Book Review - Fauci

Title: Fauci

Author: Michael Specter
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: This is a short biography about Dr. Anthony Fauci who was the 5th Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the 2nd Chief Medical Advisor to the President from 2021 to 2022. Like me, most people probably never heard of Dr. Fauci until the COVID-19 pandemic pushed him into the news. Even now, most people probably still don't know how instrumental he has been in finding cures and treatments for so many diseases like HIV/AIDS, SARS, the Swine flu, MERS, Ebola, and COVID-19. He played a significant role in the early 2000s in creating the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and in driving development of biodefense drugs and vaccines following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Needless to say, Dr. Fauci is an amazing person. 

Description (Audible): Pushkin Industries presents Fauci: the first-ever audio biography of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most prominent voices in the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Written and narrated by New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter, Fauci combines Specter’s unparalleled reporting with exclusive new interviews and archival audio of Dr. Fauci; his wife, Christine Grady, RN, PhD; key colleagues; and peers. Listeners will hear Dr. Fauci speak firsthand about the harassment and death threats he has received as a result of his leadership and about the stress of simultaneously combating the COVID-19 pandemic and an information war waged by his boss, the president of the United States.

Specter has covered Dr. Fauci - and global public health - for more than three decades. In Fauci, Specter traces the doctor’s life from his childhood as a basketball-loving kid in Brooklyn through his leadership during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to today, when the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of viral research are shaping humanity. With its chorus of voices, archival recordings, and original score, Fauci brings the immediacy and energy of the best documentary podcasts to the audiobook format.

Book Review - This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History

Title: This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History
Author: Beverly Gage
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: This book has pretty much everything I love - road trips, travel, history, adventure, science and lots of cool facts and quirky trivia. Beverly Gage is an awesome writer and reading her book is like taking a road trip with your own private tour guide. I admit many of the places she visited included some of the darker moments in America's history. However, I like that she did not try to gloss over that history. I loved this book!   

Description (Audible): Ride along with Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Beverly Gage as she travels the country to see the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans learn—and fight—about our history. From the birth of the nation in Philadelphia to Disneyland and the California dream, This Land Is Your Land offers a guided tour of thirteen places and thirteen key moments that define America’s greatest successes and challenges.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a document that proclaimed the liberty and equality of all human beings, but produced a country that often failed to agree upon—or live up to—those ideals. This Land Is Your Land is for everyone who wants to find that history—to experience it and confront it, to celebrate it and condemn it—in the places where it happened.

Gage shows that Americans can face their past and still love their country. Toss the book in the back seat—or listen on audio with the windows down—and join the journey.

Review: HippoCampusMagazine

Book Review - An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Title: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: This book, much like Howard Zinn's book "A People's History of the United States", attempts to tell the true history of America and specifically how indigenous people were subjugated by white European settlers. I grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and believed in the myth of manifest destiny that was taught in my early school years. Books like this have helped me come to realize that much of what was taught was false or not the complete truth. Reading this book was quite eye-opening and should be required reading for all Americans.  

Description (Audible): Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. Writing from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants, she centers Indigenous voices over the course of four centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them.

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. With a new foreword from Raoul Peck and a new introduction from Dunbar Ortiz, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

Book Review - A Walk in the Park

Title: A Walk in the Park
Author: Kevin Fedarko 
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: This is without a doubt one of the best books I've read, ever. In fact, it's so good, I needed to expand my rating system to six👍 This book is extremely well written and has everything I love; nature, adventure, science, history, suspense and much more. I literally couldn't put it down. Needless to say, I highly recommend it!  

Description (Audible): Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. A few years after quitting his job to pursue an ill-advised dream of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon—a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had actually completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.”

The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon’s truest wilderness, a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril—and where, even today, there is still no trail spanning the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic landmark.

Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets of enchantment, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, that only a handful of humans have ever seen. Members of the canyon’s eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider myths at the very center of our national parks—and exposed them to the threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko’s dying father, who had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape.

And always, there was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgiving, yet suffused with magic, drenched in wonder, and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty. A singular portrait of a sublime place, A Walk in the Park is a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America’s greatest natural treasure.

