| 2025 | Winner | What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson | One World |
| 2024 | Winner | Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic | Emily Monosson | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Winner | Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas | Jennifer Raff | Twelve |
| 2022 | Winner | The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred | Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | Bold Type Books |
| 2021 | Winner | The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World | Sarah Stewart Johnson | Crown |
| 2020 | Winner | Archaeology From Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past | Sarah Parcak | Macmillan |
| 2019 | Winner | Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth | Adam Frank | W. W. Norton |
| 2018 | Winner | Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst | Robert Sapolsky | Penguin Press |
| 2017 | Winner | The Gene: An Intimate History | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner |
| 2016 | Winner | The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History | Thor Hanson | Basic Books |
| 2015 | Winner | Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle | Douglas J. Emlen | Macmillan |
| 2014 | Winner | Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian | A. Douglas Stone | Princeton University Press |
| 2013 | Winner | The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t | Nate Silver | Penguin Press |
| 2012 | Winner | T he Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change | Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker, George Denton | MIT Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st | Burton Ritcher | Cambridge University Press |
| 2010 | Winner | Complexity: A Guided Tour | Melanie Mitchell | Oxford University Press |
| 2009 | Winner | The Art and Politics of Science | Harold Varmus | W. W. Norton |
| 2008 | Winner | Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body | Neil Shubin | Pantheon |
| 2007 | Winner | The Making of the Fittest | Sean B. Carroll | W. W. Norton |
| 2006 | Winner | Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Control of Climate | William F. Ruddiman | Princeton University Press |
| 2005 | Winner | The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins Monkeys, Apes and Humans | Chris Beard | University of California Press |
| 2004 | Winner | Issac Newton | James Gleick | Pantheon |
| 2003 | Winner | Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth | Andrew H. Knoll | Princeton University Press |
| 2002 | Winner | A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution & Abrupt Climate Change | William H. Calvin | University of Chicago Press |
| 2001 | Winner | The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future | Richard B. Alley | Princeton University Press |
| 2000 | Winner | Cradle of Life: The Discovery of the Earth's Earliest Fossils | J. William Schopf | Princeton University Press |
| 1999 | Winner | The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory | Brian Greene | W. W. Norton |
| 1998 | Winner | Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx & The Evolution of Bird Flight | Pat Shipman | Simon & Schuster |
| 1997 | Winner | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond | W. W. Norton |
| 1996 | Winner | Where Does the Weirdness Go? Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not as Strange as You Think, and Steel | David Lindley | Basic Books |
| 1995 | Winner | Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration | Edward O. Wilson, Bert Holldobler | Harvard University Press |
| 1994 | Winner | Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy | Kip S.Thorne | W. W. Norton |
| 1993 | Winner | Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos | Garrett Hardin | Oxford University Press |
| 1992 | Winner | One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought | Ernst Mayr | Harvard University Press |
| 1991 | Winner | Envisioning Information | Edward R. Tufte | Graphics Press |
| 1990 | Winner | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History | Stephen Jay Gould | W. W. Norton |
| 1989 | Winner | The How And The Why: An Essay on the Origins and Development of Physical Theory | David Park | Princeton University Press |
| 1988 | Winner | Infinite in All Directions | Freeman Dyson | HarperCollins |
| 1987 | Winner | Chemicals and Society: A Guide to the New Chemical Age | Hugh D. Crone | Cambridge University Press |
| 1986 | Winner | The Mystery of Comets | Fred L. Whipple | Smithsonian Institution Press |
| 1985 | Winner | The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form | Norma E. Emerton | Cornell University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars | George Greenstein | Freundlich Books |
| 1983 | Winner | Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History | Stephen Jay Gould | W. W. Norton |
| 1982 | Winner | Emerging Cosmology | Sir Bernard Lovell | Columbia University Press |
| 1981 | Winner | Cosmic Dawn: The Origins of Matter and Life | Eric Chaisson | Little, Brown |
| 1980 | Winner | The Image of Eternity: Roots of Time in the Physical World | David A. Park | University of Massachusetts Press |
| 1979 | Winner | Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery | John Imbrie, Katherine Palmer Imbrie | Enslow Publishers |
| 1978 | Winner | Mechanics of the Mind | Colin Blakemore | Cambridge University Press |
| 1977 | Winner | The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space | Gerard K. O'Neill | William Morrow |
| 1976 | Winner | Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay | William W. Warner | Little, Brown |
| 1975 | Winner | T he Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World | Guido Majno | Harvard University Press |
| 1974 | Winner | Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity | Howard E. Gruber, Paul H. Barrett | Harvard University Press |
| 1973 | Winner | The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann | Herman H. Goldstine | Princeton University Press |
| 1972 | Winner | The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology | Barry Commoner | Knopf |
| 1971 | Winner | Vitamin C and the Common Cold | Linus Pauling | W. H. Freeman |
| 1970 | Winner | The Life and Death of a Salt Marsh | John, Mildred Teal | Little, Brown |
| 1969 | Winner | Antibodies and Immunity | G. J. V. Nossal | Basic Books |
| 1968 | Winner | Great Waters | Sir Alister Hardy | HarperCollins |
| 1967 | Winner | Modern Genetics | Haig P. Papazian | W. W. Norton |
| 1966 | Winner | Man Adapting | Rene Dubos | Yale University Press |
| 1965 | Winner | Bird Migration | Donald R. Griffin | Anchor |
| 1964 | Winner | The Origin of Adaptations | Verne Grant | Columbia University Press |
| 1963 | Winner | The Unseen World | Rene Dubos | The Rockefeller Institute Press |
| 1962 | Winner | The World of Ice | James L. Dyson | Knopf |
| 1961 | Winner | Communication Among Social Bees | Martin Lindauer | Harvard University Press |