Finalists for 2019 Young Adult Science Book Award Announced

AAAS and Subaru are proud to announce the finalists for the 2019 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Young Adult Science Book category. The Prize celebrates outstanding science writing and illustration for children and young adults and is meant to encourage the writing and publishing of high-quality science books for all ages. Longlists for all four categories were announced in September.

The 2019 winner will be selected from among the following finalists. (For information about a book, click on its cover, which will take you to a page with additional details about the title and a link to purchase it from Amazon.)

• Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures, by Roma Agrawal. Bloomsbury. 2018.

  Built is an informative, entertaining, well-organized, and easily understandable journey through the history of a variety of engineering projects from around the world. It’s all of this as well as an engaging and inspirational personal encounter with an articulate woman structural engineer.

• Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. Picador. 2018.

  Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind the Pluto mission: of their decades-long commitment and persistence; of the political fights within and outside of NASA; of the sheer human ingenuity it took to design, build, and fly the mission; and of the plans for New Horizons’ next encounter, 1 billion miles past Pluto in 2019.

• Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon, by Robert Kurson. Random House. 2018.

  Drawn from hundreds of hours of one-on-one interviews with the astronauts, their loved ones, NASA personnel, and myriad experts, and filled with vivid and unforgettable detail, Rocket Men is the definitive account of one of America’s finest hours.

• Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures, by Nick Pyenson. Viking. 2018.

  In Spying on Whales, Pyenson guides readers through the world of whales. Pyenson weaves his own personal research and encounters into the journey of the whale’s prehistoric past, their survival and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment, and their evolution into the future. He captures the importance of scientific research through the beauty and mystique of whales partnered with vignettes and encounters throughout his discoveries.

AAAS’s Science NetLinks will create lesson plans and other resources around the 2019 finalists, and once again the books will be offered to schools across the country as part of the Subaru Loves Learning initiative. Through this partnership between AAAS and Subaru, more than 85,000 books were donated in 2018.

Winners will be announced in December and awarded at the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., February 14-17, 2019.

The finalists for the children’s science picture book, middle grades science book, and hands-on science book categories were announced earlier in the week.