Our Symphony with Animals
On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies
By Aysha Akhtar
Review by Michael Sakuma on Tue, Oct 8th 2019. |  | I have a, mixed, love-hate relationship with western medicine. In the span of 100 years it has significantly extended our lifespan and changed the things that most often kill us from things in the environment (malaria and pneumonia), to ourselves (i.e. excessive French fries and smoking). Medicine, built on the cold-mechanistic shoulders of science, views us, in large degree as machines. We can replace, tighten and modify most all of our parts, in the same way that we can soup up a muscle car or renovate an old Chevy. Doctors all too often lack bedside manner, seemingly
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Democracy in Chains
The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
By Nancy MacLean
Review by John Mullen on Tue, Oct 8th 2019. | Gerrymandering to restrict African American votes. Laws requiring voters to show picture Identification. Closing state picture identification offices in largely African American counties. Videoing at polling booths. Closing polling places in poor counties. Distributing false information about the locations of polling places. Stripping voter registrations based upon minor differences in signatures separated by many years. Posing as polling workers then falsely offering to deliver absentee ballots.
Prior to reading Nancy MacLean's book I had little context in which to understand these wel
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How History Gets Things Wrong
The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories
By Alex Rosenberg
Review by David Meskill on Tue, Oct 8th 2019. |  | Historians debate many things, from the Founding Fathers' motivations to the role of violence in the rise of capitalism, from the possibility of writing "grand narratives" to the best use of digital data. But about basic historical methods, there is little disagreement, only confident consensus. The work on historical method that in recent years has attracted the most attention – Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto – asserted in passing that historians possess a tool-box of "sophisticated" and reliable techniques. Of the roughly 50 reviews of the manifesto
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Missing Pieces
By Ken Cathers
Review by Bob Lane on Tue, Sep 3rd 2019. | Have you ever been working on a puzzle and after hours of fitting pieces together you discover that there are a few missing pieces that make it impossible to complete the puzzle? Ever considered that a human life is like a puzzle?
Who hasn’t?
When you are feeling incomplete or troubled by loss or a missing connection it is a normal feeling to consider that something is missing. Some missing piece that makes it difficult to go on, to be at peace with the world.
The poems in this collection come from a place like that. In poem after poem the words construct and revel in the power of lan
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The Truth About Animals
Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife
By Lucy Cooke
Review by Roy Sugarman, PhD on Tue, Sep 3rd 2019. |  | Lucy is a zoologist with a subtle and wicked sense of humor which comes out constantly across the chapters of this entertaining book. She does set out however with a serious attempt to educate us to the amazing facts that will in some cases challenge our long-held views about animals, such as vultures and hyenas. As someone from Africa originally who knows a lot about these animals in particular, I can tell you I knew a lot more than you are likely to, and NOTHING compared to Lucy and her collaborators.
This is the kind of book that makes you want to dominate the dinner conversation and start
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The Oxford Illustrated History of the World
By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Editor)
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Aug 20th 2019. | I was 12 years old when I last took a history class. I was far more interested in science, mathematics and literature; and languages might be useful. I didn't see much point in studying history and I didn't enjoy it. Eventually I got interested in philosophy, and I ended up teaching philosophy for the last 30 or more years. But in a curious turn of events, I have also been teaching a course in ancient western culture for the last few years. I've picked up enough knowledge in the intervening decades to be able to fill the time, and I've come to realize that in order to explain cultures that are
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Red Meat Republic
A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America
By Joshua Specht
Review by Bob Fischer on Tue, Aug 20th 2019. |  | Red Meat Republic is a wonderfully thorough history of the rise of industrial beef production. According to one standard narrative, it was almost inevitable that the industry took the shape it did: as people moved to urban centers, there were fewer people left in rural areas to raise and slaughter cattle, and as refrigeration technology improved, it became easier to centralize aspects of production and then distribute meat across the country. The rise of big beef, on this view, was a bit like the rise of the factory line in any other industry: the method was so efficient, and fit so well
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The Scientific Attitude
Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience
By Lee McIntyre
Review by Maura Pilotti, Ph.D. on Tue, Aug 6th 2019. | Imagine that you are an archeologist who has stumbled upon a strangely shaped artifact on the ground while surveying an area for potential excavation. You pick it up, and, with growing curiosity and perhaps even excitement, you take it to your lab. There, you use a magnifying glass or some other probing tool to methodically examine it. You also rely on your knowledge of the extant literature to understand its nature, albeit the available information does not help you much since different views exist of its likely properties. In the end, you generate your interpretation after having considered
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