A well-written (of course, since it is a best-of anthology) of science/nature essays. Great for learning new things and staying up to date with the genre.

THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2023 is a beautifully edited collection with essays covering a range of topics of current and pressing interest - highly recommended for all libraries.

I thought this was a really great collection of works on a variety of topics from global warming to disease to fireflies. The majority of the articles were very engaging, even to someone without a lot of knowledge on the specific topic. I thought "Shadows, Tokens, Spring" by Ben Mauk was particularly good.

Every year I look forward to the new "The Best American Writing" collections, and "Science and Nature" is my favorite. In one volume you get a reliable representation of the most interesting magazine publications, not only the most popular, but also the more obscure - so you will always find hidden gems among them that you would never come across otherwise.

Thanks to the publisher, Mariner Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

This was an eclectic collection of interesting essays that covered various disciplines of science and medicine. I particularly enjoyed “Antarctica's Collapse Could Begin Even Sooner than Anticipated”, “True Grit”, “A French Village’s Radical Vision of a Good Life with Alzheimer’s”, “In El Salvador and Beyond, an Unsolved Kidney Disease Mystery” and “Don’t Look Down”. Most of which were topics that I had never really considered, so it opened up entirely new views on the state of the world from those perspectives.

My goodreads records indicate that I have read the 2011-2013 and 2015 instantiations of this series. I'm not sure why I stopped, but the 2023 edition is a good indication that stopping was a mistake.

The highest complement I can give an editor of a Best American title is that his or her preferences were difficult to discern. The essays need to be diverse in both content and style - something Carl Zimmer has definitely achieved. A few things do stand out though. There are no celebrity writers, Zimmer has dug deep among smaller magazines and web journals to find content (only one New Yorker article!), and there is a balance between literary nonfiction and straight reportage - with some articles having a level of detail that may deter casual readers.

This year COVID-19 has taken a backseat to climate change as the dominant (6-7 out of 23 essays) topic. Standout essays include a story about improving lives of Alzheimer's patients (from the New Yorker), a fairly technical account regarding probing ice shelves in Antarctica, a historical account of plague in Mongolia and China (with obvious COVID-19 parallels), and a hurricane survival tale involving some very tenacious cows in South Carolina (which may make you feel a bit guilty next time you eat beef). The volume closes with an absolutely harrowing first-hand account of two pregnancies that will stay with me for a while - a reminder of the dangers of the post-Roe world we live in.

A quick word of advice. Science articles often benefit from illustrations, but the budget of the best American series limits the articles to text. When I find an article that would benefit from illustration, I often google the original article. I did this for the ice-shelf article and an article on subatomic particles and found some very useful diagrams as well as some enriching photography. I still need to do this for a few other articles.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy for early review.

"What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted."

Each year, The Best American Science and Nature Writing has a new editor that puts together the essays. For 2023, author Carl Zimmer has compiled a number of very compelling pieces of writing at a time when science is more important (and unfortunately more political) than ever.

I enjoy the small snapshots into the scientific worlds of different fields and felt that this was well balanced and represents the past and future of scientific progress.

I adored The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023! I started reading this series with the 2022 edition, and will definitely keep reading them.

The 2023 edition is edited by Carl Zimmer, a prolific science author who has written numerous books, including She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. This collection included a wide range of science and nature writing, including many that focused on Covid-19 and global warming. I have thought frequently about the articles highlighted in this collection and have discussed many of them with family members and friends. Highly recommended!

Thanks so much to Carl Zimmer, Jaime Green, and Mariner Books for this ARC through NetGalley! The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 will be available October 17th, 2023.

An interesting collecting of writing. I especially liked the one about "My Metamorphosis" and the one about the California Redwood park. I was a bit turned off by the didactic whining in the forward, but might just be me. Obviously someone has a chip on their shoulder and doesn't like others having opinion. Still though, much of the writing was worth my time and would recommend the book. I like writing that makes me think, whether I agree or not, just prefer not to be attacked if a different view is held.

I like reading scientific articles online and I jumped at the chance to read this when I saw it on Netgalley. It has articles and stories of a wide variety and topic and I thought it would be interesting. Turns out for me that there can be too much of a good thing in this case. The articles were interesting individually but it can be a bit of a slog to read them all back to back like this. My favorite articles were Dislodged and My Metamorphosis. I can only give this a 3 star at this time however. I may read it again when I don’t have a deadline to read like I did with the advanced readers copy so I can space everything out more and maybe my rating will go up then.

Many of these articles are so specific in their subject matter that they could not appeal to everyone. I did enjoy An Invisible Epidemic by Elizabeth Svobada, the concept of moral injury really struck home.