Book Review - Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves

Title: Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves
Author: Michael J. Benton
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I loved this book. My main reason for reading it was to better understand how life has evolved on Earth. Scientists have determined Earth has experienced at least five major mass extinctions - 

1. End-Ordovician (444 million years ago) - Caused by rapid global cooling and glaciation, which caused sea levels to drop drastically and destroyed shallow marine habitats, followed by quick warming and oxygen loss.
2. Late Devonian (360 million years ago) - Caused by massive ocean anoxia (oxygen depletion) and nutrient overloads (eutrophication), partly linked to early land plants weathering soil and altering atmospheric carbon dioxide
3. End-Permian / "The Great Dying" (250 million years ago) - Triggered by colossal flood basalt volcanic eruptions (the Siberian Traps) that released massive greenhouse gases, causing extreme global warming, ocean acidification, and sulfidic, oxygen-starved oceans. This was the worst event, wiping out 96% of species.
4. End-Triassic (200 million years ago) - Caused by intense volcanic activity tied to the breakup of Pangea, which rapidly pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and drove severe climate change and ocean acidification
5. End-Cretaceous (66 million years ago) - Caused by a huge asteroid impact resulting in the Chicxulub crater in modern-day Mexico, which triggered a prolonged "impact winter," blocking sunlight, halting photosynthesis, and collapsing global food chains. The fifth extinction wiped out about 80 percent of all species, including the dinosaurs.

While extinction events are not common, it appears they are a natural part of how life evolved on Earth. Many scientists believe that Earth is now experiencing a human caused "sixth extinction" event (Holocene or Anthropocene extinction) due to habitat destruction, climate change, pollution and over exploitation of natural resources. On a geologic time scale, humans are just a blip and at the rate we're going, I truly believe humans could end up going extinct just like the billions of other species before us. 

Description (Audible): Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction. This compelling evidence, revealing a series of environmental crises resulting in the near collapse of life on Earth, illuminates our current dilemmas in exquisite detail.

Beginning with the oldest, Professor Michael J. Benton takes us through the "big five" die outs: the Late Ordovician, which set the evolution of the first animals on an entirely new course; the Late Devonian, apparently brought on by global warming; the cataclysmic End-Permian, also known as the Great Dying, which wiped out over 90 percent of all life on Earth; the newly discovered Carnian Pluvial Event; and the End-Cretaceous asteroid. He examines how global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification, erupting volcanoes, and meteorite impact have affected conditions on Earth, and how life survived, adapted, and evolved.

In Extinctions, listeners will learn about revolutionary new tools used to uncover ancient extinction events and processes in forensic detail, and how scientists are improving our understanding of the deep past. New research allows us to link long-ago upheavals to crises in our current age, the Anthropocene, with important consequences for us all.

Review: Paleontolgical Society

Book Review - Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America

Title: Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America 

Author: Heather Cox Richardson
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I've been an avid follower of Heather Cox Richardson on social media for some time and consider her one of my favorite sources on current events. Lately, I have been obsessed with the question, how did America get taken over by the corrupt Trump oligarchy. This book does an excellent job of describing the history and evolution of democracy in America and how someone as corrupt as Trump has been able to take control. My only complaint is that it doesn't give any clear direction on what should be done to save our democracy. I love this book and consider it to be one of my favorite books on American democracy.    

Description (Audible): At a time when the very foundations of American democracy seem under threat, the lessons of the past offer a road map for navigating a moment of political crisis. In Democracy Awakening, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, tracing the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” to the earliest days of the republic. She examines the historical forces that have led to the current political climate, showing how modern conservatism has preyed upon a disaffected population, weaponizing language and promoting false history to consolidate power.
With remarkable clarity and the same accessible voice that brings millions to her newsletter, Letters from an American, Richardson wrangles a chaotic news feed into a story that pivots effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Nixon to the January 6 insurrection. An essential read for anyone concerned about the state of America, Democracy Awakening is more than a history book; it’s a call to action. Richardson reminds us that democracy requires constant vigilance and participation from all of us, showing how we, as a nation, can take the lessons of the past to secure a more just and equitable future.

