en-US Tue, 11 Mar 2025 20:41:04 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 60826049 219 Russell "Russ" Roberts 0593418263 Adam 3 Read Introspect instead

I like Russ and I appreciate seeing him make some classic drinking game Russ points but the book is short and doesn't dig all that deep and that makes the sense I've heard all of this before bite harder. It echoes Visa's Introspect but the points are faded by the tempering of wizened experience (no offense Russ). The ultimate issue is that Wild v Tame problems is a theoretical framework I find compelling for a lot of evolutionary problems in econ and thus a lot of economic problems in ecology and while it's obviously out of scope for Russ to tackle that here, I wish he didn't feel so embarrassed about the whole notion of theory work he is challenging and thus contributing to. Unclear how much it was cut to cater to mass audiences vs how much Russ got negatively polarized against it and wanted to just say "no more of that!" And write something in a poetic register. Fair enough but I'm not sure they have to be at odds. Maybe something I could explore myself then!]]> 4.03 2022
author: Russell "Russ" Roberts
name: Adam
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves:
review:
Read Introspect instead

I like Russ and I appreciate seeing him make some classic drinking game Russ points but the book is short and doesn't dig all that deep and that makes the sense I've heard all of this before bite harder. It echoes Visa's Introspect but the points are faded by the tempering of wizened experience (no offense Russ). The ultimate issue is that Wild v Tame problems is a theoretical framework I find compelling for a lot of evolutionary problems in econ and thus a lot of economic problems in ecology and while it's obviously out of scope for Russ to tackle that here, I wish he didn't feel so embarrassed about the whole notion of theory work he is challenging and thus contributing to. Unclear how much it was cut to cater to mass audiences vs how much Russ got negatively polarized against it and wanted to just say "no more of that!" And write something in a poetic register. Fair enough but I'm not sure they have to be at odds. Maybe something I could explore myself then!
]]> 58169 Where do ideas come from?

In Catching the Big Fish, internationally acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch provides a rare window into his methods as an artist, his personal working style, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish - and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which he works, such as painting, music, and design. Lynch writes for the first time about his more than three-decade commitment to Transcendental Meditation and the difference it has made in his creative process.

In brief chapters, Lynch explains the development of his ideas - where they came from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He specifically discusses how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he considers the self and the surrounding world - and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to those who wonder how they can nurture their own creativity.]]> 181 David Lynch 1585425400 Adam 0 ebook 3.78 2006
author: David Lynch
name: Adam
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: ebook
review:

]]> 11250317
Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.]]> 352 Madeline Miller 1408816032 Adam 5
Given the focus of the Iliad over the Odyssey, it's no surprise that this book has far less of the "fun" parts of mythology, the gods and monsters and ends of the earth. The storytelling easily makes up for that. It is a shorter, smaller story that burns bright and hot instead of cool and slow. I was also very satisfied with the focus on the internal politics and social dynamics among the Greeks, something that Circe's immortality (intentionally and interestingly but nonetheless) downplays. More than "historically authentic" or "emotionally modern" I think these characters feel like Miller's characters, with the unique way she has of matching these potently idiosyncratic, often harsh, traits with an implicit vulnerability. They aren't relatable, exactly, but they feel vividly human, not constrained by their culture and historical moment but shaping it dynamically. I'm not quite putting my finger on it exactly here, but it's very impressive and enviable.]]> 4.38 2011
author: Madeline Miller
name: Adam
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: audiobook, folklore, fantasy, historical-fiction, favorites
review:
I'm greedy and want more of these immediately, but what a blessing that we have even two books by Madeline Miller. Like Circe, Song of Achilles is an absolute treasure. My thirst for more content like this led me to try the Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology, and the contrast between the two highlights everything that makes these books so special. I love mythology as much as the next person, probably a lot more, but what passes for a "telling" of a myth usually amounts to a prettied up synopsis. It lacks the key thing we demand in modern storytelling: a seat on the rollercoaster, so to speak. We want to see the story play out as the character sees it, immersed into the perception and emotion of every moment. And that is what Miller provides for the Iliad. It's a truly wonderful thing. By bringing us into this secret intimacy and immediacy of Patroclus' life and love, it makes the story we know feel like something vague and distant. She does it with the standard tools of the narrative craft, through small lines of introspection and description all beautiful on their own but which all contribute to an emotional core that, given foreknowledge of the conclusion, is poignant as hell. The tragedy of Patroclus and Achilles was abstract, hard to really feel before, but now it feels like a slow-motion train crash. And when it finally hits, the emotional power built up by all those tiny moments of characterization become crushing.

Given the focus of the Iliad over the Odyssey, it's no surprise that this book has far less of the "fun" parts of mythology, the gods and monsters and ends of the earth. The storytelling easily makes up for that. It is a shorter, smaller story that burns bright and hot instead of cool and slow. I was also very satisfied with the focus on the internal politics and social dynamics among the Greeks, something that Circe's immortality (intentionally and interestingly but nonetheless) downplays. More than "historically authentic" or "emotionally modern" I think these characters feel like Miller's characters, with the unique way she has of matching these potently idiosyncratic, often harsh, traits with an implicit vulnerability. They aren't relatable, exactly, but they feel vividly human, not constrained by their culture and historical moment but shaping it dynamically. I'm not quite putting my finger on it exactly here, but it's very impressive and enviable.
]]> 289314 104 Jim Woodring 1569713103 Adam 4 comics, star-wars, legends
Ooh, plus! A replica droid full of murder-weasels in jumpsuits!]]> 3.13 1998
author: Jim Woodring
name: Adam
average rating: 3.13
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/13
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: comics, star-wars, legends
review:
A surprisingly unique offering, exactly the sort of the a character one-shot ought to do. I don't know that Jabba's characterization quite matches the idea you get of him in RotJ, but it's still quite fun and I don't really mind. They're a pulp counterpart to something like Aphra, where the dark corners of the underworld aren't a scary place but something to gleefully roll around in. Jabba isn't a marginal figure in this world but on top of it, so all of the twists of fate and double crosses and betrayals that roil around him aren't world shaking blows, they just are his world. He rolls with all of it and always comes out on top because he's always the most devious and ruthless guy in the room. It's not deep but it's a lot of fun. It's also just nice to have a Star Wars story that's only concerned with self-interest and draws no broader moral angles, to remind us this isn't a place concocted purely as a setting for morality plays.

Ooh, plus! A replica droid full of murder-weasels in jumpsuits!
]]> 204802994 Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary the egg.

It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.



'Jules Howard's egg's-eye view of evolution is dripping with fascinating insights' ALICE ROBERTS



If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chicken egg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blue eggs of the blackbird?

Every egg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.

In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.

Whether belonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their role in the tapestry of life can be told.]]> 288 Jules Howards 1783967781 Adam 0 4.13 2024
author: Jules Howards
name: Adam
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: currently-reading, audiobook, non-fiction, science
review:

]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Adam 3 ecofiction 4.16 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Adam
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: ecofiction
review:

]]> 10955059
Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.


The book's radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses—such stuff as dreams are made on—and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.]]> 624 Terrence W. Deacon 0393049914 Adam 5 3.99 2011
author: Terrence W. Deacon
name: Adam
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: audiobook, evolution, favorites, non-fiction, philosophy, science
review:

]]> 50915816 A smart, sexy guide to embracing the repressed, tabooed, and often unwanted aspects of ourselves so we can discover our inner power and finally live the life we deserve.

“We always get exactly what we want; but often, though we may not be aware of it, what we most want is dark—very dark.�

Each of us has a dual nature: we are light (conscious) and dark (unconscious). The dark side of our personality—the “other,� the shadow side—is made up of what we think is our primitive, primal, negative impulses—our “existential kink.� Our existential kink also drives the dark or negative repeating patterns in our life: always choosing the abusive partner or boss, settling for less, thinking that we’re undeserving, not worthy. But it also is the source of our greatest power.

In Existential Kink, Carolyn Elliott, PhD, offers a truth-telling guide for bringing our shadow into the light. Inviting us to make conscious the unconscious, Elliott asks us to own the subconscious pleasure we get from the stuck, painful patterns of our existence.

Existential Kink provides practical advice and meditations so we truly see our shadow side’s “guilty pleasures,� love and accept them, and integrate them into our whole being. By doing so, Elliott shows, we bring to life the raw, hot, glorious power we all have to get what we really want in our lives.]]> 202 Carolyn Elliott 1578636477 Adam 0 abandoned 3.78 2020
author: Carolyn Elliott
name: Adam
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 123012858
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works , Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.]]> 552 Philip Ball 0226826686 Adam 5 audiobook 4.24 2023
author: Philip Ball
name: Adam
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 5954 Narcissus and Goldmund tells the story of two medieval men whose characters are diametrically opposite: Narcissus, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and Goldmund, a romantic youth hungry for knowledge and worldly experience. First published in 1930, Hesse's novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh. It is a theme that transcends all time.]]> 315 Hermann Hesse 0374506841 Adam 5
I love Hesse for the earnest wonder with which he perceives the subtle sensuous beauty of all moments. It is this pre-intellectual earnestness that draws me to him, despite all his false dichotomizing and his habit of attributing a character's core being and motivations to a single childhood event. He was certainly a literatus, yet his grasp of the life of the mind never seems quite whole; it is not in this that I feel his wisdom. For all the 3,000 book reviews he wrote, I still feel that his fiction betrays him as a Goldmund, not a Narcissus. I imagine the man who wrote N&G to be deeply and intuitively responsive to the aesthetics and romantics of his world. This in contrast perhaps to someone like Borges, who is deeply and intuitively responsive to the beauty and play of human intellectualizing. ]]> 4.26 1930
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Adam
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: magical-connective-fantastic-lit, philosophical-fiction, favorites
review:
Narcissus and Goldmund is my favorite book, I say when anyone asks. I love N&G so much for the breadth of life experience and revelation it portrays and communicates, and for the depth of feeling with which Hesse articulates these thoughts. N&G contains and expresses so much of what it is to live, in a way that is never paltry, that never disrespects any of the vast array of feelings life implies.

