Every year I send out short comments on the books I’ve most enjoyed. Well not always super short. Here is this year’s list:                   

                         

                                                                                               Nonfiction


Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain  by Lisa Feldman Barrett

It’s hard to top the opening paragraph in this short primer about the current scientific understanding of our brains: “Once upon a time, the Earth was ruled by creatures without brains. This is not a political statement, just a biological one.” In fact, Lisa Barrett, eminent neuroscientist and University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University, evidently enjoys slyly sprinkling her account with pertinent political examples affording her plausible deniability. On the human construction of social reality: “We could have a leader who says terrible things on video, and then news outlets could agree that the words were never said. That’s what happens in a totalitarian society. Social reality may be one of our greatest achievements but it’s also a weapon we can wield against each other.” The book may cover complex material, but the author delivers it with a sense of fun and humor.

While Barrett is at the forefront of neuroscience research, her book also demonstrates her ability to translate complex and technical material into clear and concise communications, easily absorbed by the reader. Extensive references and expanded details are available on an associated website.

She dispenses with well-intended fallacies about the brain, substituting instead cogent explanation with minimal jargon. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain reads like a synthesis of the last decade or two of the thinking in brain science. She has performed an invaluable service by distilling this emerging understanding into a set of bite-sized narratives that summarize how neuroscientists think about their subject.

I particularly appreciate her attention to metaphors. People have long put forward their ideas about the brain, often seemingly oblivious to their metaphorical and often misleading consequences. For example, one hears the distorted claim that the left side of the brain is linguistic and logical, while the right is intuitive and creative. That one was especially in vogue when I was a neuroscience student in the late ‘70s. People use phrases like “the storage of memories”, as if the brain handles files like a computer and places them in an ordered location for later retrieval. And no, your brain doesn’t have an ancient reptilian layer dedicated to instinct and survival. To her credit, she devotes time to warning about the lure of simplification, wherein metaphor can substitute for explanation, and alerts the reader to examples of her own use of metaphor, along with her reasons and intentions. 

While this slim volume doesn’t require even more compression here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about one of her central teaching points about the brain. This is no substitute for Barrett’s careful and clear narrative. The brain uses the sensory data it’s receiving to help you survive. It does it’s best job at this essential task not by waiting patiently for clarity about the meaning of the information it’s receiving. One cannot afford to confirm that a charging tiger is in fact about to sink its teeth into your throat. Instead, the brain anticipates, utilizes memories of past similar experiences and brain states, and uses these to make predictions about what is likely to happen next. We are not aware of this process, but the neural conversation about predictions results in one winning prediction and, to quote Barrett “…the winning prediction becomes your action and your sensory experience.” So in an essential sense, your brain is a prediction device which accelerates your responses, efficiently acting to help you survive. In fact, we couldn’t do something as simple as bouncing a ball were it not for our brain’s ability to accurately predict the behavior of bouncing balls and the body’s interaction with them.

I’ve left out most of the actual lessons in favor of offering the flavor of the book. I’d highly recommend Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain for anyone interested in a mini-exposition of current neuroscience thinking. Or for anyone like me who could benefit from an update!




The World of Yesterday  by Stefan Zweig

During his productive years in the decades before and after WWI, the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig enjoyed wide readership in Europe outside Britain. Not that his work was necessarily consecrated by critical acclaim; in fact he praised many writers who regarded him as a second-rate talent. Yet he wrote in a clear and lucid style, expressing himself easily. He was perhaps most appreciated for numerous novellas and his short biographies of distinguished people such as Mary, Queen of Scots, Magellan, and Erasmus. His work has seen something of a revival in recent years, at least partly due to the publication of a new translation of The World of Yesterday and to the success of the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson cites the book as an inspiration for the film.