Review: Daily Drafts and Dialogs

Review: Journal of Public Affairs

Book Review - The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West

Title: The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West
Author: Gary Ferguson

My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I have many fond memories of hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains and Southern California mountains where Ponderosa Pine forests are common. I love their rugged beauty and sweet vanilla smell. This book has been an revelation to me on how human caused climate change, fire, insects, disease, habitat destruction and over harvesting are contributing to the loss of not only Ponderosa Pines but also many other tree species in the United States. According to the author, only a small percent of Ponderosa Pines will remain by mid century. Sadly, considering the current administrations stance on the environment, I would say that's a conservative estimate. 

Description (Audible): With their towering, cinnamon-colored trunks and dusky green canopies, ponderosa pine has long been a charismatic icon of the American West. Yet a quiet unraveling has begun: in the past decade, in a vast area from Santa Fe to the Sierras, more than two hundred million ponderosa have died. While some trees will survive in cooler places, scientists estimate that by mid-century less than five percent of the ponderosa in the American Southwest may remain. As the very character of this vast region shifts, what will be left behind? And how can we come to terms with such profound loss?

In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings listeners on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn—and to celebrate—the forests that nurtured him. In warm and luminous storytelling, Ferguson weaves together the human and natural history of ponderosa, from its march across the West more than 10,000 years ago, to centuries of artists inspired by its dazzling stature and shady passageways. Both wildfire and climate change are constant presences on this journey. Fire is necessary for healthy forests but has turned deadly, while climate change stresses even the hardiest beings of the natural world. Yet the story of ponderosa reminds us that loss can be a gateway to connection—to nature and each other.

Gary Ferguson - The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well

Book Review - The Overstory

Title: The Overstory
Author: Richard Powers
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍
My Review: I liked this book but I found it a little hard to follow the different stories and characters. The book jumps around somewhat haphazardly between stories and requires the reader to pay close attention. I love the way it incorporated trees into each story and the way it shows how intertwined trees are to our existence. If you love trees, like I do, then this book is for you. 

Description (Audible): The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Book Review - A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Title: A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

Author: Andrew H. Knoll
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍

My Review: I like science and I really appreciate books like this that distill information and make science more accessible. This book definately does that. However, it did feel a bit like a firehose of information. My favorite chapter was the last one that discussed the impacts humans are having on the planet. Needless to say, humans are not good stewards and our time on earth may end up being less than a blink of the eye.  

Description (Audible): Odds are, where you’re standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters. Probably most or even all of the above.

The story of our home planet and the organisms spread across its surface is far more spectacular than any Hollywood blockbuster, filled with enough plot twists to rival a bestselling thriller. But only recently have we begun to piece together the whole mystery into a coherent narrative. Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing twenty first-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Book Review - Of Mice and Men

Title: Of Mice and Men
Author: John Steinbeck
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍
My Review: I've been trying to broaden my horizons and read more classic books. I'd heard alot about this book but I never realized it was based on a famous quote from the 1785 Scottish poem "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns 

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley." 

Apparently Burns wrote the poem after accidentally plowing over a mouse's winter burrow. He then lamented that both mice and humans suffer from the same unpredictability of life, and no matter how carefully we prepare, unforeseen circumstances, bad luck, or human nature can ruin those preparations. That, in a nutshell, summarizes his book.  It's a tragic story of two men who have dreams of living a life of ease but unfortunately, life has other plans. I really liked this book and am looking forward to reading more classics.  

Description (Audible): From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, this classic story of an unlikely pair, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression who grasp for their American Dream, profoundly touches readers and audiences alike. George and his simple-minded friend Lenny dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own—a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come to work on a ranch in the fertile Salinas Valley of California, their hopes, like “the best laid schemes o’mice an’ men,” begin to go awry.

Book Review - Animal Farm

Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍

My Review: According to the Internet, Animal Farm "is widely considered a literary classic and one of the most influential political satires of the 20th century".  The book was first published in 1945 and uses a fictional farm setting to critique totalitarianism and the corruption of power. The story starts somewhat innocently with disgruntled farm animals taking over a farm. They then setup a somewhat egalitarian system where each animal is considered equal. Things evolve and through various means of deception, the pigs take over and the farm ends up becoming a dictatorship much like when the humans were in control. I enjoyed this book but found it to be frightenly similar to what is happening in America now.  This book should be required reading for all ages. 