I love Hesse for the earnest wonder with which he perceives the subtle sensuous beauty of all moments. It is this pre-intellectual earnestness that draws me to him, despite all his false dichotomizing and his habit of attributing a character's core being and motivations to a single childhood event. He was certainly a literatus, yet his grasp of the life of the mind never seems quite whole; it is not in this that I feel his wisdom. For all the 3,000 book reviews he wrote, I still feel that his fiction betrays him as a Goldmund, not a Narcissus. I imagine the man who wrote N&G to be deeply and intuitively responsive to the aesthetics and romantics of his world. This in contrast perhaps to someone like Borges, who is deeply and intuitively responsive to the beauty and play of human intellectualizing.
]]> 1793102 The Writing of Stones is a fascinating meditation on the human imagination contemplating the interior of stones. Caillois examines patterns that are revealed by polishing sections of minerals such as agate, jasper, and onyx. He considers the impact these configurations have had upon the human imagination throughout history and he reviews man's attempt to categorize and explain them.

Marguerite Yourcenar [in her introduction] points out that "there had taken place in [his] intellect the equivalent of the Copernican revolution: man was no longer the center of the universe, except in the sense that the center is everywhere; man, like all the rest, was a cog in the whole system of turning wheels. Quite early on, having entered 'the forbidden laboratories,' Caillois applied himself to the study of diagonals which link the species, of the recurrent phenomena that act, so to speak as a matrix of forms." Caillois found the presence throughout the universe of a sensibility and a consciousness analogous to our own. One way which this consciousness expresses itself is in a "natural fantasy" that is evident in the pictures found in stones. Man's own aesthetic may then be no more than one of many manifestations of an all-pervasive aesthetic that reveals itself in the natural world.

Caillois also studies the artist's collaboration with nature in the modification of these picture stones. By cutting and framing a picture found or by elaborating the pattern in the stone, the artist admits that nature, with or without an artist, can produce shapes and colors that are works of art. Caillois reminds us that "nature not only provided a stock of models but also directly created works worthy of admiration--works capable of competing on equal terms with human achievements without having to pass through the alchemy of human art."

Where, then, do these speculations lead us? By turning on its head, as it were, the quintessential modern dilemma--whether expressed as a dualism of mind and body, as an antithesis of matter and soul, or as the separation of subject and object--Caillois carries the reader beyond the usual arguments about what is and what is not human.

The Writing of Stones will interest all who wish to understand what can be learned about the world and its slow and patient formation. Archeologists, gemologists, sculptors, students of art, aesthetics, history, literature, and philosophy will confront questions that they have felt but have not possessed, so far, a way to study in new ways. Here Caillois offers many fresh approaches that we have yet to resolve.]]> 108 Roger Caillois 0813910501 Adam 0 to-read 4.34 1970
author: Roger Caillois
name: Adam
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30698254 The stunning conclusion to Robin Hobb’s Fitz and the Fool trilogy, which began with Fool’s Assassin and Fool’s Quest

More than twenty years ago, the first epic fantasy novel featuring FitzChivalry Farseer and his mysterious, often maddening friend the Fool struck like a bolt of brilliant lightning. Now New York Times bestselling author Robin Hobb brings to a momentous close the third trilogy featuring these beloved characters in a novel of unsurpassed artistry that is sure to endure as one of the great masterworks of the genre.

Fitz’s young daughter, Bee, has been kidnapped by the Servants, a secret society whose members not only dream of possible futures but use their prophecies to add to their wealth and influence. Bee plays a crucial part in these dreams—but just what part remains uncertain.

As Bee is dragged by her sadistic captors across half the world, Fitz and the Fool, believing her dead, embark on a mission of revenge that will take them to the distant island where the Servants reside—a place the Fool once called home and later called prison. It was a hell the Fool escaped, maimed and blinded, swearing never to return.

For all his injuries, however, the Fool is not as helpless as he seems. He is a dreamer too, able to shape the future. And though Fitz is no longer the peerless assassin of his youth, he remains a man to be reckoned with—deadly with blades and poison, and adept in Farseer magic. And their goal is simple: to make sure not a single Servant survives their scourge.]]> 952 Robin Hobb 0553392972 Adam 5 ebook, fantasy 4.75 2017
author: Robin Hobb
name: Adam
average rating: 4.75
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: ebook, fantasy
review:

]]> 4592 304 Eric H. Davidson 0120885638 Adam 0 currently-reading 4.12 2006
author: Eric H. Davidson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 29924756 120 Heidi Priebe Adam 5 4.07 2016
author: Heidi Priebe
name: Adam
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/23
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 48717236
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And NoemĂ­, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 302 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 1529402662 Adam 0 to-read 3.72 2020
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Adam
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2286707 350 David S. Goodsell 047141719X Adam 0 currently-reading 4.05 2004
author: David S. Goodsell
name: Adam
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 25849 190 Kazuo Umezu 1421507226 Adam 2
The bigger problem with DC is that the characterization is pretty weak. As a bloody, brutal extrapolation of Lord of the Flies, it displays aspirations to psychological and sociological depth but the execution of those ideas is undercut by the sprint towards violence. The adults resort to hostage taking, murder, and extortion to appoint themselves king of the school almost immediately. Most of the teachers die in a murder-suicide spree in the space of a few pages catalyzed by nothing but the main premise of the series. Kids are constantly making fickle choices just to cause conflict and justify more character deaths. Every time things get slow, this happens, or Umezu introduces a random element to torture the kids more (a squirrel infected with bubonic plague shows up and infects everyone and then the ones that survive are healthy by the end of the volume).

I'm fine with the brutal treatment of the kids and it could have been good if they'd been identifiable characters. But there were so many, and so many of the had to be introduced each volume to keep up with the number of named characters who died in the last one, that it was hard to care about any of them. And unlike in Ito's works, none of the art really carried the deaths on their own; it didn't generally feel all that imaginative. The smoke and sand effects especially just felt like scribbles a lot of the time.]]> 3.80 2006
author: Kazuo Umezu
name: Adam
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2016/02/13
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: comics, horror, ebook, post-apocalypse, weird
review:
The Drifting Classroom is a novel-scale manga that feels like a weekly serial with aspirations to a much longer run than it actually got. It has some interesting premises, and it was a clear inspiration for Bloodborne's Nightmare Lecture Hall/Nightmare Frontier, but the world-building is undermined by a sense that every comic is just searching for a one-off idea to fill space. This impression comes from the genre-trope laziness of a lot of the ideas, but also because their execution over-explains them all or wraps them up too abruptly. There are a few hints of more interesting ecological and supernatural devices, but they either never go anywhere or go way too far too fast. The mutants literally watch a movie and narrate the entire sequence of events that caused the apocalypse and their emergence, and it takes away a lot of their potential. And I guess it's not the most surprising cuz this was written in the '70s, but the apocalypse is an incomprehensible and vague but super preachy. One of the kids literally travels back in time to try to keep people from destroying the planet, ugh.

The bigger problem with DC is that the characterization is pretty weak. As a bloody, brutal extrapolation of Lord of the Flies, it displays aspirations to psychological and sociological depth but the execution of those ideas is undercut by the sprint towards violence. The adults resort to hostage taking, murder, and extortion to appoint themselves king of the school almost immediately. Most of the teachers die in a murder-suicide spree in the space of a few pages catalyzed by nothing but the main premise of the series. Kids are constantly making fickle choices just to cause conflict and justify more character deaths. Every time things get slow, this happens, or Umezu introduces a random element to torture the kids more (a squirrel infected with bubonic plague shows up and infects everyone and then the ones that survive are healthy by the end of the volume).

I'm fine with the brutal treatment of the kids and it could have been good if they'd been identifiable characters. But there were so many, and so many of the had to be introduced each volume to keep up with the number of named characters who died in the last one, that it was hard to care about any of them. And unlike in Ito's works, none of the art really carried the deaths on their own; it didn't generally feel all that imaginative. The smoke and sand effects especially just felt like scribbles a lot of the time.
]]> 6524831 Richard C. Schwartz Adam 5 ebook, non-fiction 4.41 2008
author: Richard C. Schwartz
name: Adam
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: ebook, non-fiction
review:

]]> 1576188 The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.]]> 368 Bruno Schulz 0143105140 Adam 0 recommendations 4.16
author: Bruno Schulz
name: Adam
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 16159526 In this new anthology, writers reach into the rich territory first explored by William Hope Hodgson a century the land of the fungi. Stories range from noir to dark fantasy, from steampunk to body horror. Join authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron, Nick Mamatas, W.H. Pugmire, Lavie Tidhar, Ann K. Schwader, Jesse Bullington, Molly Tanzer and Simon Strantzas through a dizzying journey of fungal tales. Feast upon Fungi.
Please the e-book and paperback contain 23 stories. The special edition hardcover contains three stories and illustrations not found in the other editions.]]> 288 Orrin Grey 0991675940 Adam 0 3.63 2012
author: Orrin Grey
name: Adam
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read, fantasy, ebook, short-stories
review:

]]> 13419204
�What is a Mongol? � As free as the geese in the air, as in unison. The flights of the geese promise us we don’t give up independence, to unite.�

The hundred tribes of the Mongols have come together with one aim: to push back against the walls that have crept onto the steppe � farther than China has ever extended its walls before. Walls are repugnant to a nomad. But can people on horses push them down, even with a united effort?

This story begins when nobody has heard of Mongols � not even most Chinese, who think the vast Northern Waste at its weakest and are right. A spectacular history starts obscurely�

Amgalant gives voice to the Mongols in their explosive encounter with the great world under Tchingis Khan. Both epic and intimate, Amgalant sees the world through Mongol eyes. It’s different from the world you know.

'Total and instant immersion... thoroughly compelling and powerful.' - Asian Review of Books]]> 602 Bryn Hammond 1466182520 Adam 0 abandoned 4.22 2012
author: Bryn Hammond
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 8031712 354 Joseph Heath 0307590593 Adam 0 to-read 4.09 2009
author: Joseph Heath
name: Adam
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15810910
Captain Marcus d’Ivoire, commander of one of the Vordanai empire’s colonial garrisons, was resigned to serving out his days in a sleepy, remote outpost. But that was before a rebellion upended his life. And once the powder smoke settled, he was left in charge of a demoralized force clinging tenuously to a small fortress at the edge of the desert.

To flee from her past, Winter Ihernglass masqueraded as a man and enlisted as a ranker in the Vordanai Colonials, hoping only to avoid notice. But when chance sees her promoted to command, she must win the hearts of her men and lead them into battle against impossible odds.

