Over 2,000 species, from the tiny spider mite to the massive blue whale, are profiled in DK's astonishingly wonderful Animal, produced in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution and more than 70 expert zoologists. To call this book "profusely illustrated" is to seriously underrepresent page after page of breathtaking photos capturing each creature in sharp images, thrumming with life. Even the page borders are covered with collages of animal skins to indicate which class of organisms is represented in that section--every inch of this heavy book is gorgeous.
Besides heft and beauty, Animal has authority. Editors-in-chief David Burnie and Don E. Wilson are top biologists, and they have assembled a crack team of consultants for each section of the book. For instance, Richard Rosenblatt of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography takes charge of the chapter on fishes, so all the classification, behavior, and distribution data is up-to-date and full of the kind of detail that comes from years of professional specialization.

Three reporters from The New York Times survey the recent history of biological weapons and sound an alarm about the coming threat of the "poor man's hydrogen bomb." Germs begins ominously enough, recounting the chilling attack by the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in 1984 on the Dalles, Oregon--no one died, but nearly 1,000 were infected with a strain of salmonella that the cult had legally obtained, then cultured and distributed.
While the U.S. maintained an active "bugs and gas" program in the '50s and early '60s, bio-weapons were effectively pulled off this country's agenda in 1972 when countries around the world, led by the United States, forswore development of such weapons at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The issue reemerged in the early '90s thanks to Saddam Hussein and revelations of the clandestine and massive buildup of bio-weapons in remote corners of the Soviet Union. The book's description of the Soviet program is horrific. At its peak the program employed thousands of scientists, developing bioengineered pathogens as well as producing hundreds of tons of plague, anthrax, and smallpox annually. The authors conclude that while a biological attack against the United States is not necessarily inevitable, the danger of bio-weapons is too real to be ignored. Well-researched and documented, this book will not disappoint readers looking for a reliable and sober resource on the topic. --Harry C. Edwards

The Bible Unearthed is a balanced, thoughtful, bold reconsideration of the historical period that produced the Hebrew Bible. The headline news in this book is easy to pick out: there is no evidence for the existence of Abraham, or any of the Patriarchs; ditto for Moses and the Exodus; and the same goes for the whole period of Judges and the united monarchy of David and Solomon. In fact, the authors argue that it is impossible to say much of anything about ancient Israel until the seventh century B.C., around the time of the reign of King Josiah. In that period, "the narrative of the Bible was uniquely suited to further the religious reform and territorial ambitions of Judah." Yet the authors deny that their arguments should be construed as compromising the Bible's power. Only in the 18th century--"when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life"--did readers begin to view the Bible as a source of empirically verifiable history. For most of its life, the Bible has been what Finkelstein and Silberman reveal it once more to be: an eloquent expression of "the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive," written in such a way as to encompass "the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community." --Michael Joseph Gross

One of the nation's more famous planned communities, Reston, Virginia, stands at the epicenter of this whirlwind tale of potential biological disaster. Preston, award-winning author of First Light (1987) and American Steel (1991), wrote a 1992 New Yorker article on the recognition and containment of a devastating tropical filovirus at a monkey house--the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit--operated by a division of Corning, Inc., about 10 miles from Washington, D.C. Preston expands on that article by describing his 1993 journey to Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon near the edge of the Rift Valley in Kenya, the place scientists believe is the source of all four identified filoviruses: the Marburg, the Sudan, the Zaire, and the Reston strains of Ebola. The Hot Zone is a compelling "science fact" thriller: filoviruses kill most of their monkey and human hosts in vividly gruesome ways. The process through which the U.S. Veterinary Corps at Frederick, Maryland, spotted Ebola at Reston and recruited a secret SWAT team to contain it is tense and terrifying; and Preston, who lived in Kenya for part of his youth, places this chilling incident in a broad global context, eloquently arguing that "the emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents [may be] a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere." Expect reader interest: Random House plans heavy promotion; Robert Redford and Jodie Foster are working on a motion picture based on Preston's article; and Dustin Hoffman stars in a second film on this frightening subject.

As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.