Category Archives: Book Review – Nonfiction

‘Beyond: Our Future in Space,’ by Chris Impey

This is a new book about the potential for space colonization.

Its concluding section presents a scattered but sweeping vision for our future in space, and offers more plausible ideas than can be found in whole shelves of futuristic science fiction. Want to construct a lunar base, or mine asteroids for precious resources? Are you looking for alien life in our solar system, or habitable planets around other stars? Impey covers all this and much, much more in a brilliantly brisk series of chapters intended to show how we might someday become not only an interplanetary species but also an interstellar one.

Such a leap would be far more epochal than that of the Apollo moon landings, Impey notes. If Earth were the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the marble-size moon would be only a yard away — and the nearest neighboring star system would be 30,000 miles distant. Though that distance may now seem insurmountable, Impey implores us to consider the possibility of crossing it, even if only to grasp how far we have come since our ancestors spread out of Africa, and how far we still must go in securing a legacy for our distant descendants.

Someday, the sun and Earth will perish, but humanity may have the choice to be “more than a footnote in the history of the Milky Way.” Contemplating this future “and the possibility that we might not exist at all, is as haunting as deep space,” Impey writes.

The book review makes some references to H.G. Wells’ 1902 essay series Anticipations, which I might get around to reading some day.

Nation on the Take

In Nation on the Take, Wendell Potter and Nick Peniman talk about the extent to which the U.S. political system has been hijacked to serve the interests of big business.

On campaign finance:

It is the knowledge that an elected official has of who is writing the check, who’s going to be there if and when this person decides to run for reelection, that they can expect another campaign check if they have demonstrated that they are voting the way the donor wants…One of the things I used to do in my job in the insurance industry was administer the political action committee and there’s a lot of thought that goes into who you write checks to, and you want to make sure that you’re writing checks to people who can be persuaded to see things from your perspective and vote for the things that you want them to or vote against things you are not supporting when the time comes.

On the finance industry:

Their contributions have been extensive and continue to be so and certainly the legislation that was finally approved by Congress, the Dodd-Frank Act, and other pieces of legislation that have been proposed to regulate the financial industry were written to a large extent by the lobbyists for financial institutions. And we point out in the book how the interest of the banks and mortgage companies were served first, and the challenges and the difficulties that a lot of average homeowners are having even yet today to keep their homes out of foreclosure… I remember watching Bill Moyers’ show a number of years ago when he had Gretchen Morgenson on, the chief financial reporter for The New York Times, and when she was asked whether or not Dodd-Frank had tackled the big stuff, she said, “No, absolutely not. It hasn’t and we could likely have another financial crisis as a result.” And when asked why, she said, “Because the banks have hundreds of lobbyists in Washington and the American people have none.”

On the pharmaceutical industry:

Despite the promises that Barack Obama had made when he was running for president that at the very least Medicare should have the ability to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries — and he also campaigned on making it lawful for Americans to reimport medications from Canada where drugs are a lot cheaper — despite those campaign promises, President Obama gave both of those up under intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to be able to get something passed…Yes, few people realize that even though the pharmaceutical industry talks a great deal about how much they spend on research and development, the companies spend far more on sales and marketing than research. In fact, most of the research is done at taxpayers’ expense by governmental or quasigovernmental entities like the National Institutes of Health and universities that get funding from the government. So much of the research is done at the taxpayers’ expense, and rightfully so. But the companies themselves spend relatively little on research. They take the research typically and invest in the development of medications but most of the prescription medications are developed at publicly funded institutions. And in a sense we pay twice as a consequence. We pay for the research as taxpayers and of course we pay dearly whenever we need the medication.

On the food industry:

We want our kids to eat healthy, period. That should just be a no-brainer, a fait accompli in a good society. But instead, because of the power of money in politics, it becomes hyperpoliticized, a massive battle with all kinds of very powerful people who make a lot of money trying to manipulate the food items that show up on our kids’ plates at their school cafeteria.

Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon has expanded his argument that innovation and growth are over into a book. Here’s the description from Princeton University Press.

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from forty-five to seventy-two years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end?

Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can’t be repeated. He contends that the nation’s productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents’ standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us.

A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

Here’s an interview with Gordon where he talks about the book.

teaching creativity

Here are some ideas on teaching kids to be creative. The main idea seems to be to focus on values rather than rules. The article talks about risk taking, but the way I would put this is, encourage them to think about the “why” of good behavior and let them figure out the “what” for themselves. I’m not sure I see the risk in that, other than the risk of not going with the crowd.

