No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

Book Review by Soumyaa Das, bookseller

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

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In 2018, I first heard of a girl in Sweden that protested against climate change by missing a day of school. As an environmentalist myself, I finally had some hope that large corporations and businesses might actually listen to this rebellious teenager and start saving our environment for future generations. However, as time progressed, I began to believe that there was no chance that we would be able to revert back to emission-free days. In fact, climate change is the most concerning topic for younger generations (millennials and after). Greta Thunberg excellently portrays my exact apprehensions. The imperative and assertive nature of this book is bound to inspire older and younger generations to fix their carbon footprint, and hopefully salvage what we have destroyed. After all, we only have 1.5 years to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Excerpt: “We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint – the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform – the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to given them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

The American Story – A Book Review by Jim Scott

  

The American Story, Conversations with Master Historians, by David M. Rubenstein

Recognized by award winning documentarian Ken Burns as “one of the best interviewers he knows,” David Rubenstein has written this book “to share with readers some of the wealth of historical knowledge that members of Congress have learned between 2013-2019,” i.e., during the running series of learning at the Library of Congress, Rubenstein’s Congressional Dialogues.  His purpose in creating the 38-session series was to increase for our national legislators their personal level of historical knowledge, that it may inform them better of future challenges and perhaps “help reduce the partisan rancor” in Washington.

Having generated prodigious, personal wealth on Wall Street, becoming a philanthropist of extraordinary dimensions, and long time host on PBS of The David Rubenstein Show (Peer to Peer Conversations), he is a critical thinker: aware of interrelatedness of critical questions, able to ask key questions at the right times, and being an active listener.  Fascinated lifelong with the power of books, he has structured here in his first book a dialogue series with authors who spent typically five to ten years, often longer, researching their published subjects, from the Founding Era to the late 20th century.  Himself educated in history and law, he has been a lifelong book collector, with a visceral understanding of the magnetic power between book-and-author and the radiant potential of that power waiting for release to the critical reader.  

Those who knew him as the master of detail and tireless deputy chief for domestic policy in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, attribute to Rubenstein the rigid rule for guest meetings in the stirringly historical Roosevelt Room: displaying conspicuously those books that may have been written by the specific guests or other books that were assumed logically to have been part of their personal libraries.  Effect: discussions were always more passionate and engaging, with a palpably positive impact on substance and productivity.

Thirty-plus years later, the Congressional Dialogues proceeded under the expert panning for gold by Rubenstein, interacting with the likes of David McCullough on ADAMS, Jon Meacham on JEFFERSON, Jack Warren on WASHINGTON, Ron Chernow on HAMILTON, Taylor Branch on MLK JR, Bob Woodward on NIXON, and many others.  The sessions were well attended and the proceedings effectively edited and reproduced in book-form.  

The book is eminently readable and enlightening.  Most readers will likely agree that Rubenstein’s educational objectives shall have been fulfilled, just as they may agree disappointedly that the “rancor in Washington” continues unabated, though not Rubenstein’s fault.

 

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Books by Neil deGrasse Tyson | Book Review

Books by Neil deGrasse Tyson, W.W. Norton & Company | Book review by Jim Scott

I.  Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, 2017

II. Letters from an Astrophysicist, 2019

Tyson is a contemporary American astronomer, science writer and communicator, perhaps as famous today as was the late-Carl Sagan in the ‘80s.

Sagan, as director of Cornell’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies and collaborator on Viking’s Mars probes, and Pioneer and Voyager probes outside the solar system, and Tyson, as director of Hayden Planetarium and television host of the National Geographic and Fox program series on the universe, have both earned prestigious public awards for their work.  Tyson has openly demurred to the prospect of filling Sagan’s shoes.  So be it.  But do not let his modesty tempt you to ignore these tidy books by Tyson!

His ‘Astrophysics’ is a triumph of clarity and succinctness.  A small book of 200 pages, delivered in 12 chapters, starting provocatively with Ch. 1-The Greatest Story Ever Told”, ending with encouragement to the reader in Ch. 12 to grasp mankind’s place in the cosmos, and eschew the “childish view that the universe revolves around us.”  In between, Tyson delivers accessibility to some of the most mind-numbing concepts that the overwhelming majority of the public would otherwise never seek, never taste, much less digest.  Black holes?  Inter-galactic space?  Neutrinos?

But, then, you might ask, “So what?”  Do we, who do not wish to spend countless hours in labs or behind telescopes, really care what brainiac astronomers-astrophysicists-cosmologists think about?  Maybe, maybe not.  Or, is this another unread, cocktail-table adornment signaling to your house guests how scientifically sophisticated and intellectually curious you are?  Certainly not!

Tyson set out to capture your interest in joining him through his lens as a passionate educator in exploring the universe, and focusing on the nuts and bolts of his craft (astrophysics): that niche in the astronomer’s world that studies the physics and properties of celestial objects, including stars, planets, and galaxies, and how they behave; exploring the nature of space and time, exploring how mankind fits within the universe and how the universe fits within us. 