The fates of both these soldiers and all the men they lead depend on the newly arrived Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, who has been sent by the ailing king to restore order. His military genius seems to know no bounds, and under his command, Marcus and Winter can feel the tide turning. But their allegiance will be tested as they begin to suspect that the enigmatic Janus’s ambitions extend beyond the battlefield and into the realm of the supernatural—a realm with the power to ignite a meteoric rise, reshape the known world, and change the lives of everyone in its path.]]> 513 Django Wexler 0451465105 Adam 4
Marcus and Winter are good, solid point of view characters, and I enjoyed watching both of them navigate the chain of command and Army society at large, react to battles and political developments, meet and judge new people, and try to be themselves as much as they can. Winter's nightmares are not quite my style, and a bit intrusive, but for the most part I found their backstories to feel pleasantly . . . normal? and woven into their character development with subtlety. All of that basically sold me on this as a "military fiction" novel. There are times that the battles are more interested in the mechanics and tactics of Napoleonic-era field battles than I was, and belabored them more than I cared to, but I rarely begrudged it, because most of them are character-driven and immersive. Otherwise, its idea of "military fantasy" is refreshingly interested in morale, internal politics, supply chains, and camp ethnography--from multiple social and gender perspectives.

The only real problem I had with this book was the ending. I think I'm going to start a hall-of-shame shelf for fantasy books ruined by this ending. It's so obvious and disagreeable that I'm getting to a point where I can tell immediately that it's coming on and just have to sigh and resign myself to the fact that the rest of the book is going to suck. Because it always does. In Thousand Names, that means the few boring hints and periodic enemy-POV chapters scattered throughout pay off in all the usual bullshit. There's a showdown with just the main characters, necromancy, demons, zombies with glowing green eyes, the obvious betrayer reveals themself and delivers a tiresome monologue, the protagonist uses a hidden ability to win a fight, worldbuilding poorly established in hints is explained directly because it's necessary we understand it but it was never relevant enough to the story to feel natural before, a complex storyline is reduced to a straightforward battle between two sides, etc.

It abandons its plainness and indulges in all the insipid bells and whistles that make plainness so appealing. The worldbuilding is not very exciting, but it isn't inherently that bad--it's actually not all that different from the demonology of Tanzer's Creatures of Will and Temper--but it's executed pretty poorly. More objectionable, I suppose, is the fact that this demon shit occupies the space in the narrative that should have been given to political questions about colonialism and inequality, military adventurism and class. It certainly isn't a problematic portrayal of colonialism, but it doesn't seem interested in exploring it at all. And this is not necessarily just an idle philosophical absence. I was genuinely confused by the implications of the ending, and I had no idea how Winter and Marcus were supposed to be figuring out where their loyalties should go. The story acts like there's a clear good and bad here but because the whole thing is a secret until the moment of decision, there's no context for why the audience, or even the generally apolitical characters, should root one way or the other. They make a decision, the narrative implies it was the right one, but I couldn't tell you why. There's some propaganda about inquisitions and such, but it's halfhearted and unconvincing. ]]> 4.03 2013
author: Django Wexler
name: Adam
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2018/02/05
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: fantasy, audiobook, bad-genre-ending
review:
My impulse is to compare The Thousand Names to Dan Abraham's Dagger and Coin series, but I hesitate. On one hand, they share a very similar audiobook narration (I was convinced they were the same guy until I checked), one I'm fond of, and their close, steady approach to their characters is a welcome change from the norm in fantasy. On the other, where Abraham is low-key and takes his time building toward something grand and clever, Wexler is (at least as of this first volume) just plain. And honestly, I've got nothing against plain. If this were just a KJ Parker-style second-world non-fantasy slice-of-military-life story I would love it. To the extent it just is that, I did love it. It's maybe 90%. So that's pretty good.

Marcus and Winter are good, solid point of view characters, and I enjoyed watching both of them navigate the chain of command and Army society at large, react to battles and political developments, meet and judge new people, and try to be themselves as much as they can. Winter's nightmares are not quite my style, and a bit intrusive, but for the most part I found their backstories to feel pleasantly . . . normal? and woven into their character development with subtlety. All of that basically sold me on this as a "military fiction" novel. There are times that the battles are more interested in the mechanics and tactics of Napoleonic-era field battles than I was, and belabored them more than I cared to, but I rarely begrudged it, because most of them are character-driven and immersive. Otherwise, its idea of "military fantasy" is refreshingly interested in morale, internal politics, supply chains, and camp ethnography--from multiple social and gender perspectives.

The only real problem I had with this book was the ending. I think I'm going to start a hall-of-shame shelf for fantasy books ruined by this ending. It's so obvious and disagreeable that I'm getting to a point where I can tell immediately that it's coming on and just have to sigh and resign myself to the fact that the rest of the book is going to suck. Because it always does. In Thousand Names, that means the few boring hints and periodic enemy-POV chapters scattered throughout pay off in all the usual bullshit. There's a showdown with just the main characters, necromancy, demons, zombies with glowing green eyes, the obvious betrayer reveals themself and delivers a tiresome monologue, the protagonist uses a hidden ability to win a fight, worldbuilding poorly established in hints is explained directly because it's necessary we understand it but it was never relevant enough to the story to feel natural before, a complex storyline is reduced to a straightforward battle between two sides, etc.

It abandons its plainness and indulges in all the insipid bells and whistles that make plainness so appealing. The worldbuilding is not very exciting, but it isn't inherently that bad--it's actually not all that different from the demonology of Tanzer's Creatures of Will and Temper--but it's executed pretty poorly. More objectionable, I suppose, is the fact that this demon shit occupies the space in the narrative that should have been given to political questions about colonialism and inequality, military adventurism and class. It certainly isn't a problematic portrayal of colonialism, but it doesn't seem interested in exploring it at all. And this is not necessarily just an idle philosophical absence. I was genuinely confused by the implications of the ending, and I had no idea how Winter and Marcus were supposed to be figuring out where their loyalties should go. The story acts like there's a clear good and bad here but because the whole thing is a secret until the moment of decision, there's no context for why the audience, or even the generally apolitical characters, should root one way or the other. They make a decision, the narrative implies it was the right one, but I couldn't tell you why. There's some propaganda about inquisitions and such, but it's halfhearted and unconvincing.
]]> 205363954 The bestselling author of Other Minds shows how we and our ancestors have reinvented our planet.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell).

What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith tells the long story of living action, and its impact. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—as a cause, as a factor, in the making of the world in which we live.

To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of communication, culture, and consciousness. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them, as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.]]> 336 Peter Godfrey-Smith 0374189935 Adam 0 to-read 3.55 2024
author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
name: Adam
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,� recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist � an informational topologist with half his mind gone � as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]> 384 Peter Watts 0765312182 Adam 0 recommendations 4.01 2006
author: Peter Watts
name: Adam
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naĂŻve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TłÜ°ů˛Ô±đ»ĺ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Adam 3 novella 4.05 1892
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Adam
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 3
read at: 2009/01/03
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: novella
review:

]]> 325785 Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.]]> 1152 Karl Marx 0140445684 Adam 3
I’ve been planning to write an article defending this claim for quite a while now, but as I’ve tested the waters for it with my pals on Twitter, it’s become obvious that my years of anti-civ/anarchist anti-capitalism did not leave me with as thorough an understanding of the ideology in general as I had assumed. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me, because Marxism is rejected just as strongly by anti-civism as capitalism is. So I was going into conversations with Marxists, or if not people who called themselves Marxists, at least people who were using the Marxist tradition as the premise of their analysis of capitalism and thus as the source of their conception of some alternative to it.

Those conversations were always quite frustrating to me (as I’m sure they were for the people I was talking to), because it always felt like I was playing motte-and-bailey whack-a-mole. Any time I thought I’d pinned them down, they always acted as if they could admit it without any harm to the fundamental distinctness of their real position. I might have just given up and concluded I was right but that they were too ideological to be convinced, but that would have been a copout and an unfair one at that. More importantly, it was undeniable that I simply hadn’t fully understood the Marxist position well enough to say whether I could reject it. The quotes they shared weren’t so much obviously wrong as profoundly inscrutable to me. At some point it became clear that Twitter spats were insufficient, and that to make any progress I’d need to develop my own understanding of Marxism. Hence: Capital. Or at least, some of it.

In a sense, Marx’s writing is much more accessible than I was afraid it would be. There’s a mess of vocabulary, and the way his argument is structured often feels awkward. So often as I was reading the first 12 chapters, I would take him at his word, trying to follow his reasoning to its logical conclusion or reinterpret it in my own terms, only to be told either that future chapters would completely reframe it, or that these ideas were advanced with some level of irony, not meant to be taken as literal analytical propositions. Looking into David Harvey’s companion to Capital, he takes that argument even further: Marx was arguing dialectically, not scientifically. His premises accumulate nuance and dynamism as the argument grows, or something. You have to finish the whole thing to get the first parts.

If I’m honest, I kind of think this is a bit unfair to Marx. The first 12 chapters of Capital are often confusing, but they certainly feel like they’re intended to be read as an exposition of a logically coherent theory. Why else would he spend so much effort laying out quantitative examples, or policing the precise definitions of his terms and how they interact? I don’t have a clue what “dialectical reasoning� is, but these chapters are immediately recognizable as an attempt at scientific theory-making. From everything I’ve read, Marx saw himself as among the first theorists of the science of industrial economies, in the possession of an unmatched theory that made massive improvements on his predecessors and contemporaries, and had the ambition to pluck as much of that low-hanging fruit as his lifetime would allow. He obviously thought his analysis of capitalism was not just politically expedient but scientifically correct.

So the reading of Capital I ended up pursuing, for better or worse, was a scientific one. Marx was writing at the very cusp of modern economics, before the “marginal revolution� but after the shortcomings of Ricardo’s labor theory of value had become obvious. In that light, his theory becomes in some ways more impressive--working without the intellectual tools that would make so much of this work clear, he managed to create a theory of capitalism that was imperfect in many particulars but still far more cognizant of the broad-scale patterns of the economy than anyone else in his time. I actually wonder if Capital is easier to understand this way, looking back from marginalism and filling in the gaps, than in trying doggedly to see it as a completely and infallible analysis that holds true today. Because while I have seen it said several times that one of Marx’s goals was to do exactly what I came in looking to find--to prove that the supposedly natural and inevitable facts of capitalism were just historically contingent--there is not a hint of that in Capital.

