Finalists for 2021 Young Adult Science Book Award

AAAS and Subaru are proud to announce the finalists for the 2021 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 October.

The 2021 winner will be selected from among the following finalists:

• The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, by Ainissa Ramirez. MIT Press, 2020.

  In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway's writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid's cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.

• Borrowing Life: How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality, by Shelley Fraser Mickle. Imagine, 2020.

  Meet the scientists and surgeons who turned the horrors of war into the gift of the first organ transplant. Peter Bent Brigham Hospital; Boston, Massachusetts; 1954. Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph Murray and his team do the impossible. They transplant a donated kidney from Ronald Herrick to his twin brother, Richard, rescuing him from acute renal failure. This first successful organ transplant was the summit of a long hard climb by a group of scientists and surgeons across the globe. Borrowing Life profiles these giants of science and reveals the intimate, fascinating story of their decades-long struggle to save lives. 

• The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, by Emily Levesque. Sourcebooks, 2020.

  In The Last Stargazers, Levesque takes readers inside the most powerful telescopes in the world and introduces them to the people who run them. She also explores the future of one of the most ancient and inspiring scientific disciplines as we gain the ability to see farther beyond our planet than ever before while relying increasingly on code and computers to study the stars. From the lonely quiet of midnight stargazing to tall tales of wild bears loose in the observatory, The Last Stargazers is a love letter to astronomy and an affirmation of the crucial role that humans can and must play in the future of scientific discovery.

• Wading Right In: Discovering the Nature of Wetlands, by Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth. The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

  In Wading Right In, Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth take us on a journey into wetlands through stories from the people who wade in the muck. Traveling alongside scientists, explorers, and kids with waders and nets, the authors uncover the inextricably entwined relationships between the water flows, natural chemistry, soils, flora, and fauna of our floodplain forests, fens, bogs, marshes, and mires. Tales of mighty efforts to protect rare orchids, restore salt marshes, and preserve sedge meadows become portals through which we visit major wetland types and discover their secrets, while also learning critical ecological lessons.

Winners will be announced in January 2021.

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.