Great Non Fiction STEM Reading Ideas

Rebecca Hill     

                  

STEM reading has a personality all of its own.  It has its own jargon.  Sentence structures and content are more complex.  Charts, symbols, diagrams and equations populate the pages.  Even different literacy skills are required. With the advent of the Common Core, integrating literacy into STEM curriculum is the new challenge and most STEM teachers are wondering exactly how they will include it in an already packed curriculum.

In recent years a plethora of STEM-oriented narrative nonfiction has populated the shelves of our local bookstores and libraries. Lively discussions and readings on STEM topics from such expert authors as Steven Pinker, Stuart Firestein, Erik Larsen, Douglas Brinkley and others have all written narrative nonfiction that makes for fascinating and intriguing STEM reading. Under their tutelage STEM subjects come to life. With fascinating accounts of real lives and events, these books bring a contemporary real-time feel that will inspire students, making them an ideal vehicle for meeting Common Core literacy requirements. For those STEM teachers or school librarians looking for some great suggestions of STEM narrative nonfiction read on for some great options to introduce for STEM nonfiction reading as a support for textbook learning. 

Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein.  Neuroscientist and Columbia University’s Biology Chair, Firestein explores how ignorance helps scientists concentrate and expand their research. 

The Half Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman.  Applied mathematician and network scientist Arbesman chronicles how and why our most basic ideas, theories and facts change over the course of time.  

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker is a fascinating neurological and psychological study on why we act rationally and/or irrationally.

Virus Hunters: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses around the World by C.J. Peters and Mark Olshaker. Written by the Commander of the Army Virology Unit that fought Ebola in Preston’s book, The Hot Zone, Peters’ Virus Hunters demonstrates an entirely new version of the American Cowboy-one that risks his life in the search for highly infectious diseases like Marburg, Ebola and others.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammens, an award winning American science and nature writer, presents frightening new evidence about how our continued encroachment on natural habitats and our hyper-mobility as a population exposes us to greater viral threats. 

In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changes the World by Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, Ian Stewart.  Stewart's book shares the stories behind the mathematical equations that have most influenced our world.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar chronicles life and struggles of American mathematical genius, John Nash.  A mathematician in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations, Nash struggled mightily with paranoid schizophrenia, a condition that led to his hospitalization on numerous occasions, but despite this struggle, he persevered and won the Nobel Prize in Economics.   

Longitude by Dava Sobel tells the story of math in practice, sharing the fascinating tales of sailors learning their way through wild and treacherous seas. 

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by  Andrew Blum follows Blum while he travels to UCLA to see one of the first networked computers to Google headquarters where he journeys to their lunchroom then to visiting cable landing stations that house the entry points for the undersea fiber optics that connect us to the rest of the world.  It is a detailed account of cyberspace from its primal beginning to its “cloud.”

Almost Human: Making Robots Think by Lee Gutkind.  Gutkind profiles fascinating roboticists like Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, Fredken Professor of Robotics whose current projects include robots to search for and recover meteorites in Antarctica and Lunar Rover, mobile robots for a privately funded lunar mission. 

How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion by Dr. Daniel H. Wilson is a tongue-in-cheek survival guide teaching humans the secrets to defending   He also wrote the science fiction novel, Robopocalypse. 

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben. McKibben explores the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology from a bioethical standpoint and also provides a fascinating contrast for discussion points in technology and engineering classes. 

Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin provides a fascinating account of the Manhattan Project. 

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin paints a detailed picture of the scientific genius behind the building of the bomb and as a man vilified for his advocacy for control of nuclear weapons. 

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley gives a birds-eye view of one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit the United States Gulf Coastal areas, and its aftermath, paying particular attention to the governmental failure and ramifications of emergency medical care in the time of extreme climate changes. 

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larsen tells the story of Isaac Cline, a U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist and the seaside town of Galveston, Texas which was submerged by a monster hurricane in 1900.  The book tells of the failures and prejudices of the U.S. Weather Bureau that resulted in the devastation of Galveston and the loss of hundreds of lives. 

Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin gives a fascinating account of the first reported tornado in 1680 and illustrates just how steep our learning curves have been about tornadoes, starting with Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment to how we now classify tornadoes as F1-F5 storms. While Sandlin’s book takes a look back at those folks who chase tornadoes, it is also a very unique history that examines America’s history with violent weather and how we have adjusted and learned from it.  

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery covers most of the basics of climate change and is one of the leading books in weather and climate change.