Description (Audible): George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture, quoted so often that we tend to forget who wrote the original words. It is an account of the bold struggle that transforms Mr. Jones' Manor Farm into Animal Farm, a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that bears an insidious familiarity. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is re-established with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.

Book Review - The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Title: The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Author: Timothy Egan
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Timothy Egan is one of my favorite authors. I've read several of his books and they're all great. This book is one of his best. It tells the tragic story of the 1930s dust bowl and the people who lived through it. This book is especially prescient and shows how easy it is for humans to destroy our environment and how we need to be more aware of how our actions affect the planet. I loved this book. 

Description (Audible): In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.

KU Common Books - Timothy Egan speaks at The University of Kansas about his book "The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl"  (1:14:00)

Oklahoma Horizon TV - Timothy Egan discusses his book and the sense of urgency behind capturing these stories before they are lost to history (6:40)

Book Review - This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West

Title: This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West 
Author: Christopher Ketcham
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Outside magazine described this book as “A big, bold book about public lands . . . The Desert Solitaire of our time.” Based on that review and the fact that Desert Solitaire is one of my all time favorite books, I decided to give it a read. I loved this book but I have to say, it's depressing. It's hard to understand why people are so bad at protecting America's public lands. Public lands and the flora, fauna and things that depend on it are finite and once they're gone, they're gone.  

Description (Audible): The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before.

Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how capitalism is killing our great commons. Ketcham begins in Utah, revealing the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, and exposing rampant malfeasance in the federal land management agencies, who have been compromised by the profit-driven livestock and energy interests they are supposed to regulate. He then turns to the broad effects of those corrupt politics on wildlife. He tracks the Department of Interior's failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act--including its stark betrayal of protections for the grizzly bear and the sage grouse--and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry. Along the way, Ketcham talks with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists and other citizens who are fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

This Land is a colorful muckraking journey--part Edward Abbey, part Upton Sinclair--exposing the rot in American politics that is rapidly leading to the sell-out of our national heritage. The book ends with Ketcham's vision of ecological restoration for the American West: freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.

Description (Smithsonian): Christopher Ketcham’s This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West is a powerful and provocative examination of the forces shaping public lands in the American West. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, Ketcham argues that a combination of political influence, corporate interests, government mismanagement, and entrenched myths about the cowboy lifestyle have contributed to the degradation of some of America’s most treasured landscapes. 

Book Review - Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Title: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization

Author: Bill McKibben
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I can't believe I'm saying this but, Bill McKibben and this book give me a SMALL BIT of hope that humanity could potentially mitigate a human-caused climate crisis by replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind and battery power.  I was a little dismayed to learn that China is light-years ahead of the US in the development of solar, wind and battery power and is actually able to daily deploy the equivalent power of one coal-fire power-plant with solar energy. China is also rapidly improving solar, wind and battery technology and becoming the dominant source for alternative energy. By contrast, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite and even going out its way to prevent development of solar, wind and battery technology. Time is running out and humans need to break their addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible. Thankfully there is a solution and, according to this book, that solution is solar, wind and battery power. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about climate change. 

      

Description (Audible): Every eighteen hours, the world puts up a nuclear power plant's–worth of solar panels. At the same time, combustion continues to melt our poles, poison our bodies, and drive our global inequality. And it is no longer necessary: For the first time in 700,000 years, we know how to catch the sun’s rays and convert them into energy.

In Here Comes the Sun, world-renowned author Bill McKibben tells the story of our sudden spike in power from the sun and wind. McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy, which, if it accelerates, gives us a chance not just to limit climate change’s damage, but to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. Getting there means overcoming obstacles like Big Oil, but McKibben sees a chance for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.

