Book Review: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (2022). Richard V Reeves.

I recently read this truly excellent book by Richard Reeves, on a topic which the author mentions he was discouraged from writing about by several friends and professional colleagues, due to its extremely controversial nature.  

 

He wrote it anyway, and I'm very glad he did.  It's all about why and how men and boys, and a wide range of their contemporary problems and needs, require our attention and resources, and why neither the Left nor the Right are getting it right with respect to the difficulties faced by men in our society today.

Reeves anticipates the predictable feminist-oriented reaction against this position, and the assumption that he and his arguments are misanthropic and anti-women in nature, which they are not. At the outset, he states a number of important caveats about what he's not arguing for, principally the expectation that he hopes to preference the needs of men over women, and then moves on through chapter after chapter, exploring many ideas and the scientific research in support of the notion that we need to pay more attention to the plight of men and boys.

 

This is a book that needs to be read in its entirety, and the various pieces of the puzzle which he explores need to be seen together as a whole to be fully understood.  But here are just a few of the important points he considers.    
 

Boys and men have fallen behind in school and academics.  Women at this point, as a result of Title IX and 50 years of widespread governmental and institutional support, now succeed at a far higher percentage of the population in acquiring education in most subject areas than do men.  Why is this?  
 

Boys and men are also struggling in employment – despite the "glass ceiling" for women, and the predominance of men at the top of the corporate elite.  In fact, a significant number of young, able-bodied working age men have dropped out of the work world entirely, and are no longer in the labor pool, which has created major negative impacts in other areas of social life, such as family stability and lower availability of suitable or desirable mates for many women.  
 

Black boys and men, as distinct from males who are white or even in other ethnic groups, have a specially compounded set of problems caused by the legacy of slavery, systematic demonization of black men as a result of systemic racism, and widespread lack of functional fathers and male role models in many black families due to widespread imprisonment, welfare laws and other structural impediments put in place over many generations, which need particular focused attention and help.
 

Reeves then makes a strong case for something that on some levels, most of us accept, which is that human boys and men do have biologically-based differences from girls and women. This idea, seemingly so obvious, has actually been highly contested in some circles for the past 50 or more years, in service of the need and desire to remove sex-linked characteristics as the basis for discrimination against women.  

 

Reeves' analysis on this central topic is refreshing and insightful. Many of the differences between men and women that have been universally recognized and accepted over eons have actually been verified in much social research recently. As he points out, the stereotypical male tendencies and behaviors that are different from those of women are not "bugs" of masculinity.  They’re features, resulting from evolution, which in the past rewarded men for focusing on aspects of the needs of their families and communities which were different from those of women, due primarily to the men's lack of ability to bear children.

 

Reeves mentions common beliefs about the differences in men and women, such as that men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people, or that because men have more testosterone, that leads men to greater aggression, risk-taking, and more competitiveness, all features which play out over time as the evolutionary tools by which men struggle to be able to reproduce their genes, by gaining access to women's attentions and their bodies. 

But these differences aren’t (or shouldn't be) grounds for discrimination (as they have been in the past) – they’re simply tendencies that overlap between men and women, and appear in different proportions in each individual. This means that in a perfect world, for example, we still wouldn’t expect to see a perfect balance in the number of men and women in all employment fields or areas of interest.  

 

This point was a revelation to me -- that we shouldn't always strive or expect to see complete parity for example in male/female distributions within any particular profession, even if everyone has equal access to them. The distribution instead should mirror the averages of how interested each sex (as a group) is in that profession.

 

The point, as Reeves says, is to make it possible for all people to realize their best interests and capabilities.  Our lives and opportunities are not and should not be controlled by just our sex at birth, and the attributes that come with it. They are controlled instead by three different factors:  nature (what we're each born with), nurture (the training and support we receive), and our personal action and choices. 

 

We can encourage women in STEM, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the profession will ever be women -- as a part of the population, they probably are just not quite as interested in those fields as men.  But it might be 41%, and if so, they should have the opportunity to succeed, just as much as the men should. 
 

One important point that derives from all this in Reeves' view is that treating traditionally male characteristics as a “toxic” pathology is damaging to men, and it's wrong. Masculinity is only toxic when it doesn’t serve the greater good of the species, or isn’t under mature adult control.  No one ever says anything about “toxic femininity”. When harnessed correctly, masculinity is natural, a result of evolution, and of benefit to society.  One example of this would be the greater propensity of men to take personal risks in defense of others.  

