An astonishing debut from the beloved NPR science correspondent: intimate essays about the intersection of science and everyday life.

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s invocation to the “transient and strange,” longtime NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce brings what best-selling essayist Tim Kreider calls her “bright inquiring mind and lively, drily funny voice” to the largest matters of life―birth and death, constancy and impermanence, love and aging. In personal essays both curious and wise, she describes the wildest workings of the natural world, from the echoing truth of a fetal heartbeat and the incredible leap of the humble flea to the eerie power of tornadoes and the otherworldly glint of micrometeorites. Beautifully blending explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, she captures the ache of ordinary comforting a frightened child, wrestling with potential genetic defects, confronting mortality through a parent’s illness. Transient and Strange delves into the places where science touches our lives most intimately, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us.