Nature, science, and culture take the stage in summer’s top reads

Nature’s summer book round-up gathers ten contributors’ obsessions, pairing science, ecology, and cultural history across a diverse slate of titles—from Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and Jessica Riskin’s Living Medicine to Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water and Simon Marginson’s Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval—with brisk, personal reflections that explore rivers’ aliveness, conservation ethics, medical science, AI, education, and the human stories that thread through them.