While modern leftists embrace attitudes toward economics that range from complete rejection to criticism of pro-market premises like gains from trade, competitive equilibria, or rational actor theory, Marx (so far) implicitly or sometimes explicitly takes all of that for granted. He »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t contradict marginalism; his analysis relies on it just as much as the neoclassical theory modern Marxists love to shit on. He just »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t have a clear enough framing of the ideas to realize how much more they’ll eventually be able to explain, so he relies on cumbersome alternatives. For instance, Marx obviously thinks the rational actor assumption--that both workers and capitalists enter the market to pursue their own self-interest, and in the aggregate make the best choices available to them to achieve that--goes without saying. His explanation of why value can’t come from circulation begins with a perfectly reasonable statement of gains from trade--he just discounts it as irrelevant using a terminological distinction (use/exchange value) that is not very convincing and contradicts what he’s said before (that money has use-value as well as exchange value). His assumption that commodities trade at their cost of production is only true, by his own admission, when perfect competition makes it true. The notion of “socially necessary labor timeâ€� bundles in the assumption that labor is expended on something people desire.

His analysis of surplus value, the centerpiece of his whole theory, is perhaps the best illustration of this of all. Marx knows there must be limits on how workers and bosses can negotiate. He knows capitalists can’t pay more for an hour of labor than its product (after capital costs) can be sold for--and assuming perfect competition, as he does, that’s a fairly low cap. He also knows that workers can’t accept lower wages than their minimum cost of staying alive. Plus, he’s well aware that given perfect competition in all other goods, the difference between these two bounds is the only place capitalists can make any money, and that if they get more, that means workers get less. Without a theory of marginal utility, Marx can’t quite land the final stage of this negotiation. He resorts to a long and confusing set of examples and subcategories about how this pie--the difference btw what workers are willing to accept and capitalists are willing to pay--is divvied up. One of these plainly contradicts the premise that the other openly rejects, so they both boil down to the same thing. And because he »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t have a real theory of trade, the mechanisms by which that negotiation takes place are all exported to “class struggle.â€�

I’d always had the impression that the surplus value theorem was Marx’s reason why capitalism was inherently exploitative. And he seems to agree--he calls the rate of surplus value the “rate of exploitation.â€� It’s just that, he never gives us any reason to think that. For one thing, surplus value is a good that workers own and therefore are free to sell or not. No one is robbing them of it. If they sell it, it’s because they feel like it’s the best option available to them. The Labor Theory of Value thus »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that capitalism is exploitative. It’s perfectly plausible to imagine a libertarian accepting all of this. And while Marx does overlook the possibility that workers could get the better of this trade--presumably because that seemed so far-fetched in his time, for reasons I’ll get back to later--it’s not that hard to imagine an adjustment to his theory that accounts for it.

For all those reasons and more, I find myself more baffled than ever that leftists today act like Marx hit on a perfectly elegant theory of class exploitation, and that rejecting it means giving up our one chance at a structural, root-cause analysis that can end the evils of capitalism. The fact that Marx is both the founder of the world’s most radical and influential labor movement and believed in the labor theory of value (LTV) is little more than a coincidence.

Looking at Marxism from a history of economics-as-a-science perspective, it’s easy to frame Marx as a Ptolemaian, doing his best to add corrections and complications to save the LTV as real-world experience piled up against it. But the shift from the LTV to the marginalist theory of value isn’t completely analogous to the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism. There is no “fact� of the matter that would become physically obvious if you saw the economy from the right perspective. From a certain angle, they’re just two incommensurable perspectives, both of which might be useful for certain goals but neither of which can ever be decisively proven over the other, just by the nature of their claims. That’s kind of the conclusion I was coming to before I read Capital, because it seemed so hard for me and my Marxist interlocutors to grasp statements we each took as intuitive.

But now that I’ve read these first 12 chapters (plus a few other fragments), I’m no longer convinced that the LTV is so distinct. Again, Marx’s formulation assumes everything marginalism makes central. I think it’s better to think of it as a clumsy first pass. Not that it has different priorities, but that it »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t know yet quite what mattered and how. Capital is arguably constructed the way it is because Marx knows, intuitively, that marginalism is true and has to account for it to make the LTV viable. I find it slightly misleading to say that the LTV is a “special caseâ€� of marginalism, but there’s also a lot of truth to it. Marx’s argument makes it true that capitalists can only profit by exploiting labor by fiat--he has assumed away, through equilibrium competition, any other possible source. The marginal revolution simply plugged in the missing core that made everything fit together on its own, allowing all of the assumptions holding things together--including the LTV itself--to fall away. It makes you wonder what Marx would have thought if marginal utility theory had been formulated in his youth. It’s the sort of idea that feels hard to deny once you’ve heard it plainly stated.

In the introduction to his companion to Capital, when he’s putting his theoretical cards on the table, David Harvey mentions somewhat disparagingly the strain of Marxists who seek to convert Marxism into a “positivist,� empirically verifiable scientific hypothesis. This, per Harvey, betrays the spirit of Marx’s writing; he was a dialectician, not a scientist. I still have no idea what that means and can’t help but think it’s a copout to escape falsification. But Marx does make some predictions, and they have not been borne out. The one that interests me most regards the human population. One of the fundamental assumptions of Marx’s analysis is that commodity prices are set by their cost of production. I never found the part in Capital where Marx explains the mechanism for this in general, but he does in Value, Price, and Profit and it’s pretty straightforward: capital flows to industries where prices are higher than costs. Marx tells us that the same is true of labor, so unless he says otherwise (I haven’t found where he does but haven’t looked exhaustively), the mechanism should be the same: high wages produce more workers. He does at one point explicitly reject this hypothesis, but I have no idea how he thinks it remains true. He seems to take for granted that the “cost of production of labor� includes enough to support children, but because that cost of production itself is so weakly theorized, it can’t handle the explanatory burden placed on it. It’s just another hand-waving assumption.

Anyway, the funny part is that modern leftists love to crow about how Malthus� prediction that population growth would ensure permanent scarcity was wrong. But because that’s the case, Marx’s core assumption, that costs of labor production are the baseline for setting wages, is no longer true! Because “Malthus was wrong,� labor is far more scarce now than it was in Marx’s time, and in the process, his whole theory about exploitation has become even more tenuous than it was in his time. It’s much harder now to deny that relative scarcity is what determines the price of labor (as of everything else).

I stopped reading after Chapter 12 and skipped around to see what the rest was like, dipping in to get his take on the “reserve army of the unemployed� and on “primitive accumulation.� It seems quite scattershot, full of random empirical and historical anecdotes and national and industrial level data but not in any way that seems strongly linked to his theory. Chapter 10 just abruptly switches mid-chapter from surplus value theory to anecdotes about worker exploitation. It’s the dialectical method, I guess. Doesn’t seem great but I can’t say I read it closely enough to really judge.]]> 4.28 1867
author: Karl Marx
name: Adam
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1867
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/27
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: ebook, economics, non-fiction, wealth-and-power-inequality, abandoned
review:
When I abandoned anti-civilizationism, I lost with it any analytic conception of capitalism and its evils. The position I moved to instead was not pro-capitalist, though I have come to understand market economics in a way that is more sympathetic to libertarian positions. My position now is that capitalism, communism, and socialism are, at least as they’re commonly used online, deeply confusing terms that conflate answers to philosophical questions about the nature of the human relationship to scarcity with goals and values about how we should treat each other with technical questions of economic policy. On each score, they herd people into narrow corners of ideological possibility space, hardening their minds against curiosity and making them say really dumb shit. My position more specifically is that “anti-capitalism� implies that certain aspects of the condition thrust upon us by evolution are in fact contingent, and even invented, elements of our current social structure.

I’ve been planning to write an article defending this claim for quite a while now, but as I’ve tested the waters for it with my pals on Twitter, it’s become obvious that my years of anti-civ/anarchist anti-capitalism did not leave me with as thorough an understanding of the ideology in general as I had assumed. That probably shouldn’t have surprised me, because Marxism is rejected just as strongly by anti-civism as capitalism is. So I was going into conversations with Marxists, or if not people who called themselves Marxists, at least people who were using the Marxist tradition as the premise of their analysis of capitalism and thus as the source of their conception of some alternative to it.

Those conversations were always quite frustrating to me (as I’m sure they were for the people I was talking to), because it always felt like I was playing motte-and-bailey whack-a-mole. Any time I thought I’d pinned them down, they always acted as if they could admit it without any harm to the fundamental distinctness of their real position. I might have just given up and concluded I was right but that they were too ideological to be convinced, but that would have been a copout and an unfair one at that. More importantly, it was undeniable that I simply hadn’t fully understood the Marxist position well enough to say whether I could reject it. The quotes they shared weren’t so much obviously wrong as profoundly inscrutable to me. At some point it became clear that Twitter spats were insufficient, and that to make any progress I’d need to develop my own understanding of Marxism. Hence: Capital. Or at least, some of it.

In a sense, Marx’s writing is much more accessible than I was afraid it would be. There’s a mess of vocabulary, and the way his argument is structured often feels awkward. So often as I was reading the first 12 chapters, I would take him at his word, trying to follow his reasoning to its logical conclusion or reinterpret it in my own terms, only to be told either that future chapters would completely reframe it, or that these ideas were advanced with some level of irony, not meant to be taken as literal analytical propositions. Looking into David Harvey’s companion to Capital, he takes that argument even further: Marx was arguing dialectically, not scientifically. His premises accumulate nuance and dynamism as the argument grows, or something. You have to finish the whole thing to get the first parts.

If I’m honest, I kind of think this is a bit unfair to Marx. The first 12 chapters of Capital are often confusing, but they certainly feel like they’re intended to be read as an exposition of a logically coherent theory. Why else would he spend so much effort laying out quantitative examples, or policing the precise definitions of his terms and how they interact? I don’t have a clue what “dialectical reasoning� is, but these chapters are immediately recognizable as an attempt at scientific theory-making. From everything I’ve read, Marx saw himself as among the first theorists of the science of industrial economies, in the possession of an unmatched theory that made massive improvements on his predecessors and contemporaries, and had the ambition to pluck as much of that low-hanging fruit as his lifetime would allow. He obviously thought his analysis of capitalism was not just politically expedient but scientifically correct.

So the reading of Capital I ended up pursuing, for better or worse, was a scientific one. Marx was writing at the very cusp of modern economics, before the “marginal revolution� but after the shortcomings of Ricardo’s labor theory of value had become obvious. In that light, his theory becomes in some ways more impressive--working without the intellectual tools that would make so much of this work clear, he managed to create a theory of capitalism that was imperfect in many particulars but still far more cognizant of the broad-scale patterns of the economy than anyone else in his time. I actually wonder if Capital is easier to understand this way, looking back from marginalism and filling in the gaps, than in trying doggedly to see it as a completely and infallible analysis that holds true today. Because while I have seen it said several times that one of Marx’s goals was to do exactly what I came in looking to find--to prove that the supposedly natural and inevitable facts of capitalism were just historically contingent--there is not a hint of that in Capital.

