Guido Tonelli’s Genesi is most convincing when it refuses the cheap version of wonder. The book is not a hymn to humanity standing at the summit of creation, waving a little flag over the rubble of physics. Its better movement is colder and more useful: matter organizes itself, structures appear under constraint, life becomes cooperation, and finally some animals discover that a shared story can keep a group alive when the world has stopped being hospitable.

Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs wants to do for paleontology what Neil deGrasse Tyson did for astrophysics — make a technical field feel personal and urgent. For about half the book, it succeeds brilliantly. Then it starts listing celebrities.

The Best Part: Origins

The opening chapters are genuinely exciting. Brusatte reconstructs a world where dinosaurs were not the inevitable rulers of the Mesozoic but marginal players — small, bipedal, overshadowed by the crocodile-line archosaurs that dominated the Triassic. The extinction at the end of the Permian, the worst in Earth’s history, had cleared the landscape. Dinosaurs walked into empty rooms.