expedition of the twentieth century", wrote New York Times science writer John Noble Wilford. Financed by Morgan, Rockefeller, and a host of other Wall Street titans, the Central Asiatic Expeditions (1922-1930) comprised the most ambitious scientific venture ever launched from the United States up to that time. Under the auspices of New York's American Museum of Natural History, Andrews conducted five expeditions to the last unchartered corner of the world: the Gobi Desert of Outer and Inner Mongolia. In Dragon Hunter, Charles Gallenkamp vividly recounts these tremendous discoveries and the unforgettable adventures that attended them. Filled with astonishing tales of Andrews and his team braving raging sandstorms and murderous bandits, enduring political intrigue and civil wars, and reveling in the fascinating world of Peking's foreign colony, Dragon Hunter also traces the religious controversy over evolution and the anti-imperialist conflicts between the United States and China that were sparked by Andrews's expeditions. Gallenkamp tells Andrews's incredible life story, from his beginnings as a floor sweeper at the American Museum of Natural History to his international fame as one of the century's most acclaimed explorers. The result is a thrilling page-turner-an epic search for dinosaurs and extinct mammals cloaked in a sweeping historical narrative.

In hisNew York Times bestseller, National Magazine Award-winning journalist Eric Schlosser charts the fast food industry's enormous impact on our health, landscape, economy, politics and culture as he transforms the way America thinks about what it eats.

For millennia, fresh olive oil has been one of life's necessities--not just as food but also as medicine, a beauty aid, and a vital element of religious rituals. But this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt. A superbly crafted combination of cultural history and food manifesto, Extra Virginity takes us on a journey through the world of olive oil, opening our eyes to olive oil's rich past as well as to the fierce contemporary struggle between oil fraudsters of the globalized food industry and artisan producers whose oil truly deserves the name extra virgin.

From Aardonyx to Zuniceratops--A Dino-Mite Gathering of All the Dinosaurs (More Than 300 ) Worth Knowing About

We live in a golden age of paleontological discovery--the perfect time to dig in to the spectacular world of dinosaurs. From Aardonyx, a lumbering beast that formed a link between two and four-legged dinosaurs, to Zuniceratops, who boasted a deadly pair of horns, Dinosaurs--The Grand Tour details everything worth knowing about every important dinosaur that scientists know about--more than 300 in all.

In Dinosaurs you'll learn all the gory details--about geology, anatomy, evolution, astronomy, and even Native American and Chinese mythology. Stories of harrowing paleontological expeditions conjure the thrills of history's most famous dinosaur hunters. Highlights of recent research reveal what's going on in the world of dinosaurs today, including scientists' recent discovery of pigments embedded in dinosaur fossils that shed light, for the first time, on dinosaurs' true coloration. Illustrations on virtually every page bring these prehistoric creatures to life in all their razor-sharp, long-necked, spiny, scaly glory.

And for readers inspired to test their dino-expertise in the field, renowned paleontologist Jack Horner's field notes will help enthusiasts set out on their own expeditions. Track down dinosaur footprints at Horner's recommended sites, head out on a cross-country dinosaur road trip using Horner's list of top North American dinosaurs as your map, and learn what it's like to be a leading paleontologist who's been part of some of the most sensational dinosaur discoveries ever--and how you can get involved, too

THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY, hails Scientific American: A thrilling new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists.

A masterpiece of science writing. --Washington Post

A New York Times Bestseller - Goodreads Choice Awards Winner - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Smithsonian, Science Friday, The Times (London), Popular Mechanics, Science News

This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous. --Nature

The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth's most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet's great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.

In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field--naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork--masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.

Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers--themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period--into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs' peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth's history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a "sixth extinction."

Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research--which he calls "a new golden age of discovery"--and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.

An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs' epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.

Includes 75 images, world maps of the prehistoric earth, and a dinosaur family tree.

Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "more than a terrific movie--it's an important movie." Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably?

Expanding on the film's themes, the book Food, Inc. will answer those questions through a series of challenging essays by leading experts and thinkers. This book will encourage those inspired by the film to learn more about the issues, and act to change the world.