While modern leftists embrace attitudes toward economics that range from complete rejection to criticism of pro-market premises like gains from trade, competitive equilibria, or rational actor theory, Marx (so far) implicitly or sometimes explicitly takes all of that for granted. He »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t contradict marginalism; his analysis relies on it just as much as the neoclassical theory modern Marxists love to shit on. He just »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t have a clear enough framing of the ideas to realize how much more they’ll eventually be able to explain, so he relies on cumbersome alternatives. For instance, Marx obviously thinks the rational actor assumption--that both workers and capitalists enter the market to pursue their own self-interest, and in the aggregate make the best choices available to them to achieve that--goes without saying. His explanation of why value can’t come from circulation begins with a perfectly reasonable statement of gains from trade--he just discounts it as irrelevant using a terminological distinction (use/exchange value) that is not very convincing and contradicts what he’s said before (that money has use-value as well as exchange value). His assumption that commodities trade at their cost of production is only true, by his own admission, when perfect competition makes it true. The notion of “socially necessary labor timeâ€� bundles in the assumption that labor is expended on something people desire.

His analysis of surplus value, the centerpiece of his whole theory, is perhaps the best illustration of this of all. Marx knows there must be limits on how workers and bosses can negotiate. He knows capitalists can’t pay more for an hour of labor than its product (after capital costs) can be sold for--and assuming perfect competition, as he does, that’s a fairly low cap. He also knows that workers can’t accept lower wages than their minimum cost of staying alive. Plus, he’s well aware that given perfect competition in all other goods, the difference between these two bounds is the only place capitalists can make any money, and that if they get more, that means workers get less. Without a theory of marginal utility, Marx can’t quite land the final stage of this negotiation. He resorts to a long and confusing set of examples and subcategories about how this pie--the difference btw what workers are willing to accept and capitalists are willing to pay--is divvied up. One of these plainly contradicts the premise that the other openly rejects, so they both boil down to the same thing. And because he »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t have a real theory of trade, the mechanisms by which that negotiation takes place are all exported to “class struggle.â€�

I’d always had the impression that the surplus value theorem was Marx’s reason why capitalism was inherently exploitative. And he seems to agree--he calls the rate of surplus value the “rate of exploitation.â€� It’s just that, he never gives us any reason to think that. For one thing, surplus value is a good that workers own and therefore are free to sell or not. No one is robbing them of it. If they sell it, it’s because they feel like it’s the best option available to them. The Labor Theory of Value thus »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that capitalism is exploitative. It’s perfectly plausible to imagine a libertarian accepting all of this. And while Marx does overlook the possibility that workers could get the better of this trade--presumably because that seemed so far-fetched in his time, for reasons I’ll get back to later--it’s not that hard to imagine an adjustment to his theory that accounts for it.

For all those reasons and more, I find myself more baffled than ever that leftists today act like Marx hit on a perfectly elegant theory of class exploitation, and that rejecting it means giving up our one chance at a structural, root-cause analysis that can end the evils of capitalism. The fact that Marx is both the founder of the world’s most radical and influential labor movement and believed in the labor theory of value (LTV) is little more than a coincidence.

Looking at Marxism from a history of economics-as-a-science perspective, it’s easy to frame Marx as a Ptolemaian, doing his best to add corrections and complications to save the LTV as real-world experience piled up against it. But the shift from the LTV to the marginalist theory of value isn’t completely analogous to the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism. There is no “fact� of the matter that would become physically obvious if you saw the economy from the right perspective. From a certain angle, they’re just two incommensurable perspectives, both of which might be useful for certain goals but neither of which can ever be decisively proven over the other, just by the nature of their claims. That’s kind of the conclusion I was coming to before I read Capital, because it seemed so hard for me and my Marxist interlocutors to grasp statements we each took as intuitive.

But now that I’ve read these first 12 chapters (plus a few other fragments), I’m no longer convinced that the LTV is so distinct. Again, Marx’s formulation assumes everything marginalism makes central. I think it’s better to think of it as a clumsy first pass. Not that it has different priorities, but that it »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t know yet quite what mattered and how. Capital is arguably constructed the way it is because Marx knows, intuitively, that marginalism is true and has to account for it to make the LTV viable. I find it slightly misleading to say that the LTV is a “special caseâ€� of marginalism, but there’s also a lot of truth to it. Marx’s argument makes it true that capitalists can only profit by exploiting labor by fiat--he has assumed away, through equilibrium competition, any other possible source. The marginal revolution simply plugged in the missing core that made everything fit together on its own, allowing all of the assumptions holding things together--including the LTV itself--to fall away. It makes you wonder what Marx would have thought if marginal utility theory had been formulated in his youth. It’s the sort of idea that feels hard to deny once you’ve heard it plainly stated.

In the introduction to his companion to Capital, when he’s putting his theoretical cards on the table, David Harvey mentions somewhat disparagingly the strain of Marxists who seek to convert Marxism into a “positivist,� empirically verifiable scientific hypothesis. This, per Harvey, betrays the spirit of Marx’s writing; he was a dialectician, not a scientist. I still have no idea what that means and can’t help but think it’s a copout to escape falsification. But Marx does make some predictions, and they have not been borne out. The one that interests me most regards the human population. One of the fundamental assumptions of Marx’s analysis is that commodity prices are set by their cost of production. I never found the part in Capital where Marx explains the mechanism for this in general, but he does in Value, Price, and Profit and it’s pretty straightforward: capital flows to industries where prices are higher than costs. Marx tells us that the same is true of labor, so unless he says otherwise (I haven’t found where he does but haven’t looked exhaustively), the mechanism should be the same: high wages produce more workers. He does at one point explicitly reject this hypothesis, but I have no idea how he thinks it remains true. He seems to take for granted that the “cost of production of labor� includes enough to support children, but because that cost of production itself is so weakly theorized, it can’t handle the explanatory burden placed on it. It’s just another hand-waving assumption.

Anyway, the funny part is that modern leftists love to crow about how Malthus� prediction that population growth would ensure permanent scarcity was wrong. But because that’s the case, Marx’s core assumption, that costs of labor production are the baseline for setting wages, is no longer true! Because “Malthus was wrong,� labor is far more scarce now than it was in Marx’s time, and in the process, his whole theory about exploitation has become even more tenuous than it was in his time. It’s much harder now to deny that relative scarcity is what determines the price of labor (as of everything else).

I stopped reading after Chapter 12 and skipped around to see what the rest was like, dipping in to get his take on the “reserve army of the unemployed� and on “primitive accumulation.� It seems quite scattershot, full of random empirical and historical anecdotes and national and industrial level data but not in any way that seems strongly linked to his theory. Chapter 10 just abruptly switches mid-chapter from surplus value theory to anecdotes about worker exploitation. It’s the dialectical method, I guess. Doesn’t seem great but I can’t say I read it closely enough to really judge.
]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Adam 4 3.92 1911
author: Thomas Mann
name: Adam
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 4
read at: 2007/04/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 60975 496 Derrick Jensen 1583227245 Adam 5 4.16
author: Derrick Jensen
name: Adam
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2008/08/14
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: non-fiction, the-problem-of-civilization, political-philosophy, wealth-and-power-inequality, favorites, feminism
review:

]]> 35535406 'This is the book I wish I could have written but am very glad I've read' Jim Al-Khalili

�I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.�
Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 � the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics.

Quantum physics is regarded as one of the most obscure and impenetrable subjects in all of science. But when Feynman said he didn’t understand quantum mechanics, he didn’t mean that he couldn’t do it � he meant that’s all he could do. He didn’t understand what the maths was saying: what quantum mechanics tells us about reality.

Over the past decade or so, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how.

This is more disturbing than our bad habit of describing the quantum world as �things behaving weirdly� suggests. It calls into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and knowledge itself.

The quantum world isn’t a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called â€�weirdâ€�, it’s us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means â€� and what it »ĺ´Ç±đ˛ő˛Ô’t mean.]]> 384 Philip Ball 1847924573 Adam 0 to-read 4.04 2018
author: Philip Ball
name: Adam
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201930181
Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. ĚýThen the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them. They are dropped in the middle of a struggle they barely understand, set in a competition against the other captive species with extinction as the price of failure.

Only Dafyd and a handful of his companions see past the Darwinian contest to the deeper game that they must play to learning to understand â€� and manipulate â€� the Carryx themselves. With a noble but suicidal human rebellion on one hand and strange and murderous enemies on the other, the team pays a terrible price to become the trusted servants of their new rulers. Dafyd Alkhor is a simple man swept up in events that are beyond his control and more vast than his imagination. ĚýHe will become the champion of humanity and its betrayer, the most hated man in history and the guardian of his people. This is where his story begins.]]> 422 James S.A. Corey 031652557X Adam 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Adam
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9283648
“A magisterial history.”—​Paul Krugman

Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl ofĚýinventionĚýoffset by a growing population. Then came a great invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would haveĚýusedĚýsuch powers to build utopia. But it was not so. WhenĚý1870â€�2010Ěýended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.Ěý
Ěý
EconomistĚýBrad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia Ěýtells the story ofĚýhowĚýthis unprecedentedĚýexplosionĚýof material wealthĚýoccurred,Ěýhow it transformed the globe,ĚýandĚýwhyĚýitĚýfailed toĚýdeliver us toĚýutopia.ĚýOfĚýremarkable breadth and ambition,ĚýitĚýrevealsĚýtheĚýlastĚýcentury to have been lessĚýa march of progressĚýthanĚýa slouchĚýin the right direction.]]> 624 J. Bradford DeLong 0465019595 Adam 0 to-read 3.87 2022
author: J. Bradford DeLong
name: Adam
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5553 138 Richard P. Feynman 0465023924 Adam 0 4.22 1994
author: Richard P. Feynman
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: non-fiction, science, abandoned
review:

]]> 40610956 Acclaimed and bestselling author Robin Hobb continues her Fitz and the Fool trilogy with this second entry, following Fool’s Assassin, ramping up the tension and the intrigue as disaster continues to strike at Fitz’s life and heart.