Democracy Now -Bill McKibben talks about Renewable Energy, “Sun Day” & the “Last Chance” for Climate

Media Santuary Book Club - Bill McKibben talks about the power of solar energy and his book "Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization"

 

Description (ChatGPT): Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben is an urgent yet surprisingly hopeful look at the climate crisis and the rapid rise of renewable energy. McKibben argues that while global warming can no longer be fully stopped, the explosive growth of solar and wind power offers humanity a real chance to prevent the worst outcomes and build a fairer, more sustainable civilization. Blending science, politics, and personal storytelling, he makes complex climate issues accessible without losing their seriousness.

What sets the book apart is its balance of realism and optimism. McKibben does not minimize the dangers posed by fossil fuels and political resistance, but he also refuses to accept climate doom as inevitable. The result is an inspiring and thought-provoking call to action that encourages readers to see clean energy not just as a technological shift, but as an opportunity to reshape society for the better.

Book Review - Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet

Title: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
Author: Kate Marvel
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I think I may be a wee bit masochistic because I enjoy reading books like this that explain how humans are destroying the planet. It's hard to understand how there are still people who do not believe that humans are the primary cause of climate change. I just wish they would read a book like this that explains in simple, clear language and with scientific evidence how, within just the last 100 years, humans have managed to change the planet so much that even if we were to stop now, it will take thousands of years to reverse the damage.  I loved this book and am grateful for scientists like Kate Marvel who are studying climate change and hopefully waking people up to the reality of climate change before it's too late.  

Kate Marvel interview: Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet - July 2025

Kate Marvel TED Talk - Can clouds buy us more time to solve climate change? - April 2017

Kate Marvel speech: Inner Climate 2025

Kate Marvel & Friends - Feeling Climate Change - June 2025

Description (Audible): A captivating exploration of climate change that uses nine different emotions to better understand the science, history, and future of our evolving planet

Scientist Kate Marvel has seen the world end before, sometimes several times a day. In the computer models she uses to study climate change, it’s easy to simulate rising temperatures, catastrophic outcomes, and bleak futures. But climate change isn’t just happening in those models. It’s happening here, to the only good planet in the universe. It’s happening to us. And she has feelings about that.

Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief—but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.

Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.

Description (ChatGPT): Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel is a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent exploration of climate change that goes beyond science into the realm of human feeling. Marvel organizes the book around nine emotions—like wonder, anger, and hope—using each as a lens to better understand our relationship with the planet.

What makes this book stand out is its balance: it’s grounded in clear scientific insight, yet deeply personal and reflective. Marvel doesn’t preach or overwhelm; instead, she invites readers to sit with the complexity of climate change without losing sight of possibility.

Concise, humane, and quietly powerful, Human Nature is a refreshing take on a heavy subject—one that leaves you not just informed, but more connected to both the Earth and your own emotional response to it.

Book Review - A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

Title: A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

Authors: David Attenborough, Jonnie Hughes
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I loved this book and highly recommend it. It's hard to not be cynical these days. Every day it seems like there's something new to worry about. This book follows David Attenborough's life from his early years to present, providing an amazing perspective on how humans have changed the planet to the point of potentially causing a "sixth extinction", which incidently, could include humans. The book does try to provide ways that humans could prevent our demise which I found to be reassuring. However, considering the book was written prior to Trump's second administration, I'm tending to favor a more cynical view for human survival.  

Description (Audible): In this scientifically informed account of the changes occurring in the world over the last century, award-winning broadcaster and natural historian, David Attenborough shares a lifetime of wisdom and a hopeful vision for the future.See the world. Then make it better.

Description (ChatGPT): This powerful and deeply personal book reads like both a memoir and a warning. Drawing on decades of firsthand observation, Attenborough traces the dramatic decline of Earth’s biodiversity alongside the rise of human impact, making the environmental crisis feel immediate and undeniable. What sets the book apart is its tone: while the middle sections paint a stark picture of climate change, habitat loss, and a possible “sixth mass extinction,” Attenborough never settles into despair. Instead, he offers a clear, science-based vision for restoring the planet—through renewable energy, rewilding, and changes in how we live and consume (SuperSummary)

Concise, accessible, and quietly urgent, A Life on Our Planet is less about guilt and more about responsibility. It leaves readers not just informed, but motivated—reminding us that while the damage is real, so is the possibility of recovery if action is taken now.