This is Zweig’s only memoir, and as the title conveys, its subject is the loss of the Europe and in particular the Austria of his youth. He wrote most of it a few steps from my door, a refugee from Hitler in Ossining, NY. Zweig paints an expansive portrait (one that some later termed “The Habsburg Myth”) of life in pre-war Austria. The first chapter “The World of Security” summarizes what had been lost: durability, continuity, safety, prosperity, a place for the flourishing of the arts. He details the educational process and sexual ethos of pre-War Austria. Zweig had been a fully engaged member of Viennese cafe culture of the early part of the century. It is hard not to sense a nostalgic romanticism in Zweig’s account, and yet I think he gets a pass for sentimentality having lived through the monstrosity of WWI, Fascist Europe, and for writing while contemporaneously fleeing the Third Reich.

This reflection is fascinating on several levels. First, Zweig had personal friendships with many of the great artists and thinkers of his day. We hear his deep interchanges with Rilke, Rodin, Freud, James Joyce, Maxim Gorky, Richard Strauss, Toscanini, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Herzl, and Romain Rolland. If you saw the recent Beatles Get Backdocumentary, these conversations read like delicious eavesdropping, akin to listening to Paul and John at lunch, privately talking with a microphone secretly placed in the flowerpot between them. 

Second, while we are familiar with the facts of the European catastrophe from 1914 through the late 1940s, personal accounts enrich one’s understanding of the events and their effect on individuals. In Zweig’s case, we hear the observations of an astute observer, a man who regarded himself as a citizen of the world, if Austrian in particular. He recounts his reaction as he heard about the German mobilization in 1914 while on a beach in Belgium; his despair at the restrictions in communicating with friends and fellow writers living outside the Central Powers even by letter; the proverbial wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread after the war; the first time he heard the name Hitler; his sense of the increasing presence of menacing Brownshirts in Austria; his near relief to hear of the death of “my old mother” in 1938 Vienna, knowing she was now safe from further suffering. He had felt distraught after Nazi rules prevented Jews from sitting on public benches, depriving his weakened mother of her daily walk that required periodic rests. 

Finally, there is the question of his suicide. Zweig mailed the manuscript to his publisher the day before his suicide in February 1942. He was not in hiding, like some who fled the Nazis. He was living north of Rio de Janeiro, in safety, facing East as he contemplated Europe. He was found dead with his wife, double suicides, of a barbiturate overdose. A final testament read “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth.” And yet one need only read The World of Yesterday to appreciate - though perhaps not anticipate - this sentiment and its implications. It permeates the book. His beloved Europe irretrievably broken. His sense of beggardom as a man without a country. The enormity of the losses. He conveys a conversation with Gorky, who asserted that no one in exile had yet produced worthy art. And yet, it is only fair to wonder why Zweig was unprepared to look to the future. To continue his work, as so many other artists and thinkers did. To mention only a few: Einstein, Chagall, Mondrian, Schönberg, Hannah Arendt, Levi-Strauss, Thomas Mann. And the hordes who started life again after surviving the concentration camps. While it permeates the book, it’s also in the title. The World of Yesterday. By 1942, and probably long before, Zweig was a man of the past. His love, his passion, his sense of belonging, his core identity were in the Europe destroyed. He saw no more for himself but to bear the unbearable weight of what was irretrievably gone. He saw no future. But he left a remarkable memoir, a testament to what he loved and lost. 






The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life  by David Quammen


The title speaks immediately to David Quammen’s ambitions. This is no ordinary work of science journalism: you are embarking on a literary adventure which will make you rethink nothing less than Life on Earth. Is this volume an account of a foundational alteration in biological understanding, or an illuminating portrayal of a rich body of contemporary scientific history,? In an interview, Quammen seems to distance himself from the fervor of its subtitle, offering two alternative elevator pitches for this book. It’s either a history of molecular phylogenetics, or the story of the greatest biologist of the 20th century who you’ve never heard of. Clearly one approach sells more books. The story of self-perceived outsider biologist Carl Woese - and frankly how much of an outsider are you if, while perhaps belatedly, you are elected to the National Academy of Sciences? - becomes the scaffolding for the story of major recent developments in our understanding of the nature of life and the causal mechanisms behind evolutionary change.

