FanFare

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
posted by ellieBOA on Aug 27, 2024 - 10 comments

A thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. [more inside]
posted by pwnguin on Mar 6, 2024 - 2 comments

"Full of intimate stories, from chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and struggling with familial strife, Pageboy is a love letter to the power of being seen. With this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world." -- MacMillan [more inside]
posted by johnofjack on Dec 23, 2023 - 1 comment

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women’s Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle—and not so subtle—strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.
posted by johnofjack on Oct 3, 2023 - 5 comments

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. [more inside]
posted by quatsch on Jul 7, 2023 - 2 comments

Stand up comedian Fern Brady was told she couldn't be autistic because she's had loads of boyfriends and is good at eye contact. This is a story of how being female can get in the way of being autistic and how being autistic gets in the way of being the 'right kind' of woman.
posted by ellieBOA on Feb 23, 2023 - 4 comments

An international bestseller—the extraordinary memoir of a German-Nigerian woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. [more inside]
posted by johnofjack on Jan 14, 2023 - 2 comments

"Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are" (Macmillan). [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on Jan 12, 2023 - 2 comments

Through the lens of horror—from "Halloween" to "Hereditary"—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences. [more inside]
posted by johnofjack on Dec 29, 2022 - 4 comments

The experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. [more inside]
posted by General Malaise on Dec 8, 2022 - 13 comments

Girls Can Kiss Now is a fresh and intoxicating blend of personal stories, sharp observations, and laugh-out-loud humor. This timely collection of essays helps us make sense of our collective pop-culture past even as it points the way toward a joyous, uproarious, near—and very queer—future. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA on Sep 3, 2022 - 0 comments

"When her twenty-five-year marriage suddenly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. But when she starts feeling physically sick, losing weight and sleep, she sets out in pursuit of rational explanation. She travels to the frontiers of the science of “social pain” to learn why heartbreak hurts so much—and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on May 5, 2022 - 3 comments

Journalist Mark Woods gets a grant to visit 12 US National Parks over a year to write about the future of the National Park System. Life throws in a curve ball as his mother gets a terminal cancer diagnosis early in the year. Part travelogue, part reflection on family, part essay on the past and future of the National Park Service, this was a really enjoyable book to read, especially in January when my camper is in winter storage.
posted by COD on Feb 9, 2022 - 0 comments

Kirkus describes Amanda Montell's Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism as "[a] scrutiny of the social science behind cult communication. With the same verve demonstrated in her debut on feminism and language, Wordslut (2019), Montell explores how language can manipulate masses of people in detrimental ways. Using accessible prose, the author discusses the varied definitions of the word cult, the dangers of universally demonizing its terminology, and its murky history as society’s relationship with spirituality has evolved." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on Jan 12, 2022 - 1 comment

On the morning of March 25, 1975, sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon left their home in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. to visit the local mall. Their mother Mary gave them firm instructions to be home by 4:00pm. When they weren't home by 7:00, the sisters' parents called the police. A massive search was launched. But after weeks and months of effort, there was no trace of them: the girls had disappeared into thin air. [more inside]
posted by Fukiyama on Jan 16, 2021 - 1 comment

The subtitle of the book is How a Rescue Donkey Inspired a Rag-Tag Gang of Runners to Enter the Craziest race in America. [more inside]
posted by COD on Jan 16, 2021 - 1 comment

"I am not arguing that every white man is mediocre. I do not believe that nay race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity. What I'm saying is that white male mediocrity is a baseline, the dominant narrative, and that everything in our society is centered around preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent."
posted by The corpse in the library on Dec 1, 2020 - 5 comments

Ibram X. Kendi writes part a distillation of the thesis from his 2016 Stamped from the Beginning previously and part personal memoir of his own journey through racist ideas to an antiracist perspective. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust on Jun 30, 2020 - 9 comments

The first comprehensive, fully-illustrated approach to the voice that explains the anatomy and mechanics in detailed yet down-to-earth terms, for voice users and professionals of all kinds [more inside]
posted by aniola on May 15, 2020 - 0 comments

Lolo Houbein has 40 years’ worth of gardening wisdom to share—on how to coax an abundance of organic food from a plot that is just 3 feet square! [more inside]
posted by aniola on May 1, 2020 - 1 comment

Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits. Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Feb 17, 2020 - 1 comment

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life: supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and pepper drove the Age of Discovery, coffee beans fueled the Enlightenment and cottonseed sparked the Industrial Revolution. Seeds are fundamental objects of beauty, evolutionary wonders, and simple fascinations. Yet, despite their importance, seeds are often seen as commonplace, their extraordinary natural and human histories overlooked. Thanks to this stunning new book, they can be overlooked no more. This is a book of knowledge, adventure, and wonder, spun by an award-winning writer with both the charm of a fireside story-teller and the hard-won expertise of a field biologist. A fascinating scientific adventure, it is essential reading for anyone who loves to see a plant grow.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Feb 10, 2020 - 2 comments

A medical historian narrates the last century of scientific struggle against an enduring enemy: deadly contagious disease. Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 “parrot fever” pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms. In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of bacteria and viruses. We also see how fear of disease often exacerbates racial, religious, and ethnic tensions―even though, as the epidemiologists Malik Peiris and Yi Guan write, “‘nature’ remains the greatest bioterrorist threat of all.” Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge, as well as the role that human behavior and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Feb 1, 2020 - 1 comment

Kirkus: “The internet and mobile devices have brought us an explosion of writing by normal people,” writes [Gretchen] McCulloch, a Wired columnist and co-creator of the linguistics-focused podcast Lingthusiasm. In this provocative debut, the author celebrates the internet’s “vast sea of unedited, unfiltered words,” which constitute “a new genre, informal writing.”" [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes on Jan 26, 2020 - 3 comments