Tyson may indeed capture you as he has me.  Anticipating that, he has followed with ‘Letters’, a remarkably insightful, compact compilation of decades of his science correspondence (with whomever!), “a vignette of the wisdom (he) has mustered to teach, enlighten, and ultimately commiserate with the curious mind.”  As in art, one might recall having read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, advising a student of poetry to feel-love-seek truth in understanding and engaging the world of art.  “Go into yourself,” beautifully explained by Rilke.

Likewise, in science, brilliantly conveyed in Tyson’s thoughtful, sensitive letters.

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Book Review | Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Book Review by Jim Scott | Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Perhaps your magnum opus is your chicken liver rigatoni with cippolini onions and sage celebrated by your dinner guests.  Then share the table with “chef” Macfarlane, a master in non-fiction nature writing.  His meal, Underland, is a sumptuous dish of claustrophobia broiled slowly with a peripatetic discussion of deep thoughts while journeying into the bowels of the earth.  He and his companion (the reader, in true Aristotelian fashion) will stare into the face “of deep time…the chronology of the underland…the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretches away from the present moment…measured in units that humble the human instant…kept by stone, ice, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates.”

This is no knockoff of James Tabor’s acclaimed, deep cave exploration Blind Descent.  Not as an adventurer seeking record-breaking cave depths, Macfarlane offers this brilliantly researched work to tease the reader’s understanding of the geologic ways of our planet and, along with it, to explore the writer’s take on the human impact against the natural backdrop.  He has done this with the humility of modern physicists (though physics is not his discipline), who recognize that human knowledge is an island in an ocean of ignorance. 

Robert Macfarlane is a passionate environmentalist and Fellow in English at Emmanuel College of Cambridge University, where he is Director of Studies in English and University Reader in Literature and the Environmental Humanities.  He is a winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award (2017).  Underland recounts his cave explorations in England, France, Italy, Finland, Norway, and Greenland, supplemented with exhaustive research into biology, ecology, geology, history, glaciology, and astrophysics.  His prose has the transcendent beauty of that expected from an English professor, combined with mythological darkness of literature from the underworld, human imagination of ancient Greek, Hindu, Aztec, Mayan, Inuit, and Finnish storytellers.

  He is a profound believer in climate change who pulls no punches in delineating man’s degradation of the environment.  He speaks both to serious laypersons and scientists, asking without preaching, “did we do that?” as he tackles the issues of whether we stand today in a man-made world gone nuts, or whether that change is yet one more manifestation of nature’s power and variability of the Holocene (the official epoch of the planet’s current history).  Implicit in Underland is his suspicion that the “gone nuts” theorem is a popular by-product of the yet unproven exit from Holocene to Anthropocene (the age of man), which he defines as the “crowning act of  (man’s) self-mythologization…and technocratic narcissism” instead of recognizing the vast forces of the agency of nature.  Readers may recall Nobel Prize physicist, the late Richard Feynman, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

This is no global warming polemic, nor a denier’s playbook.  This is a learning springboard and a summons to get beyond political convenience, to acquire more actionable knowledge of planet Earth and mankind’s feckless stewardship.  Do not be surprised if this book surpasses Macfarlane’s previously acclaimed The Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Old Ways (2012), and Landmarks (2016), and is acknowledged as his magnum opus.  Take the time to read it.  You won’t be disappointed.

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LGW to MAD

Book Suggestion by Angella Meanix, Bookseller

If you’re looking for a long-drawn-out book with lots of complicated characters and convoluted storylines, don’t read this book.

Turbulence by David Szalay was a great read. It’s a book of short stories that took me on a journey of brief escapades. I love that I didn’t have to get too involved or keep too much track, rather I enjoyed little insights – moments, decisions, and actions. Each character’s life felt brief and transient mirroring the structure of the book itself; boarding flights, Uber rides and layovers. I still felt connected to each of them and wondered how things would turn out though.  I was completely absorbed.

I am a fan of short stories.  Not all ideas have a full 300 pages in them.  This type of book is great for a quick escape.  Curled up on the couch, the stories played out around me.  The Fall season coming on, a cup of tea and a blanket seemed particularly conducive to the delicate relationships in these tidy chapters.

If you find yourself saying “I don’t have time to read”, you might consider this book or any collection of short stories.  Interpreter of Maladies, Fly Already to name a couple.

Excerpt:

GRU to YYZ:  The next morning she had to lose the pilot before she could leave.  He was still in her bed.  Asleep. “Hey”, she said, “Hey, I have to go.”  He opened his eyes (light blue).  There was reddish stubble on his big jaw.  He looked around still not sure where he was.  Outside the last rain of the São Paulo summer was falling audible in occasional plinks and tinks on the window.  “What time is it?”, he finally asked propping himself up.  “Almost eleven”, she told him, “I have to leave in ten minutes”.

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