The author took almost 400 pages to tell this story and to argue his thesis. So please bear with the length of this woefully short version: There were once a few bedrock principles in evolutionary biology, beginning with the work of Darwin, who published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and elaborated by many others. Unique individuals make up membership in species. Species segregate and isolate from other species, and are the entities that collectively make up ever larger units of biological classification. Groups of species may be members of the same genus, groups of genera of the class, and so on to ever larger entities. The order, the phylum, and ultimately the largest groups, Kingdoms or Domains, have historical and structural relationships that allow us to arrange them into an organizing principle of biology: The branching tree of life.

Quammen’s goal is to show how three discoveries invalidate these categorical concepts that once were core to biology. The field of molecular biology, which studies the chemical basis of cellular activity, is central to this story. That work was accelerated by Watson and Crick’s explosive 1953 publication of the structure of DNA. The discovery of DNA and RNA, and the proteins they code for, have allowed us to examine similarities and differences in life forms. We can now compare living organisms not based primarily on their physical appearances or subjectively perceived affinities, but instead based on a tracing of genetic lineages. These genetic similarities and differences offer powerful new information about how life forms are actually related to each other. Life contains its history and its relationships to other organisms within its genetic code. Except that’s not entirely true, but let’s skip over that for now.

First, there’s the story of Carl Woese, who in the late 1970s made a startling discovery, now universally accepted within biology. In the interest of simplification, since antiquity two kinds of life were recognized, plants and animals. In the seventeenth century, Leeuwenhoek identified microscopic life, and eventually the recognition came that there was a fundamental divide between two kinds of microscopic life: those made up of cells like those in our bodies, the cells that form complex life, called eukaryotes, among whose traits is a nucleus with genetic material located within. And a second group, prokaryotes - we might call them bacteria at this point - whose structures are simpler. What Woese did was to study the RNA in the protein-making apparatus in all cells, called ribosomes, and he made an extraordinary discovery. There were two groups of simple bacteria-like organisms which were genetically dramatically different, and had been genetically and historically separate for billions of years. Now what had looked like one group, bacteria, were two: bacteria and a new group called Archaea. To Woese, the most fundamental tree of life needed to be redrawn to three “domains” of life: bacteria, archaea — and eukaryotes. All complex life is composed of the last group. Others draw trees that look a little different, but still take account of Woese’s discovery. Remarkable! And a blow to the traditional trees of life that had previously been drawn.

About a decade earlier, Lynn Margulis had published groundbreaking work, controversial at the time, that also shook the field. She proposed, in what is now accepted biology, that at some point in the distant past (as in billions of years ago), simple cells incorporated other simple cells - in a process called endosymbiosis - allowing the development of larger and more complex cells. These larger cells were eukaryotes, and their energy-producing organelles, mitochondria, were originally bacteria. The eukaryotic cell is thus seen as a chimera. Further research yielded an unexpected reality: At some point roughly two billion years ago, an archaean host incorporated a mitochondrion-like bacterium, and the result was the eukaryotic cell. This cell had access to thousands of times the energy of simple cellular life, and led to the cells of which all complex multicellular life on Earth is composed. The branching tree of life might not be so vertical after all, if rather than diverging (as tree branches do) through slow mutation and genetic isolation, but rather, at least on one occasion, fundamental branches crossed over and united. Perhaps the history of life is more like a web than a tree?

The recognition of lateral gene transfer (LGT) is for Quammen the final blow to the tree of life metaphor. Most common in bacteria, sometimes whole sections of genetic material are donated by one species to another. This is a primary mechanism of antibiotic resistance. One resistant strain can donate the genes for that resistance to an entirely different species, making that type of bacterial group resistant too. It turns out that wholesale donation of DNA between bacterial groups is common. Species don’t diverge only through the slow accumulation of mutations over time. That’s the branching tree model. They can share their beneficial mutations, allowing — at least in bacteria — a much faster mechanism for genetic and evolutionary change.