After nearly killing his oldest friend, the Fool, and finding his daughter stolen away by those who were once targeting the Fool, FitzChivarly Farseer is out for blood. And who better to wreak havoc than a highly trained and deadly former royal assassin? Fitz might have let his skills go fallow over his years of peace, but such things, once learned, are not so easily forgotten. And nothing is more dangerous than a man who has nothing left to lose…]]> 757 Robin Hobb 055339293X Adam 4 ebook, fantasy 4.53 2015
author: Robin Hobb
name: Adam
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: ebook, fantasy
review:

]]> 321005 Bookworm, Run! (1966)
True Names (1981)
The Peddler's Apprentice (1975) with Joan D. Vinge
The Ungoverned (1985)
Long Shot (1972)
Marooned in Realtime (excerpt) (1987)]]> 275 Vernor Vinge 0671653636 Adam 0 4.09 1981
author: Vernor Vinge
name: Adam
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves: recommendations, science-fiction
review:

]]> 201751520
In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. This is an urgent issue for efforts to make life from scratch in laboratories here on Earth and missions searching for life on other planets.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, Life as No One Knows It celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.]]> 272 Sara Imari Walker 0593191897 Adam 0 to-read 3.88
author: Sara Imari Walker
name: Adam
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 183932716
Each of us is endowed with an inheritance. A set of ancient biases, forged through countless millennia of natural and cultural selection, which shape every facet of our behaviour.

For generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights, driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. We find ourselves careering towards a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier wars, and environmental destruction.

In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our evolved biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperil its future. Unveiling a pioneering new way of viewing our collective history � one that weaves together psychological experiments, on-the-ground fieldwork, and big data � Whitehouse introduces three biases that shape human behaviour conformism, religiosity, and tribalism.

These biases have catalysed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and creation of multiethnic empires. Yet today, they are driving us to ruin. Taking us deep into New Guinea tribes, Libyan militias, and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how the tools we once used to manage our biases are breaking down, with devastating implications for us all.

By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance reveals a surprising new path to solving our most urgent problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey; one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.]]> 464 Harvey Whitehouse 1529152224 Adam 0 to-read 4.25
author: Harvey Whitehouse
name: Adam
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13400 1616 Bruce Alberts 0815332181 Adam 0 to-read 4.38 1983
author: Bruce Alberts
name: Adam
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 228568
This commemorative edition, honoring the memory of the author who died in 2011, contains essays by his daughter Olivia Judson, Matthew Meselson, and Mark Ptashne and an obituary by Jason Pontin. It contains all the content added to previous editions, including essays on some of the principal historical figures involved, such as Rosalind Franklin, and a sketch of the further development of molecular biology in the era of recombinant DNA.]]> 720 Horace Freeland Judson 0879694785 Adam 0 to-read 4.57 1979
author: Horace Freeland Judson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1973981 114 William W. Cohen 038748275X Adam 0 to-read 3.75 2007
author: William W. Cohen
name: Adam
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 123668 172 James Blish 0380595680 Adam 0 to-read 3.85 1968
author: James Blish
name: Adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1968
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6429264 A renowned biochemist draws on cutting-edge scientific findings to construct the mosaic of life’s astounding history.

How did life invent itself? Where did DNA come from? How did consciousness develop? Powerful new research methods are providing vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining atomic structures of proteins, and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have helped explain evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane expertly reconstructs the history of life by describing the ten greatest inventions of evolution (including DNA, photosynthesis, sex, and sight), based on their historical impact, role in organisms today, and relevance to current controversies. Who would have guessed that eyes started off as light-sensitive spots used to calibrate photosynthesis in algae? Or that DNA’s building blocks form spontaneously in hydrothermal vents? Lane gives a gripping, lucid account of nature’s ingenuity, and the result is a work of essential reading for anyone who has ever pondered or questioned the science underlying evolution’s greatest gifts to man.]]> 352 Nick Lane 0393065960 Adam 0 to-read 4.11 2009
author: Nick Lane
name: Adam
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 4058671


Editor Susan Feldmann hasĚýĚýassembled this introductory anthology of oralĚýĚýliterature around themes that allow comparison of the manyĚýĚýways different tribes explained similar concepts.ĚýĚýThe result is a magnificent journey into theĚýĚýNative American cosmos and a chance for us toĚýĚýexperience everything from the beginning of time to theĚýĚýpassage through death with the first people of ourĚýĚýland.]]> 304 Susan Feldmann 0440383145 Adam 0
It doesn't seem very meaningful to evaluate these as stories per se. They're removed from the storytelling context they were made for, and it's hard to know how much that accounts for their skeletal quality. They all feel like plot synopses, lists of events without much tone or setting or character. Nonetheless, many of them are totally bizarre and awesome and I'd love to see them realized for contemporary audiences. In an alternate timeline there's a Zuni Studio Ghibli and FROM Software using these incredibly grotesque and wondrous tropes and stories and mixing them with other traditions to create some wonderfully weird media. The Zuni stories are quite distinct from the rest and stand out for their horrific (or some would say puerile) sensibilities and ecological imagination. But all of them have great things to bring to the modern cultural dialogue and it's a shame, for many reasons, that the peoples who carry them on are not in a place to do that work.

As for phylogenies, while this is far from a complete dataset, it's impossible to miss the repetition here. Many of these stories echo each other extensively and are clearly cousins. There's even a couple of Eurasians stories recognizable here, including Chicken Little, Pandora, and Polyphemus (the last of which Julien d'Huy has shown empirically to be related to Eurasian iterations of the tale). There are probably more I'm just not recognizing. It does make me wonder where the Zuni stuff came from, because it seems like they aren't part of the same folkloric tree here.

The narrative-as-foraging-aide question is much more vexing. I was pretty skeptical when I first read this hypothesis, but I actually found a lot of evidence in these stories that could potentially support it, much more than I was expecting. There are not a lot of setting details in these stories, but sometimes they will go out of their way to say how many feathers to fletch and arrow with or the specific cardinal directions a mythical figure traveled to reach a good flint outcrop. Coming in with this theory in mind, details like this stand out like sore thumbs and feel heavy-handedly didactic. There's even one odd story in here that feels like nothing more than a mnemonic for a series of numbers. But I still find it hard to buy into. There's so much information involved in successfully living in these landscapes that goes so far beyond the basic details contained in these stories that it's hard to imagine it being useful to encode them. If you have been taught all the skills involved in making arrows and hunting game, do you really need a story remind you to put three feathers and not four? On the other hand, it's a hard claim to evaluate because in theory much of this information could be indirect both narratively and ecologically--maybe a story about mythical Bear gives some useful framing for how to harvest salmon.]]> 3.20 1965
author: Susan Feldmann
name: Adam
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at: 2017/06/03
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: anthropology, native-americans, non-fiction, folklore, ecofiction
review:
I picked this up mostly to get familiar with the stories and the kinds of things they contained, but also with two historical theses in mind. First, that stories are objects of evolution by natural selection, can be fitted to a phylogeny, and, with sufficient data, a timeline and common ancestry can be inferred. The second is that stories contain and propagate valuable information about living in a landscape--whether that's ecological, material culture, or social.

It doesn't seem very meaningful to evaluate these as stories per se. They're removed from the storytelling context they were made for, and it's hard to know how much that accounts for their skeletal quality. They all feel like plot synopses, lists of events without much tone or setting or character. Nonetheless, many of them are totally bizarre and awesome and I'd love to see them realized for contemporary audiences. In an alternate timeline there's a Zuni Studio Ghibli and FROM Software using these incredibly grotesque and wondrous tropes and stories and mixing them with other traditions to create some wonderfully weird media. The Zuni stories are quite distinct from the rest and stand out for their horrific (or some would say puerile) sensibilities and ecological imagination. But all of them have great things to bring to the modern cultural dialogue and it's a shame, for many reasons, that the peoples who carry them on are not in a place to do that work.

As for phylogenies, while this is far from a complete dataset, it's impossible to miss the repetition here. Many of these stories echo each other extensively and are clearly cousins. There's even a couple of Eurasians stories recognizable here, including Chicken Little, Pandora, and Polyphemus (the last of which Julien d'Huy has shown empirically to be related to Eurasian iterations of the tale). There are probably more I'm just not recognizing. It does make me wonder where the Zuni stuff came from, because it seems like they aren't part of the same folkloric tree here.

The narrative-as-foraging-aide question is much more vexing. I was pretty skeptical when I first read this hypothesis, but I actually found a lot of evidence in these stories that could potentially support it, much more than I was expecting. There are not a lot of setting details in these stories, but sometimes they will go out of their way to say how many feathers to fletch and arrow with or the specific cardinal directions a mythical figure traveled to reach a good flint outcrop. Coming in with this theory in mind, details like this stand out like sore thumbs and feel heavy-handedly didactic. There's even one odd story in here that feels like nothing more than a mnemonic for a series of numbers. But I still find it hard to buy into. There's so much information involved in successfully living in these landscapes that goes so far beyond the basic details contained in these stories that it's hard to imagine it being useful to encode them. If you have been taught all the skills involved in making arrows and hunting game, do you really need a story remind you to put three feathers and not four? On the other hand, it's a hard claim to evaluate because in theory much of this information could be indirect both narratively and ecologically--maybe a story about mythical Bear gives some useful framing for how to harvest salmon.
]]> 91519
Stephanie Potter gives up a promising academic career to marry Daniel Orton, while her sister, Frederica, enters Cambridge, and her brother, Marcus, begins recovering from a nervous breakdown.]]> 384 A.S. Byatt 0684835037 Adam 0 abandoned 3.89 1985
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Adam
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 13689317
Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? What could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, developments in the emerging field of 'systems chemistry' are unlocking the problem. Addy Pross shows how the different kind of stability that operates among replicating molecules results in a tendency for chemical systems to become more complex and acquire the properties of life. Strikingly, he demonstrates that Darwinian evolution is the biological expression of a deeper, well-defined chemical the whole story from replicating molecules to complex life is one continuous process governed by an underlying physical principle. The gulf between biology and the physical sciences is finally becoming bridged.]]> 224 Addy Pross 0199641013 Adam 0 to-read 3.88 2012
author: Addy Pross
name: Adam
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 783559 contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biological science itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences.]]> 734 Stuart A. Kauffman 0195079515 Adam 0 to-read 4.18 1993
author: Stuart A. Kauffman
name: Adam
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41021196
But behind the facade of respectable middle-age lies a turbulent and violent past. For Tom Badgerlock is actually FitzChivalry Farseer, bastard scion of the Farseer line, convicted user of Beast-magic, and assassin. A man who has risked much for his king and lost more�

On a shelf in his den sits a triptych carved in memory stone of a man, a wolf and a fool. Once, these three were inseparable friends: Fitz, Nighteyes and the Fool. But one is long dead, and one long-missing.

