NC SciFest - April Sweetbean Bonus - Adult and Teen

Celebrate the NC Science Festival with April's Sweetbean Reading Challenge! Read about science all month long with fun books, cool facts, and exciting discoveries. Let’s read, learn, and discover the wonders of science together!

Updated March 27, 2025
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
American murderer : the parasite that haunted the South
Jarrow, Gail
Paper Book
Included on NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" List Finalist, 2023 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction ALSC Notable Children's Book What made workers in the American South so tired and feeble during the 19th and early 20th centuries? This exciting medical mystery uncovers...
Bomb : the race to build and steal the world's most dangerous weapon
Sheinkin, Steve.
Paper Book
Perfect for middle grade readers and history enthusiasts, New York Times bestselling author Steve Sheinkin presents the fascinating and frightening true story of the creation behind the most destructive force that birthed the arms race and the Cold War in Bomb: The Race...
A city on Mars : can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?
Weinersmith, Kelly
Paper Book
* THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the Hugo Award * Scientific American's #1 Book for 2023 * Winner of Royal Society's Trivedi Prize * A Guardian Best Book of 2024 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Times Best Science and...
The disappearing spoon : and other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements
Kean, Sam.
Paper Book
From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's...
Eve : how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution
Bohannon, Cat
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST * THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution...
An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
Yong, Ed
Paper Book
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension-the...
In the shadow of the moon : America, Russia, and the hidden history of the space race
Cherrix, Amy E.
Paper Book
An exhilarating dive into the secret history of humankind's race to the moon, from acclaimed author Amy Cherrix. This fascinating and immersive read is perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin's Bomb and M. T. Anderson's Symphony for the City of the Dead. You've heard of the space race, but do...
The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales
Sacks, Oliver W.
Paper Book
In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife...
The monster's bones : the discovery of T. Rex and how it shook our world
Randall, David K.
Ebook
In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York's struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum's success, and intrepid Kansas-born...
A short history of nearly everything
Bryson, Bill.
Paper Book
One of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journey--into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods,...
Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers
Roach, Mary.
Paper Book
"One of the funniest and most unusual books of the year....Gross, educational, and unexpectedly sidesplitting."--Entertainment Weekly Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years,...
The story of more : how we got to climate change and where to go from here
Jahren, Hope
Paper Book
The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. * "Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" --Elizabeth Kolbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction...
What if? : serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions
Munroe, Randall
Paper Book
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask. Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology,...
Women in science : 50 fearless pioneers who changed the world
Ignotofsky, Rachel
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER .This "wittily illustrated and accessible volume" (The Wall Street Journal)highlights the contributions of fifty notable women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from the ancient to the modern world. ...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.