NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024 * TIME's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 * New York Magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year * Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2024 * Smithsonian's 10 Best Science Books of the Year * A Best Book of the ...NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024 * TIME's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 * New York Magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year * Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2024 * Smithsonian's 10 Best Science Books of the Year * A Best Book of the Year: Boston Globe, Scientific American, New York Public Library, Christian Science Monitor, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly * An Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Prize * Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History "A masterpiece of science writing." -Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass "Mesmerizing, world-expanding, and achingly beautiful." -Ed Yong, author of An Immense World "Rich, vital, and full of surprises. (The New Yorker) It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival.
In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents. The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.
Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is. But what do they need us for--if at all?