Introduction
As a reader, I’m drawn to both the intimate and the expansive. Stories, big or small, captivate my mind. This collection of short book reviews captures this tendency, with stories about loss, love, and the human condition that span either a mere lifetime or billions of years.
In God Said, Ha!, comedian Julia Sweeney recounts the story of losing her brother to cancer and surviving her own cancer diagnosis. The warmth and humor she brings to such a heartbreaking series of events is both inspiring and humbling. Journalist Carl Honoré challenges us to slow down in an age of breathtaking speed, taking cues from the slow food movement in Italy to weightlifters slowly savoring each rep at the gym. I take a critical look at the work of popular historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose biological determinism and anti-humanism left a bad taste in my mouth. Contrast that with linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, whose passionate plea for democracy and equality in Requiem for the American Dream is a fierce antidote to the political necrosis happening in the United States. Finally, we turn to Naomi Oreskes’s book, Why Trust Science?, a call for a communitarian, collaborative approach to science as a disciple.
What ties all these disparate reads together is a grappling with the human condition and our relationship to the broader world. Each book left me with a better understanding of the cosmos than I had before, even when I didn’t always like them. Such is the life of a curious reader amongst the billions of stars and stories.
God Said, Ha! by Julia Sweeney (1997)
God Said, Ha! by Julia Sweeney (1997) is a funny, heartwarming, and deeply personal memoir by one of my favorite comedians and actors. Sweeney, best known for her stint as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, adapted this book from her one-woman show of the same name. Her book is a chronicle of one of the most-difficult years of her life, when she and her brother were both diagnosed with cancer. She takes readers through all the highs and lows of that terrible year— from her family moving into her house, the challenges of her brother’s illness, and the shock of learning she had cancer herself.
I love memoirs, especially by writers and artists I find inspiring, and Sweeney’s book doesn’t disappoint. She has a distinct voice filled with equal parts grace and humor. I was especially taken with her ability to see the bright side of life as well as take on the dark side. The death of a loved one, particularly a close relative, can often be an indescribable experience, but Sweeney finds a beautiful and moving way to share her story. If you love memoirs that are funny as well as profound, this is a good one to check out.
In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré (2004)
Do you ever feel like life moves too fast? I know I do; it seems like time is always slipping away from me, time that I could be productive, helpful, or just doing…something. In this age of social media, smart phones, streaming, two-day shipping, and food delivery, our lives are continually accelerating and leaving us unfulfilled, unhappy, and exhausted. But what if there was a different way to live, where time is not something seen as a hindrance but as the substance we move through as we wish?
The answer to this question is found in a book by journalist Carl Honoré written nearly twenty years ago. In Praise of Slowness (2004) anticipated so much of our current predicament and offers many insights into how we can embrace the power of being slow. Honoré started this project after realizing that he couldn’t read bedtime stories longer than a minute to his son. This spurred his interest into looking into all things slow. He interviewed chefs in Italy who started the Slow Food movement, a backlash against the Fast Food of McDonald’s. He ate meals that went for hours at a time, relishing every bite of whole food made from scratch. But the slow lifestyle isn’t limited to food. It’s also taking over fitness (yoga and SuperSlow weight lifting), sex (tantric), work (4 day work weeks and less hours), music (the Tempo Giusto movement), and even schooling (private and homeschooling focused on leisurely, self-directed learning). Honoré concludes that the best way to live life is by embracing balance— go fast when you need to and go slow when you need to— and that a slow movement could become a slow cultural revolution.
Honoré’s breezy and conversational prose made it, ironically, a fast read, even when I tried to slow down. He conducted lots of first-hand interviews with a wide array of people to get a picture of the slow ethos, alongside citing scientific studies on the efficacy of slowness in educational and workplace settings. I found the argument pretty compelling, and I notice that when I slow down, take a deep breath, and embrace balance, I’m happier and feel better. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in challenging the hyperspeed of our age.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari (2017)
The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould often warned his readers about the dangers of “biological determinism,” the belief that everything about humanity, or any animal for that matter, can be summed up solely by their genes, drives, and desires to reproduce. Doing so would not only be unscientific, in that there’s still much we don’t know about the diversity of life, but also scientistic, meaning that all answers to these questions come solely through the hard sciences.