So far so good. This book is a deep exploration of our understanding of biology and evolution. It’s well worth reading. Quammen is an accomplished prose stylist. I suspect you now know enough to determine whether you want to broaden your understanding of current biological thinking with this account. But a bit of my own perspective, if you’ll bear with me a little longer.

I remember learning about LGT, in high school biology in 1974 as a discovery decades old. Granted, we know more now. The insight that Archaea is a separate line, and that endosymbiosis led to the eukaryotic cell, is approaching almost half a century. So while not entirely new, these truths do add up to something big. When concepts as solid and categorical as species and vertical evolution, or the structure of the tree of life, become conditional and not absolutes after all, that is no small matter. Our ideas about biology and biological change are modified.

Will this overturn biological thought? No. Mainstream biologists are finding trees of life useful and important to this day. New trees, more informed trees, trees based on molecular and genetic data are still introduced, developed, and modified frequently in the molecular phylogenetic literature. Are the discoveries Quammen articulately reports revolutionary? Arguable. Revolution is a strong word. One could argue that our understanding of the principles underlying life and evolution have expanded and become more sophisticated in fascinating ways.

Biologists are rightly concerned about creationists. Any demotion or flaw in Darwin is fuel for manipulation and misuse. Of course it is absurd that the expectable errors of Darwin a century and a half ago could possibly invalidate the scientific support for evolution firmly established since his time. His theories originated in an entirely different era of science. The ideologically motivated twist the inevitable shifting of paradigms in science for their own ends. But biologists do need to express their ideas clearly and articulately, to minimize the chances of misuse or misunderstanding.

Like Newton before him, Darwin advanced some of the greatest insights in the history of science. Where Newton fell short, supplanted or corrected by Einstein and the truly revolutionary discoveries of twentieth century physics, he could not have known or done better. This does not diminish his genius. If anything, we marvel at his accomplishments. And what of Darwin and the twentieth century biology he helped to father? Biology has provided recent correctives. Old absolutes like vertical evolution and the ever-diverging tree of life are replaced; new mechanisms for genetic change are uncovered; new images like webs - not only trees - are useful. Are these developments revolutionary, like those that superseded Newton’s work, or are they evolutionary, expanding the scope of biological understanding? I offer a beer to all comers and a lively exchange of views!
 
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11  by Garrett M. Graff


If journalism is the first rough draft of history, this effort twenty years after straddles the two. The focus is on the what and not the why, and any interpretation or context is the immediate and preliminary, as expressed at the time. Two decades begins to sound like history, but this book is mostly about the event itself as it unfolded and the events on the ground as they were lived. Passing the 20th anniversary of America’s worst terrorist attack, a whole generation has grown up unaware of the details of that grim day. And for those who lived through it, it remains an unforgettable “where were you then” moment in lives which for most contain only a handful of such moments.

Garrett Graff has amassed a monumental collection of first person accounts, descriptions, and memories, as well as contemporaneous news reporting and commentary to tell the story of 9/11. We revisit that day through those who escaped the World Trade Center or survived the Pentagon attack, those on the phone with loved ones on the fourth plane, first responders, many of whom lost family and coworkers, and political and news figures. These accounts are organized into readable chapters, each telling a story chronologically beginning in the the early morning, and topically, as the day unfolded in multiple places and in multiple ways. The political reactions and responses are part of the narrative. Witness the title, which refers to the grounded US air fleet, and the one plane still airborne: that of President George W. Bush on his way back to Washington.

Do you want to read a comprehensive narrative of the 9/11attacks? I can only say that I did want to be reminded. I will never forget both the confusion and horror for me personally that day, and the aftermath in NYC in the days following, as a feeling of shared trauma and intimate connection united everyone for a brief moment. It was a singular experience, and I recall a feeling of privilege to bear witness personally to the tragedy through the experience of New Yorkers. The details of that day are not pretty, although many are heroic. And forgetting isn’t my preferred style. I prefer remembering, acknowledging, being aware, and accepting where possible. An important piece of my life is more strongly anchored and won’t blow away.





