Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky is the third and final book in her Broken Earth trilogy. It presents the concluding events of Essun and Nassun’s narratives, revealing how the fate of the world is decided by these two women and their companions. Jemisin also takes us on a journey through Hoa’s memory of how The Shattering occurred, […]
I. Grabbing the Wheel It’s like, we’ve been in a car with a brick on the gas pedal and no one at the wheel, careening down the road, running over people and crashing into things. We’re still in the car. We can’t get out of the car. But someone could at least grab the […]
Summary: Warren Farrell and John Gray’s The Boy Crisis examines how and why boys and men are struggling to survive and thrive in modern life, and seeks to provide a preliminary blueprint for how to reverse this trend. In Part One, Farrell lays out the statistical evidence for the problem, demonstrating how boys and men are failing […]
Summary: Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a stunning and elegant work of modern fiction. Taking inspiration from an ancient novel by Antonius Diogenes that survives merely as “a few papyrus fragments” and a “ninth-century plot summary” (Author’s Note), Doerr weaves together three narrative arcs from different eras in humanity’s past, present, and future. One takes place during […]
Summary: Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and […]
Summary: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is an exceptionally lucid and commendable contribution to popular neuroscience. In this series of concise, highly-accessible essays, Barrett synthesizes a huge field of academic knowledge in a fashion that any literate person can enjoy and benefit from. Her central thesis is that the brain is […]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with […]
Summary: Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise is an exquisitely-crafted and emotionally-gripping novel that covers a huge swath of thematic, historical, and futuristic ground. The story is told in three Books, each of which is loosely connected through the recurrence of certain character names and relationship dynamics that inhabit a single home in Washington Square, New York City. Book […]
Summary: Gernot Wagner’s Geoengineering: The Gamble is a primer on the history of solar geoengineering, the state of current research, and possibilities for future experimentation and deployment. In a succinct and balanced fashion, Wagner discusses the various technical ways solar geoengineering might be implemented, as well as the morass of ethical and geopolitical problems that deployment may […]
Note: In July 2022, I published an extended review of this book. You can check that out here. Summary: Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock is a work of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) set in the near future, probably sometime in the 2040s. The book invites readers to imagine what might happen if someone unilaterally decided to initiate a solar geoengineering […]