Then one Winterfest night a messenger arrives to seek out Fitz, but mysteriously disappears, leaving nothing but a blood-trail. What was the message? Who was the sender? And what has happened to the messenger?

Suddenly Fitz's violent old life erupts into the peace of his new world, and nothing and no one is safe.]]> 706 Robin Hobb 0553392433 Adam 5 fantasy, ebook 4.48 2014
author: Robin Hobb
name: Adam
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/01/30
shelves: fantasy, ebook
review:

]]> 65213781
Anna Sinjari―refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker―has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. While humanity reels from disaster, she must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.]]> 544 Seth Dickinson 1250233011 Adam 0 shortlist-to-read 3.61 2024
author: Seth Dickinson
name: Adam
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves: shortlist-to-read
review:

]]> 1511295 Darwinism Evolving examines the Darwinian research tradition in evolutionary biology from its inception to its turbulent present, arguing that recent advances in modeling the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems may well catalyze the next major phase of Darwinian evolutionism.

While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power.

Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently facing.

Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: Darwin's Newtonian Darwinism, the rise of developmentalist evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposals for meeting those challenges.

A Bradford Book]]> 608 David J. Depew 0262540835 Adam 0 to-read 4.20 1994
author: David J. Depew
name: Adam
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 445408
Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"—a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.

The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Rancière an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Rancière sees as perpetuating inequality.

]]> 176 Jacques Rancière 0804719691 Adam 0 recommendations 4.10 1987
author: Jacques Rancière
name: Adam
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 150247395
Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820702 Adam 0 to-read 4.28 2024
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Adam
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 64005201 "An ingenious argument" (Kirkus) for a "novel thesis" (Publishers Weekly) that cells, not DNA, hold the key to understanding life’s past and present â€�Ěý

What defines who we are? For decades, the answer has seemed our genes, the “blueprint of life.â€� In The Master Builder, biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias argues we’ve been missing the bigger picture. It’s not our genes that define who we are, but our cells. While genes are important, nothing in our DNA explains why the heart is on the left side of the body, how many fingers we have, or even how our cells manage to reproduce. Drawing on new research from his own lab and others, Martinez Arias reveals that we are composed of a thrillingly intricate, constantly moving symphony of cells. Both their long lineage—stretching back to the very first cell—and their intricate interactions within our bodies today make us who we are.ĚýĚý

Engaging and ambitious, The Master Builder will transform your understanding of our past, present, and future—as individuals and as a species.Ěý]]> 383 Alfonso Martinez Arias 1541603281 Adam 0 to-read 4.00 2023
author: Alfonso Martinez Arias
name: Adam
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34399345 Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universeIn this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.]]> 572 Arthur Koestler Adam 4 4.47 1959
author: Arthur Koestler
name: Adam
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: ebook, history, non-fiction, phil-of-science, science
review:

]]> 17098 mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation.

James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion. Ideas so basic to the twenty-first century we literally take them for granted.]]> 272 James Gleick 1400032954 Adam 4 3.78 2003
author: James Gleick
name: Adam
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: british-naturalists-scientists, non-fiction, phil-of-science, science
review:

]]> 63859 Great book 158 Donald J. Wheeler 0945320531 Adam 0 to-read 4.08 1993
author: Donald J. Wheeler
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26135825
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.]]> 232 Alison Bechdel 0618871713 Adam 4 non-fiction 4.07 2006
author: Alison Bechdel
name: Adam
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/27
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> 62246548 280 Hasok Chang 1108470386 Adam 5 4.48
author: Hasok Chang
name: Adam
average rating: 4.48
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/30
date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: ebook, non-fiction, phil-of-science, philosophy
review:

]]> 55401
Set in a brilliantly realized world ravaged by dark, uncontrollable magic, Deadhouse Gates is a novel of war, intrigue and betrayal confirms Steven Eirkson as a storyteller of breathtaking skill, imagination and originality--a new master of epic fantasy.]]> 604 Steven Erikson 0765310023 Adam 0 fantasy, recommendations 4.27 2000
author: Steven Erikson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/28
shelves: fantasy, recommendations
review:

]]> 1127113 114 Willard Van Orman Quine 0674326350 Adam 0 abandoned 3.69 1995
author: Willard Van Orman Quine
name: Adam
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 61327449 The secrets to successfully planning and delivering projects on any scale—from home renovation to space exploration—by the world’s leading expert on megaprojects
Ěý
“This book is important, timely, instructive, and entertaining. What more could you ask for?”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
Ěý
“Over-budget and over-schedule is an inevitability. Incompetence and grift is outrageous. Bent Flyvbjerg, with this terrific data-driven book, has shown that there is another way.”—Frank Gehry

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, newĚýreality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig�? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.� In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours. For example:

� Understand your odds. If you don’t know them, you won’t win.
â€� Plan slow, act fast. Getting to the action quick feels right. But it’s wrong.Ěý
� Think right to left. Start with your goal, then identify the steps to get there.
� Find your Lego. Big is best built from small.
� Be a team maker. You won’t succeed without an “us.�
� Master the unknown unknowns. Most think they can’t, so they fail. Flyvbjerg shows how you can.
� Know that your biggest risk is you.

Full of vivid examples ranging from the building of the Sydney Opera House, to the making of the latest Pixar blockbusters, to a home renovation in Brooklyn gone awry, How Big Things Get Done reveals how to get any ambitious project done—on time and on budget.]]> 304 Bent Flyvbjerg 0593239512 Adam 5 4.28 2023
author: Bent Flyvbjerg
name: Adam
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/08
shelves: audiobook, economics, evolution, favorites, non-fiction
review:

]]> 22130074 270 Helen Marshall 1771483024 Adam 0 to-read, short-stories 3.98 2014
author: Helen Marshall
name: Adam
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/02
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> 366659 The Catalan Communications edition has no ISBN and a slightly different cover than the DelRay edition. A picture of the copyright page has been added.

Fernando Fernández made sure the text and illustration of his adaptation was faithful to and entirely in the spirit of the original. The details of what he chose and how well he synthesized them are up for debate- I only mention the intention of the adapter. The length of the original is such that many scenes had to be abbreviated or left out of a 96 page interpretation.

He painted the entirety in an awe-inspiring fashion that captures the mood of the story with such brilliance that Stoker himself would have, beyond doubt, been been impressed with the objective quality of the art and honored by the tremendous effort that was put forth to render his masterpiece.]]> 368 Bram Stoker 4876881154 Adam 4 3.58 1897
author: Bram Stoker
name: Adam
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1897
rating: 4
read at: 2009/12/09
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves: horror, history, antiquarian-prose
review:
I have a weakness for the florid and quaint vocabulary of 19th Century Romantic literature, and, having read Frankenstein last and loved it, and having read much Lovecraft more recently and felt the same way, I picked up Dracula over winter break. It is everything I wanted as far as the language is concerned, and though the plot has nothing of the philosophical interest provided by Shelley or Lovecraft, Dracula is a solid horror novel. It's not the best; the characters' Christianity becomes quite cloying after a bit, and the plot resolves dreadfully anticlimactically for the last 100 pages or so. However, it's worth the read. The diary format is both well done and inspiring; it shows you what your own diary could and should be like, and made me long for the time or willpower to sit down each night and write such an eloquent and detailed description of my experiences.
]]> 69709682
With a ragged peace in place, demons burn farmlands, violent Reivers roam the wilds and plague has spread beyond the Black Meadows. The country is on its knees.

In a society that fears and shuns him, Aranok is the first magically-skilled draoidh to be named King’s Envoy.

Now, charged with restoring an exiled foreign queen to her throne, he leads a group of strangers across the ravaged country. But at every step, a new mystery complicates their mission.

As bodies drop around them, new threats emerge and lies are revealed, can Aranok bring his companions together and uncover the conspiracy that threatens the kingdom?

Strap in for this twisted fantasy road trip from award-winning author Justin Lee Anderson.]]> 529 Justin Lee Anderson 0316454176 Adam 0 shortlist-to-read 4.12 2019
author: Justin Lee Anderson
name: Adam
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves: shortlist-to-read
review:

]]> 5961818
Now, with his long-awaited new book, "The Winter Harvest Handbook," anyone can have access to his hard-won experience. Gardeners and farmers can use the innovative, highly successful methods Coleman describes in this comprehensive handbook to raise crops throughout the coldest of winters.

Building on the techniques that hundreds of thousands of farmers and gardeners adopted from "The New Organic Grower" and "Four-Season Harvest," this new book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness and quality in customized unheated or, in some cases, minimally heated, movable plastic greenhouses.

Coleman offers clear, concise details on greenhouse construction and maintenance, planting schedules, crop management, harvesting practices, and even marketing methods in this complete, meticulous, and illustrated guide. Readers have access to all the techniques that have proven to produce higher-quality crops on Coleman's own farm.

His painstaking research and experimentation with more than 30 different crops will be valuable to small farmers, homesteaders, and experienced home gardeners who seek to expand their production seasons.

A passionate advocate for the revival of small-scale sustainable farming, Coleman provides a practical model for supplying fresh, locally grown produce during the winter season, even in climates where conventional wisdom says it "just can't be done."]]> 264 Eliot Coleman 1603580816 Adam 0 recommendations 4.34 2009
author: Eliot Coleman
name: Adam
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 42041926 The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world--which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.]]> 288 Julia Galef 0735217556 Adam 0 audiobook 4.09 2021
author: Julia Galef
name: Adam
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/25
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 59693959 In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet

Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.

Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.]]> 313 Ottessa Moshfegh Adam 0 to-read 3.53 2022
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Adam
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62918667
Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species � but there’s a catch.

Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these �sleeping beauties� crop up everywhere. But why?

Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbour the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off.