In the mid-1860s, grapevines in southeastern France inexplicably began to wither and die. Jules-Émile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier, was sent to investigate. He discovered that the vine roots were covered in microscopic yellow insects. What they were and where they had come from was a mystery. The infestation advanced with the relentlessness of an invading army and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Portugal to the Crimea. The wine industry was on the brink of disaster. The French government offered a prize of three hundred thousand gold francs for a remedy. Planchon believed he had the answer and set out to prove it. Gripping and intoxicating, The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life one of the most significant, though little-known, events in the history of wine.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 19, 2020 - 3 comments

The Little Ice Age tells the fascinating story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history. Using sources ranging from the dates of long-ago wine harvests and the business records of medieval monasteries to modern chemical analysis of ice cores, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan reveals how a 500-year cold snap began in the fourteenth century. As Fagan shows, the increasingly cold and stormy weather dramatically altered fishing and farming practices, and it shaped familiar events, from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America, from the French Revolution to the Irish potato famine to the Industrial Revolution. Now updated with a new preface discussing the latest historical climate research, The Little Ice Age offers deeply important context for understanding today's age of global warming. As the Little Ice Age shows, climate change does not come in gentle, easy stages, and its influence on human life is profound.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 3, 2020 - 5 comments

Before there were mammals on land, there were dinosaurs. And before there were fish in the sea, there were cephalopods―the ancestors of modern squid and Earth’s first truly substantial animals. Cephalopods became the first creatures to rise from the seafloor, essentially inventing the act of swimming. With dozens of tentacles and formidable shells, they presided over an undersea empire for millions of years. But when fish evolved jaws, the ocean’s former top predator became its most delicious snack. Cephalopods had to step up their game. Many species streamlined their shells and added defensive spines, but these enhancements only provided a brief advantage. Some cephalopods then abandoned the shell entirely, which opened the gates to a flood of evolutionary innovations: masterful camouflage, fin-supplemented jet propulsion, perhaps even dolphin-like intelligence. Squid Empire is an epic adventure spanning hundreds of millions of years, from the marine life of the primordial ocean to the calamari on tonight’s menu. Anyone who enjoys the undersea world―along with all those obsessed with things prehistoric―will be interested in the sometimes enormous, often bizarre creatures that ruled the seas long before the first dinosaurs.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Dec 29, 2019 - 2 comments

“Raise less corn and more hell!” Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorted her fellow Kansans in the late 19th century. Kansas was the epicenter of left-wing populist fervor. Kansans agitated against big banks and other businesses that took advantage of the working class farmer. Fast forward a hundred years, and Kansas is one of the most stridently right-wing states in the nation. Native Kansan Thomas Frank explores the changes that led the state's working class voters to redirect their anger. He also relates these changes to the new political landscape of the country as a whole. [more inside]
posted by Monochrome on Oct 27, 2019 - 3 comments

A routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence.
posted by sallybrown on Oct 16, 2019 - 1 comment

Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (Lantern Books 2010) explores food politics, identity, sexuality, health, womanism, feminism, decolonization, anti-racism, eco-sustainability, and animal rights through the lens of the black female vegan experience in the USA. It is the first volume of its kind to address the racial and gender vegan experience in the USA. [more inside]
posted by aniola on Oct 12, 2019 - 0 comments

DIY wood-frame house construction book. With diagrams, for example, on how to frame out a window. With tables, for instance, on what size header you need to span a certain width window gap. Published by the USDA's Forest Service. [more inside]
posted by aniola on Oct 3, 2019 - 1 comment

I'm half-way through Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. It's an essential but harrowing book mainly centred on managed (and unmanaged) retreat from the shore. As Rush is a coastal person this is a deeply personal venture. If planet breakdown is stressing you at this moment this is not a book to read. [more inside]
posted by unearthed on Jul 26, 2019 - 0 comments

#1 New York Times Bestseller Gretchen Rubin’s year-long experiment to discover how to create true happiness. Drawing on cutting-edge science, classical philosophy, and real-world examples, Rubin delivers an engaging, eminently relatable chronicle of transformation.
posted by Cozybee on Jul 21, 2019 - 3 comments

Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women—more than a million in total—were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten. Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war—the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories. [more inside]
posted by mixedmetaphors on Mar 16, 2019 - 2 comments

So I read a ton of non-fiction and I bet a lot of other mefites do too, so I've created a non-fiction club to start discussing them. I'm aware this is going to be a pretty broad category, but I kinda like that. I already posted a thread on "Our Native Bees" by Paige Embry, and I hope other people will post more on Non-fiction books too.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Mar 8, 2019 - 7 comments

Honey bees get all the press, but the fascinating story of North America’s native bees—several endangered species essential to our ecosystems and food supplies—is just as crucial. Through interviews with farmers, gardeners, scientists, and bee experts, Our Native Bees explores the importance of native bees and focuses on why they play a key role in gardening and agriculture. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Mar 8, 2019 - 2 comments

Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now. [more inside]
posted by asperity on Dec 5, 2018 - 2 comments

Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. [more inside]
posted by soplerfo on Mar 22, 2017 - 1 comment

I am toying with this idea, in part because of chainsofreedom's new fictional "in these trying times" club and Miko's excellent recent ask. Except these days, most of what I read is nonfiction. Anyone up for a nonfiction #resisting club tackling useful works to know about? I'm thinking a mix of history, maybe some political thought, maybe some sociology kinds of things. Suggestions inside the cut. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix on Feb 7, 2017 - 12 comments

The story of the 2007-2008 credit and housing bubble collapse, seen through the eyes of a handful of misfit financial investors who predicted it would happen. Based on the book by Michael Lewis.
posted by zarq on Dec 28, 2015 - 42 comments