Book Review - A World Appears A Journey into Consciousness

Title: A World Appears A Journey into Consciousness
Author: Michael Pollan
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: I am a huge fan of Michael Pollan and have read many of his books.  Michael Pollan is a genius. I enjoyed this book but it was a little more esoteric than his others and it may take me a little more time to absorb. The book discusses conciousness and what that means. Michael speculates that maybe plants and other living things have consciousness but on a different level than humans. He also discusses the possiblity that through AI (Artificial Intellegence), computers could achieve a level of simulated conciousness.  Michael has spent alot time experimenting with psychedelics and how they affect our reality. Through the use of psychedelics, he has experienced a reality that helped him see how plants and other living things have a level of conciousness that's hard for humans to see. I've never experimented with psychedelics and don't really plan on it. So, I probably will never know that reality. I do feel though that all living creatures have some level of conciousness and no matter how good AI becomes, computers will only have a simulation of conciousness.  

Michael Pollan speech: A World Appears: A Journey Into Conciousness

PBS NewsHour: Exploring the power and mystery of consciousness

Michael Pollan interview: A Mindblowing Conversation About Humanity With Michael Pollan

Description (Audible): When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.

Description (ChatGPT): In A World Appears, Michael Pollan takes readers on a wide-ranging exploration of one of humanity’s deepest mysteries: consciousness. Blending neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and personal experience, Pollan investigates how subjective awareness arises and whether it might exist beyond humans—in animals, plants, or even machines. (Publishers Weekly)

Pollan’s strength lies in his curiosity and storytelling. Rather than presenting definitive answers, he interviews scientists, philosophers, and spiritual practitioners while reflecting on meditation and psychedelic experiences that shape his own thinking about the mind. The result is an engaging, accessible journey through competing theories about sentience, emotion, the self, and the limits of scientific explanations. (Library Journal)

The book is less about solving the “hard problem” of consciousness than about expanding the reader’s sense of wonder about it. Thought-provoking and readable, A World Appears invites us to reconsider what it means to be aware—and how precious that awareness might be.

Book Review - Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Title: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
Author: Karen Hao
My Rating: 👍👍👍
My Review: I really wanted to like this book. I'm very concerned about how AI may be used. I realize AI has alot of potential for good but I'm worried about the bad things it may be used for and the environmental consequences. This book does a good job describing the evolution of AI. But, I wish it did a better job discussing the potential good versus bad such as energy requirements, pollution and environmental impacts.   

Description (Audible): From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of resources: the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of empire: only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era. 

Description (ChatGPT): Karen Hao’s Empire of AI delivers a compelling, deeply reported look at OpenAI’s rise and the broader AI industry, casting a critical eye on Silicon Valley’s most talked-about tech story of the decade. Hao weaves together the company’s internal power struggles, shifting mission, and transformative breakthroughs with broader concerns about the human and environmental costs of generative AI — from poorly paid data labelers in the Global South to the massive energy and resource demands of large-scale models.  Gobookmart

What sets this book apart is its willingness to challenge the dominant, celebratory narratives around AI and its charismatic CEO, Sam Altman. Hao portrays OpenAI’s evolution from a nonprofit safety-driven mission to a hybrid commercial powerhouse as emblematic of tech’s new “empire,” complete with internal conflict, ethical murkiness, and outsized influence on society. Bagrounds

Readers praise Hao’s research and storytelling, finding her accounts of key events — including leadership upheavals — both informative and engaging. However, some critics argue the book leans heavily toward skepticism and personal critique, offering less balance on AI’s benefits or technical explanations. Goodreads

Overall, Empire of AI is a powerful and provocative exploration of one of the most consequential technological shifts of our time — ideal for anyone interested not just in AI itself, but in the ethical and political questions shaping its development.

Book Review - A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park

Title: A Place Called Yellowstone: The Epic History of the World’s First National Park

Author: Randall K. Wilson
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: Pending...

Description (Audible): Discover the epic history of the first US national park in this historical adventure for fans of American history, the Wild West, and the hit show. 

It has been called Wonderland, America's Serengeti, the crown jewel of the National Park System, and America's best idea. But how did this faraway landscape evolve into one of the most recognizable places in the world? As the birthplace of the national park system, Yellowstone witnessed the first-ever attempt to protect wildlife, to restore endangered species, and to develop a new industry centered on nature tourism. 