In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature’s rich and strange tapestry.]]> 352 Andreas Wagner 0861545273 Adam 0 to-read 3.81
author: Andreas Wagner
name: Adam
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38315 Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile,and The Bed of Procrustes.]]> 368 Nassim Nicholas Taleb 0812975219 Adam 0 audiobook 4.08 2001
author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
name: Adam
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/11
date added: 2023/06/11
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 411702 Graphic Classics editions, makes a good introduction for young readers to the imaginative riches of literature. These books contain many extra features, including brief biographies of their authors, a list of each author's important works, a glossary, and an index. Suitable for classroom use as introductions to literature for junior and senior high school students, these graphic novels entertain young readers while introducing them to the works of renowned literary artists. Full-color illustrations throughout. Retold here is the tragic story of Quasimodo, the hunchback bell tender of Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, and his struggle to save Esmerelda, a girl falsely accused of a crime she did not commit.]]> 48 Michael Ford 0764159798 Adam 0 recommendations 3.78
author: Michael Ford
name: Adam
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/31
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Adam 0 abandoned 4.14 2023
author: David Grann
name: Adam
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/14
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Adam 0 abandoned 4.17 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Adam
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 54227475
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can't answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society's most charged conflicts--whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.]]> 368 Carl Zimmer 0593182715 Adam 5 audiobook 3.88 2021
author: Carl Zimmer
name: Adam
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/22
date added: 2023/04/23
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 43307890
Collects: Saga #43-48.]]> 152 Brian K. Vaughan 1534303499 Adam 3
Merged review:

Maybe it's just been too long since I read the previous volumes, but I found seven and eight hard to connect to. They felt a bit scattered and random, centered more in the just slightly overbearing narrator's themes than in the agency of the characters. A lot of the politics feel less interesting and relevant here than they have in the past, too. I had the misapprehension this was the end of the series, and if that were true it would be a pretty bad ending! Luckily it is not, but still, it's not the most satisfying midpoint.]]> 4.46 2017
author: Brian K. Vaughan
name: Adam
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2018/12/17
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: comics, ebook, science-fiction
review:
Maybe it's just been too long since I read the previous volumes, but I found seven and eight hard to connect to. They felt a bit scattered and random, centered more in the just slightly overbearing narrator's themes than in the agency of the characters. A lot of the politics feel less interesting and relevant here than they have in the past, too. I had the misapprehension this was the end of the series, and if that were true it would be a pretty bad ending! Luckily it is not, but still, it's not the most satisfying midpoint.

Merged review:

Maybe it's just been too long since I read the previous volumes, but I found seven and eight hard to connect to. They felt a bit scattered and random, centered more in the just slightly overbearing narrator's themes than in the agency of the characters. A lot of the politics feel less interesting and relevant here than they have in the past, too. I had the misapprehension this was the end of the series, and if that were true it would be a pretty bad ending! Luckily it is not, but still, it's not the most satisfying midpoint.
]]> 26530386 The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.

For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion years, they made the jump to complexity. All complex life, from mushrooms to man, shares puzzling features, such as sex, which are unknown in bacteria. How and why did this radical transformation happen?

The answer, Lane argues, lies in energy: all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a lightning bolt. Building on the pillars of evolutionary theory, Lane’s hypothesis draws on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and cell biology, in order to deliver a compelling account of evolution from the very origins of life to the emergence of multicellular organisms, while offering deep insights into our own lives and deaths.

Both rigorous and enchanting, The Vital Question provides a solution to life’s vital question: why are we as we are, and indeed, why are we here at all?]]> 368 Nick Lane 0393352978 Adam 5 audiobook 4.19 2015
author: Nick Lane
name: Adam
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/13
date added: 2023/04/13
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 61272810
Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit , Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.

Nathan Ballingrud’s stories have been adapted into the film Wounds and the Hulu series Monsterland , The Strange is his first novel.]]> 304 Nathan Ballingrud 1534449957 Adam 0 to-read 3.76 2023
author: Nathan Ballingrud
name: Adam
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7954936
Gilbert Taylor, Booklist]]> 416 Kevin Kelly 0670022152 Adam 0 to-read 3.72 2010
author: Kevin Kelly
name: Adam
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 51199750
Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.

We have now arrived at a remarkable moment, prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention.]]> 267 Neil Shubin Adam 3 audiobook 4.06 2020
author: Neil Shubin
name: Adam
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/01
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: audiobook
review:

]]> 37638098 An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years the Steve Jobs era--the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple's creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies.

Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation--inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy--and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.

An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.]]> 264 Ken Kocienda 1250194466 Adam 0 to-read 4.02 2018
author: Ken Kocienda
name: Adam
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208264

By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime.


Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, CĂ©zanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past.


Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find. By illuminating the differences between them, this pioneering book provides vivid new insights into the mysterious processes of human creativity.]]> 256 David W. Galenson 0691121095 Adam 0 to-read 3.76 2005
author: David W. Galenson
name: Adam
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 8034188 326 Steven Johnson 1594487715 Adam 0 to-read 3.99 2010
author: Steven Johnson
name: Adam
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1363152 Floyd Merrell 0802071422 Adam 0 to-read 5.00 1996
author: Floyd Merrell
name: Adam
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 183954 208 John H. Holland 0201442302 Adam 0 to-read 3.89 1995
author: John H. Holland
name: Adam
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7126 The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translation

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas� epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

Translated with an Introduction by Robin Buss

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Adam 0 abandoned 4.29 1846
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Adam
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/17
shelves: abandoned
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]]> 493746 Preface
Of strange objects
Vitalisms and animisms
Maxwell's demons
Microscopic cybernetics
Molecular ontogenesis
Invariance and perturbations
Evolution
The frontiers
The kingdom and the darkness
Appendixes]]> 208 Jacques Monod 0394718259 Adam 4 4.22 1970
author: Jacques Monod
name: Adam
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/06
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 442239 383 Colin Woodard 0151013020 Adam 0 recommendations 3.85 2007
author: Colin Woodard
name: Adam
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 53925
~publisher's web site]]> 568 Mario Vargas Llosa 0571139612 Adam 0 to-read 4.24 1981
author: Mario Vargas Llosa
name: Adam
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23884
Gabriel García Márquez's most political novel is the tragic story of General Simón Bolívar, the man who tried to unite a continent.

Bolívar, known in six Latin American countries as the Liberator, is one of the most revered heroes of the western hemisphere; in García Márquez's brilliant reimagining he is magnificently flawed as well. The novel follows Bolívar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers-and still-powerful memories-he defies his impending death until the last.

The General in His Labyrinth is an unforgettable portrait of a visionary from one of the greatest writers of our time.]]> 248 Gabriel García Márquez 1400043336 Adam 0 recommendations 3.74 1989
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Adam
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: recommendations
review:

]]> 844051 400 Charles Bernard Nordhoff 0316611689 Adam 0 to-read 4.01 1932
author: Charles Bernard Nordhoff
name: Adam
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10506
As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy.

In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood.]]> 528 Umberto Eco 0156030373 Adam 0 to-read 3.50 1994
author: Umberto Eco
name: Adam
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 65651918 86 Rose Novick 1009033360 Adam 5 5.00
author: Rose Novick
name: Adam
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/21
date added: 2023/02/21
shelves: ebook, evolution, non-fiction, phil-of-science, philosophy
review:

]]> 63231594 Optimally Irrational: The Hidden Benefits of Bad Instincts provides economists, social scientists and researchers in behavioral economics with a clear view of the frontier of research in economics and other behavioral sciences, including how the different biases unveiled by behavioral economics make sense when we try to optimize problems. The book evaluates the role of bias in human economic behavior, considers the human decision-making processes as the product of natural selection, and explores why we behave the way we do.




Discusses how we think about, and adopt, apparently irrational behaviors and biases in empirical research
Explains how biases may be adaptive solutions to well-posed optimization problems under constraints
Unites advances in behavioral economics with those from other behavioral sciences and evolutionary biology]]> 322 Lionel Page 1009209205 Adam 0 to-read 5.00
author: Lionel Page
name: Adam
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45992751 352 Ruth Goodman 1782438505 Adam 0 to-read 4.11 2020
author: Ruth Goodman
name: Adam
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59575939 A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

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 world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.]]> 464 Ed Yong Adam 5 4.46 2022
author: Ed Yong
name: Adam
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/06
date added: 2023/02/06
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]]> 60384070
Breathless is a “gripping� ( The Atlantic ) but “clear-eyed analysis� ( Time ) of SARs-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a “forever virus,� destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly, in one variant form or another. As scientists labor to catch it, comprehend it, and control it, with their high-tech tools and methods, the virus finds ways of escape.

Based on interviews with nearly one hundred scientists, including leading virologists in China and around the world, Quammen explains
-Infectious disease experts saw this pandemic coming
-Some scientists, for more than two decades, warned that “the next big one� would be caused by a changeable new virus—very possibly a coronavirus—but such warnings were ignored for political or economic reasons
-The precise origins of this virus may not be known for years, but some clues are compelling, and some suppositions can be dismissed
-And much more

Written by “one of our finest explainers of the natural world for decades� ( Chicago Tribune ), This “compelling and terrifying� ( The New York Times ) account is an unparalleled look inside the frantic international race to understand and control SARS-CoV-2—and what it might mean for the next potential global health crisis.]]> 416 David Quammen 1982164360 Adam 4 4.15 2022
author: David Quammen
name: Adam
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/25
date added: 2023/01/25
shelves: audiobook, non-fiction, science
review:

]]> 527756 1774 Robert Musil 0330349422 Adam 0 to-read 4.20 1930
author: Robert Musil
name: Adam
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1930
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4562574
For a century, the killer whales of Twofold Bay herded baleen whales towards the harpoons of local whalers, helping them hunt and sharing the rewards. It was a life of industry, adventure and a strange and unique partnership between whale and man.

As fewer baleen whales frequented the Australian east coast, the killer whales and the whaling industry they supported slowly disappeared. The body of the last killer whale, Old Tom, was retrieved in 1930-marking the end of an era in Australian history.

In Killers in Eden Danielle Clode explores how this relationship between whaler and killer whale developed. Using our modern knowledge of killer whales to untangle fact from myth, Danielle uncovers the truly remarkable history of the killers in Eden.]]> 200 Danielle Clode 1865086525 Adam 0 to-read 4.04 2002
author: Danielle Clode
name: Adam
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 35070887 152 Linnea Sterte 9187325268 Adam 0 to-read 4.33 2017
author: Linnea Sterte
name: Adam
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58986604 528 Steve Brusatte 0062951513 Adam 0 to-read 4.35 2022
author: Steve Brusatte
name: Adam
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60165403 Shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
A Kirkus Review Best Nonfiction Book of 2022

A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America . In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world� of North America―a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction� to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.]]> 448 Dan Flores 1324006161 Adam 0 to-read 3.95 2022
author: Dan Flores
name: Adam
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 22237142 Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again.

At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.

With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut.

Full of real-life heists-both spectacular and absurd-A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.]]> 296 Geoff Manaugh 0374117268 Adam 0 shortlist-to-read 3.34 2015
author: Geoff Manaugh
name: Adam
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/17
shelves: shortlist-to-read
review:

]]>