There are a few paragraphs on brainstorming research.

…there a few things that happen that make brainstorming groups less than the sum of their parts.

One is called production blocking, and it’s the basic idea that we can’t all talk at once. And as a result, some ideas and some students just don’t get heard. Two, there’s ego threat, where kids are nervous about looking stupid or foolish, so they hold back on their most original ideas. And then, three is conformity. One or two ideas get raised that are popular. Everyone wants to jump on the majority bandwagon, as opposed to bringing in some radical, different ways of thinking.

You put kids in separate rooms, what you get is all of the ideas on the table, and then you can bring the group together for what the group does best, which is the wisdom of crowds. The evaluating. The idea selecting. The figuring out which of these ideas really has potential to be, not only novel, but also useful.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm

I’d like to share a passage from The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell. This is a clever book, because it is basically a book on the history of technology. That could be a dry and boring book that appeals only to a few history nerds, obviously, but what Mr. Dartnell has done is put a clever spin on that and write the book as though it were giving us instructions on how to “reboot” civilization after some disaster like a plague or catastrophic war. This is about two alternative designs for refrigeration.

If history is just one damn thing after another, then the history of technology is just one damn invention after another: a succession of gadgets each beating off inferior rivals. Or is it? Reality is rarely that simple, and we must remember that the history of technology is written by the victors: successful innovations give the illusion of a linear sequence of stepping stones, while the losers fade into obscurity and are forgotten. But what determines the success of an invention is not always necessarily superiority of function.

In our history both compressor and absorption designs for refrigeration were being developed around the same time, but it is the compressor variety that achieved commercial success and now dominates. This is largely due to encouragement by nascent electricity companies keen to ensure growth in demand for their product. Thus the widespread absence of absorber refrigerators today (except for gas-fueled designs for recreation vehicles, where the ability to run without an electrical supply is paramount), is not due to any intrinsic inferiority of the design itself , but far more due to contingencies of social or economic factors. The only products that become available are those the manufacturer believes can be sold at the highest profit margin, and much of that depends on the infrastructure that already happens to be in place. So the reason that the fridge in your kitchen hums – uses an electric compressor rather than a silent absorption design – has less to do with the technological superiority of that mechanism than with the quirks of the socioeconomic environment in the early 1900s, when the solution became “locked in.” A recovering post-apocalyptic society may well take a different trajectory in its development.

more on Alice Goffman

Recently I was talking about how much I enjoyed On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. I knew there was some controversy over the book, but I didn’t realize how much. I actually assumed she was a journalist, but it turns out she is a sociologist and some sociologists think they are not supposed to write books like that. (Later though, the article says that journalists have criticized her and sociologists have defended her, so I am a little confused there.) I don’t think I know any sociologists, or a lot about them. Once I knew an anthropologist, and I asked him how he was different from a sociologist, but he just laughed and never answered my question. The problem, some say, is that she got too close to her subjects, was too quick to repeat everything they told her, and reinforced stereotypes. On the last, I think that is completely false. If anything, she does a lot to humanize and find redeeming qualities in people who do some risky and violent things. As for the way she got personally involved with her subjects, that is what makes the story so engaging. I think ultimately it is a story told from a certain point of view, and you have to keep that point of view in mind almost as though you were reading a novel. Whether that is good academic sociology or not I wouldn’t know, but I enjoyed the book.

By the way, Alice Goffman did a TED talk which is more or less a summary of the book.

Bill Gates’s Blog

New York Times has an interesting post on Bill Gates’s blog. He claims to read 50 books a year. That’s…let me get my calculator…about a book a week. And then he blogs about them.

this year I enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s “The Magic of Reality,” which explains various scientific ideas and is aimed at teenagers. Although I already understood all the concepts, Dawkins helped me think about the topics in new ways. If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it…

Some, like Randall Munroe’s “Thing Explainer,” are written exactly for that reason. He uses diagrams paired with the most common 1,000 words in the English language to explain complicated ideas…

I like highlighting the work of Vaclav Smil. He has written more than 30 books, and I have read them all. He takes on huge topics like energy or transportation and gives them a thorough examination.

 

a dream of spring, or plant geeks, seeds and where to find them

I’m enjoying this book by Eric Toensmeier, part of the new (at least to me) generation of American permaculture enthusiasts.