Yellowstone remains a national icon, one of the few entities capable of bridging ideological divides in the United States. Yet the park's history is also filled with episodes of conflict and exclusion, setting precedents for Native American land dispossession, land rights disputes, and prolonged tensions between commercialism and environmental conservation. Yellowstone's legacies are both celebratory and problematic. A Place Called Yellowstone tells the comprehensive story of Yellowstone National Park as the story of the nation itself.

Description (ChatGPT): Randall K. Wilson’s A Place Called Yellowstone is a sweeping, richly told history that brings to life the geological, political, and cultural evolution of America’s first national park. Wilson masterfully weaves together the deep time of Yellowstone’s volcanic origins, the dramatic stories of early explorers and conservationists, and the fraught, ongoing debates around land use, Indigenous rights, and wildlife management. 

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its narrative drive: bureaucratic wrangling, frontier personalities, and the clash between exploitation and preservation become vivid and engaging rather than dry. Wilson doesn’t shy away from the park’s darker legacies, including dispossession of Native American lands and ecological missteps like predator removal—and he shows how these tensions have shaped modern policies and identities. 

Other Reviews - Los Angeles Times 

Book Review - Fight Oligarchy

Title: Fight Oligarchy
Author: Bernie Sanders
My Rating: 👍👍👍👍👍
My Review: This is a short read but well worth it. Bernie Sanders is a national treasure. I just wish more Americans would listen to him. 

Description (Audible): “Oligarchy is a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy individuals control the economic, political, and media life of a nation. It is a system in which ordinary people have very little power to determine the future of their country. If you’re an American, it is the system in which you’re living. That must change. In the wealthiest nation on earth we must build a political movement that creates a government that represents all Americans, not just a handful of billionaires.”—Bernie Sanders

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Senator Bernie Sanders breaks down the unprecedented crises we face today in Trump’s America, as Trump undermines democracy at every turn—and how we can effectively fight back.

From the moment that Sanders began his Fighting Oligarchy tour in the early days of the Trump administration, it was clear that his message resonated with Americans across the political spectrum. Record-breaking crowds numbering in the tens of thousands showed up across the country. Large numbers of Americans, in red states and blue states, were prepared to stand up and fight back. In this book, he shows how we can continue that fight.

In a series of short, pointed chapters, Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous economic and political power. He describes what it means when the very rich get much richer, while the majority of Americans struggle to pay the rent and put food on the table. And he observes how a corrupt campaign finance system allows billionaires in both parties to increasingly control our political system.

Sanders also discusses how, under Trump, we are rapidly moving toward authoritarianism–with a president who is undermining our democracy as he attacks Congress, the courts, the media, and law firms and universities in search of more and more power for himself. With relentless optimism and focused energy, Sanders reminds readers that true power rests with the people—and he presents a path forward to a reinvigorated democracy.

Description (ChatGPT): In Fight Oligarchy, Bernie Sanders delivers a sharp, urgent manifesto aimed at diagnosing and challenging the growing power of the ultra-wealthy in America. He argues that a small number of billionaires now dominate not just the economy, but politics and the media — a true oligarchic drift that threatens democratic governance. 

Sanders supports his claims with data (e.g., wealth inequality, influence on elections), historical context, and policy proposals. He doesn’t just point out the problem — he offers concrete solutions: progressive taxation, stronger unions, campaign finance reform, and more democratic institutions. 

Critically, reviewers note that while Sanders’s tone is familiar — his style is direct, moral, and speech-like — his ideas remain clear, commonsensical, and grounded in a deep belief in collective power. The book is short (around 160 pages), making its call to action both accessible and forceful.

However, some might feel it’s more of a rallying cry than a deeply original intellectual contribution — it leans on Sanders’s long-standing critiques rather than breaking radically new ground.

Bottom Line:
Fight Oligarchy is a compelling, no-nonsense call to mobilize against entrenched economic power. It works best as a primer for activists and anyone concerned about the future of American democracy — especially for people who already resonate with Sanders’s broader political philosophy.