The Light Eaters

Schlanger, an Atlantic staff writer, spent years reporting from labs and field sites studying plant behavior, and the book's central provocation is whether plants can be said to sense, remember, or communicate without anything like a brain. She walks through the controversial research history — including the backlash against 1970s pseudoscience like The Secret Life of Plants, which made legitimate plant-signaling research radioactive for a generation — before laying out contemporary findings on electrical signaling, chemical alarm calls between plants, and root-level decision-making. She's careful not to overclaim consciousness, but she does push readers to reconsider where the line between sensing and thinking actually sits. The reporting is the strength; the philosophical stretch is where readers will diverge.