                                                                                                        Fiction


The Ministry for the Future  by Kim Stanley Robinson

It is no secret to long-time readers of this annual that I hold Kim Stanley Robinson in high regard, and in more years than not include one of his books. Robinson is prolific, having written 21 novels and numerous essays and short stories. His works are varied in style, some with nontraditional narrative structures. All of them are meticulously researched with his characteristic scientific fluency. Many are what might be termed “near future science fiction”, focusing on his concerns about the direction of the challenges humans face. Among these, a subset could be called “climate fiction”. They include his mid-2000s Science in the Capital trilogy, starting with Forty Signs of Rain, set at the intersection of climate and policy in Washington. He followed these a decade later with New York 2140, a story of resilience in a partially submerged Manhattan - Venice-like - that owes much to the spirit of Dos Passos.

So KSR has been thinking deeply about climate for a long time. The Ministry for the Future feels like the culmination of this body of work. But it's the culmination from a particular point of view. A fictional Ministry for the Future works out of Zurich, established by the Paris Climate Accords. Its responsibility is to advocate for future generations not yet present to advocate for themselves. As such, this is KSR’s vision of climate mitigation, and he tosses the kitchen sink at the problem. Not for the purpose of promiscuously unburdening himself from every idea in his head, but with the idea that if we are to survive the coming catastrophe, every possible approach is worth considering and may play a role in the urgent imperative work ahead.

It’s hard not to admire the research that went into this novel, and to consider that he’s on to something. The scope is vast, from pumping glacier melt and refreezing it in Antarctica, to establishing habitat corridors for animal conservation, establishing a globally-accepted carbon coin that financially incentivizes keeping carbon in the ground, to contending with an increasing violence of ecoterrorism.

Should you read this for its novelistic charm? Not necessarily. But he’s so remarkably thorough in his imagining of how we might approach climate change, that it seems that everyone might profitably read this, if only not to be so demoralized. It's a tonic for the paralyzed. All is not yet lost. 

Robinson is an optimist. That’s a helpful place from which to start.



Wild Seed  by Octavia Butler

I am a sucker for immortality novels. The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson is a favorite, This Immortal by Roger Zelazny is something of a classic of the genre. And depending on where you want to draw the line, you could include the uploadable consciousness genre of which perhaps Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon is a prototype. If you are a lumper rather than a splitter you could well start all the way back at The Epic of Gilgamesh. Death tends to rankle  😉 , and so it’s really no surprise that people tell stories that circumvent that eventuality.

Given her reputation as a master of science fiction and arguably the most influential African American science fiction writer — Samuel Delany and N. K. Jemisin notwithstanding —  it’s perhaps surprising that I hadn’t read Octavia Butler earlier. Notably, she was honored recently when the landing site of the Mars rover Perseverence was named for her. Wild Seed was the first of five Butler novels I’ve now enjoyed. I learned only later that Wild Seed was the fourth in a series known as the Patternist series, dealing with issues of telepathy, human engineering and the human future. This novel, while written later, is the earliest chronologically in the series, establishing its origins.

Butler’s story loops around two central characters. Doro was born thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, and perpetuates himself by abandoning his body and taking over a new one, killing the previous occupant in the process with little remorse. He is driven to control the breeding of people with special powers, organizing villages in early America dedicated to this mission. Anyanwu is a mere centuries old, having been born in a village somewhere roughly within modern Nigeria. She has exquisite control over her body, able to repair any damage on a cellular level, and to use her powers to heal the sick. She has the ability to alter herself into other guises, shapes, people, and notably can assume the body and behavior of animals. When Doro encounters Anyanwu, he wants her for his breeding program. But for the first time he faces his own limits, and the possibility that another person has powers he cannot control. Anyanwu loves Doro but not his killing, and tries to negotiate a delicate path between her own potential death at Doro’s hands and protecting those at risk from his brutality.