Apparently, historian Yuval Noah Harari has not received this crucial memo, for in his two major works, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), he resorts to the crudest scientism and biological determinism to explain how humanity emerged and what our future may be like.
To begin, I’ll lay out what I think he does a decent job with. He’s a clever writer who can weave a compelling story, as long as you don’t think about it too deeply. He also handles the history of early hominids well, explaining the development of multiple species that fall under said banner and how Homo Sapiens won out. This is where my positives end.
Once we get to the broader outline of human history, starting with the development of agriculture, the books completely fall off the rails. He argues that the agricultural revolution was a mistake, that empires actually brought human progress (so maybe they’re not so bad), and that humans will eventually become cyborgs controlled by algorithms that determine every aspect of their lives. He paints with such a broad brush and a coy objectivity it’s often difficult to grasp whether he believes in this stuff or is saying it because it flatters the silicon valley world he desperately wants approval from.
He’s never critical of the society that the tech bros wish to create, and in some respects, I think he’s cheering them on. The result is a cynical, anti-humanistic view of the world that never leaves the confines of a TED talk conference. They’re both bad history and insulting popular science writing, combined in a toxic mix that leaves the reader exhausted. They’re garbage and should be avoided at all costs.
Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky (2017)
For many, the American Dream has turned into a nightmare. Millions of Americans live with crushing poverty, food insecurity, and lack of adequate health care despite living in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. The levels of inequality today rival and even surpass those of the Gilded Age of the 19th Century, where child labor, squalor, and rampant disease upended the lives of many. How did we get into this mess and what might be our way out?
In Requiem for the American Dream (2017), linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky attempts to answer that question, with startling clarity and incisive analysis. To him, there are 10 principles that underlie the crisis of American society today, from the hollowing out of social services to the media’s complicity in the ravaging of the working class. As societies moved away from collective approaches to social change (protest movements, unions, and mutual aid networks) to an individualized approach under the ruling ideology of neoliberalism, inequality skyrocketed, poverty intensified, and social breakdown grew. We live under a system of neoliberal capitalism that shifts these burdens from democratic institutions to deeply authoritarian ones: multinational corporations, corporate-backed think tanks, and elections that are bankrolled by the rich.
What is striking about this book is not only Chomsky’s moral indictment of our situation but also the enormous well of evidence that proves these trends. Each chapter ends with primary source excerpts cited in the main text, such as the infamous “Powell Memo,” written by lawyer and later Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, which argued that the capitalist class must reassert itself against the broadening of democracy seen during the 1960s and 70s.
The solution Chomsky provides is simple yet difficult: working people must take back their society from the megarich through direct action, organizing, and unionization. Only then will working people have a chance at staving off the inequality, authoritarianism, and climate breakdown caused by the ruling class.
Requiem for the American Dream is an indispensable guide to our times from an indispensable voice.
Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes (2019)
The public’s trust in science has been embattled for many years, with people questioning the efficacy of vaccines and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change, among many other examples. As a result, there’s a growing disconnect between the public’s conception of science and scientists who are working on breakthroughs in various disciplines. What are we to do to change this dynamic?
Part of the answer to that challenging question is in Naomi Orekes illuminating book, Why Trust Science? (2019). A professor in the history of science and planetary sciences at Harvard, Oreskes has been on the front lines of the science wars, penning popular books about the “merchants of doubt” who spread confusion on the dangers of smoking or climate change. In this book, based on a series of lectures she gave at Princeton University, she provides an excellent history of the development of science as a discipline, from the ancients to the cutting-edge, and how science has led to excellent discoveries, like evolution by natural selection and the development of vaccines, as well as horrific flights of fancy, such as eugenics. For Oreskes, science is a collective discipline that constantly improves and changes based on new and better evidence. As a result, the public should be engaged in the collective pursuit of scientific knowledge, and better yet, in scientific thinking.
I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot about some specific failures in the history of science. In particular, Oreskes highlights failures that came from sexist attitudes. It was common scientific wisdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that women couldn’t pursue education because their minds were not equipped for the challenges of scholarship. In our own time, there is a widespread disregard for women who experienced depression while on birth control, which scientists are only beginning to counteract.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history and complexity of science in an accessible but enlightening way, definitely check out this book.