I might not enjoy it as much if I hadn’t already read Edible Forest Gardens, but this book is in part a narrative of how that book came about. These are the kinds of things gardeners read in January (at least, until George R.R. Martin gets around to publishing A Dream of Spring…)

I like this paragraph about being inspired by native peoples’ management of wild landscapes:

As a budding ecologist in the 1970s and 1980s, I learned that the best we can possibly do as environmentalists is to minimize our impact on nature. The ideal footprint would be no footprint at all. That doesn’t really give us a lot of room to breathe, and with that as a model, it’s easy to see why the environmental movement has not won wider acceptance. The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive – even necessary – for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should not be to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play.

Urban forestry is a good place to start with this vision, and there is some energy behind that (although also a fair amount of negativity and cynicism opposing it). Once we get the trees we want, we can decide that it is okay for a city to have a shrub layer and an herbaceous layer too, and we can work on those. There is also a fair amount of energy and funding behind water management in cities. Once we have the soil and the plants, it seems fairly obvious to bring the water to them. Again there is some cynicism and negativity out there, and a divide between energetic but sometimes scientifically challenged hippies, and the oh-so-practical but oh-so-cynical engineers, who actually could make all this work if they put their minds to it.

One last thing on this book – it has an appendix which lists some sources of seeds and plants I wasn’t familiar with. This is an area where Google lets us down, because these companies sell all sorts of interesting things that I have been looking for, and the typical search algorithms have not been getting me there.

  • Oikos Tree Crops – focuses on native nut and fruit trees, also has some hard-to-find perennials like several varieties of Sunchoke tubers
  • Kitazawa Seed Company – focuses on seeds of Asian vegetables – lots of Thai chilies, basils and eggplant varieties here! I’m also interested in “Malabar Spinach”, which sounds like it could provide me salads all summer with minimal effort, as long as I eat it fast enough so it doesn’t eat my house. (I’m also interested in hardy Kiwis and hops, but these woody vines are a little scarier because if you let them go, you might need a chain saw to remove them.)
  • Evergreen Seeds – another source of Asian vegetable seeds
  • Edible Landscaping – these guys will ship some hard-to-find fruit tree species, like Asian persimmons and pears
  • Fedco Seeds – all kinds of vegetables and fruits, seeds and plants
  • Food Forest Farm – Toensmeier’s site, with a limited selection of very interesting plants
  • Fungi Perfecti – what it sounds like, mushrooms
  • High Mowing Organic Seeds – another general purpose seed company
  • Logee’s – obscure tropical plants, looks great for the houseplant and patio gardener, not so focused on edibles
  • One Green World – lots of fruits, nuts, and berries, focus on the Pacific Northwest
  • Raintree Nursery – more fruit and nut trees
  • Richters – lots of vegetable and herb seeds

on the run

This is by far the most interesting book I have read in a while. It’s interesting in a disturbing way – it’s hard to put down, and hard to stop thinking about after you put it down. I was already familiar with many of the facts, but what makes the book so engaging is how the author mixes the facts with narrative about real people, all from a first person perspective.

I got a much better sense from this of how young men can get entangled with the law in my own city. For the individuals in the book It started early – some got involved in the drug trade because their parents weren’t providing (fathers were absent in many cases, mothers were often hard working but sometimes affected by drug addiction or other problems) and/or because other jobs were hard to come by. Sometimes they were just with older kids who were involved in crimes, and they got charged as accessories. The first charge might be something like drug possession, driving without a license, receiving stolen property, or assault stemming from a playground fight. They were given a fine and put on probation. That made it even harder to get a job. If they fell behind on paying the fine, they could be arrested on some other minor charge, and this time they went to jail. If they had any kind of warrant, were on probation or parole, now they had an incentive to avoid the authorities at all costs. This could mean not getting a formal job, not going to hospitals, not applying for a drivers license or other government identification, not having housing or any assets in their own names. And of course, avoiding the police at all costs. Once they were avoiding the police at all costs, they could get taken advantage of by other more violent criminals, who knew they would not go to the police. Once they were taken advantage of, they could either do nothing, in which case it would happen again, or they could retaliate, in which case it could escalate and become more and more violent, ending in serious jail time for violent crimes or in death. And the handful of young men whose stories are told in the book are not unusual. Keeping track of all these warrants, fines, prisoners, probations and paroles becomes an enormous industry affecting not just a few violent criminals, but the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods. That leads to fathers who are absent and boys who are not provided for, and the cycle repeats.