Wild Seed embodies many themes apart from the immortality that initially drew me in: patriarchy, gender and race relations, eugenics and the improvement of the human species. But what propels the novel is Butler’s confident storytelling. She is in firm charge of her work at all times: language, pacing, character and plot all handled with aplomb. The reader basks in the warm security of a trusted writer. I love the experience of knowing I am in good hands, and that the author will not let me down.


Queen’s Gambit  by Walter Tevis

This one was a reread, and yes, inspired by the terrific Netflix series. It was a pleasure in the ‘80s, and again three plus decades later. Summary: young girl in orphanage overcomes adversity in rising to international chess supremacy. 

Why is the orphan trope so popular in literature? Dickens, Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter are just a few which come easily to mind. The terror of being alone in the world, unprotected from danger, in the care of neglectful or malevolent custodians….emphatically apply in the case of Beth Harmon. The 8 year old is sent to an orphanage after the death of her mother. She and the other residents are chemically sedated at night, a practice unfortunately utilized in mid-20th century American orphanages. Her deliverance begins in the basement, as she follows the janitor playing out chess games alone. We watch a prodigy emerge.

This book is distinctly about three interweaving themes: surviving a childhood of neglect, a young woman in a world of male power, and more than anything, that elusive entity we call genius. We are enchanted by the brilliance of a young girl, whose gifts are hers uniquely, uncultivated by instruction, sui generis. The contrast between her outer deprivation and her inner creativity make it hard to avert one’s eyes. It’s a powerful story of sweet redemption and ultimately ascendency. Drug addiction, loneliness, and confusion notwithstanding.

Full disclosure: I am a fan of chess. As a child I followed life in chess during the Cold War, saw the culmination of  Bobby Fischer’s career in defeating Boris Spassky, participated in tournaments in the 1970s. Tevis captures much of the spirit of tournament chess during that fraught era, and the successful portrayal of that atmosphere contributes to the realism and satisfaction of the book.

Queen’s Gambit is something of a page turner. It’s hard to put down. You are heavily rooting for the protagonist. Deliciously entertaining.


Project Hail Mary  by Andy Weir

Please bear with me because this book is not entirely the execrable midden it may seem - there’s a reason it made this list - but I can’t talk about it without first the accumulated rant. I don’t mean to offend by suggesting that if Weir is not exactly the Dan Brown of SF, he may well be the Clive Cussler or the Robert Ludlum. Which is to say that he is a writer with redeeming ideas but lacking the craft to express them skillfully. He is either uninterested in character, or unable to invent a protagonist other than the one he already created for his breakout The Martian. And to the chagrin of fans who saw potential in that first novel, he has again written a story of a lone individual, stranded apart from all other humans, attempting to save the day using only his sheer problem solving skills and the memory of high school physics. (Do we really need another iteration of Mr Fossil’s 11th grade semester one physics formulas, like distance equals half gravity times the square of time?) In fact, if there is one thing that Weir’s books seem to be “about”, it’s setting up technical problems he has transparently already solved, and showing you how smart he is by offering the solution. His work is not as puerile as that of, for instance, Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), but on that very dimension is unfortunately considerably to the left of Steven Gould (Jumper).

That said, Weir has invented one of the most scientifically realized alien life forms I’ve ever encountered. Granted it is unicellular, but the microbial details are thoughtful and considered. So if you prefer your SF with a plausible dollop of biochemistry and a coherent bacterial lifecycle, this may be the book for you. 

I have to admit that after my initial recoiling, I did get drawn into what might be described as an SF thriller. And he has spent a lot of energy on plot. Most of his energy it would seem. The fate of the Earth, after all, is at stake. Without giving away much, Weir does establish an engaging tete-a-tete between human and yet another plausible alien - nonmicrobial - so kudos for that.

Weir is committed to offering up literary comfort food, no need to chop or braise. It’s not hard to see why his books sell; we are a busy people, and one is to be congratulated for reading at all. And yet, embarrassing as it is to admit, the book is a tasty guilty pleasure.