 

In Reeves' view, the #METOO movement's use of the term "toxic masculinity" as a routine pejorative for men and the way they behave is demoralizing, too broad-brush, and doesn't take into account the negative psychological effect it has on the morale and self-image of many boys and men, especially young ones trying to understand how they are supposed to behave in the world, and what their self-worth is.
 

The author then points out the opposite side of recognizing the positive and natural value of masculinity, which is that men also have “female” characteristics in varying proportions, while many women also have varying proportions of "male" characteristics. Care-taking and nurturing tendencies, and greater social interest and engagement, exist in men too – just to a somewhat lesser degree on average.  Women similarly have aggressive, competitive and less social tendencies too, just to a somewhat lesser degree on average than the men.
 

The chapter on the politics of all this is particularly thoughtful and convincing.  Reeves asserts that the political left and the progressive/feminist ideologues need to recognize and accept that there are truly biological differences between men and women, and that admitting that is not a basis for justifying individual and systemic discrimination against women. Conversely, the political right, which has been capitalizing in recent years on reactionary anti-feminist feelings among many men, needs to realize that there’s no reclaiming the oppressive, hierarchical masculinity of yesteryear.  

 

The central challenge for all of us is to realize that it’s necessary to have both men and women adapt to the new reality of a society based on equality between men and women. It’s not a zero-sum game: we can support women and their rights, but also support the men too. But if the left (progressives) won’t deal with the very real problems and difficulties boys and men are currently facing in our society, then the opportunists and bad actors, recognizing the grievances and sense of loss that many men feel as their traditional roles have disappeared, will surely come up with their own bad solutions.  The rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic alt-right demonstrate this risk all too clearly. 
 

In the last part of the book, Reeves begins to try to pull together recommendations for what should be done to help boys and men succeed. He starts with the equitable and obvious claim that for the past 50 years in the United States, a great deal has been done to advance women’s health, rights and status in society, and that's good.  But nothing of the sort is being done for men, and it should be.
 

He suggests that we need to promote more men in the HEAL professions (health, education, and other social service fields),  just as women in STEM has been pushed.  We should get rid of the stigma of “women’s professions”, and open up more employment and career opportunities for men in these types of work, where they are needed and could have good careers. This might also improve pay scales for women in those professions.
 

One of his other innovative ideas for improving boys' outcomes in education and later life, which has drawn a lot of both positive comment and criticism, is what he calls "Redshirting" the boys – holding boys back a year (after the girls) in starting school.  He argues this would provide a significant positive effect on giving boys better results, because in general their intellectual development is delayed compared to girls (another biological difference between the sexes which recently has been well-established through research). 

 

Parents could still have the choice to opt out of a general system change like this, based on the needs of their particular children. And Reeves expresses willingness to hear other proposals to help with the uneven rate of brain development between boys and girls, relative to education.  But he's trying to start a discussion of how to help boys do better in an educational process which is currently stacked against them, compared to the girls -- a worthwhile and timely objective.

 

This book is a fascinating exploration of the situation of modern boys and men in America, and what they need to be successful and productive humans in a world shared more fairly with girls and women. It's full of important and genuinely humane proposals and insights to make things better for all of us, as we try to create a society where everyone can have a better chance to realize their own hopes and dreams, whether male or female. 

 

The book (and this review) may well be controversial, and challenge many peoples' thoughts and feelings about the relationship between the sexes, and their respective roles, but it is well worth taking the time to read it, and think more deeply about these issues in the light of contemporary science and social science research. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Fire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth (2019). Gordon L. Dillow.

I stumbled on this intriguing book over the holidays, in a pile of remaindered science books in one of our local bookstores. It turned out to be one of the better impulse book buys I’ve made lately.

The title itself is suggestive of the contents, but doesn’t nearly capture the richness of the author's presentation. The general topic is asteroids colliding with earth, and the threat they pose to life on earth and modern civilization, but Dillow approaches the subject with a measure of humor, a longtime journalist’s talent for research and storytelling, and a truly cosmic problem to consider.

The book begins with the author describing a large meteorite exploding in the atmosphere over his home in Arizona a few years ago, a spectacular natural event which he and many others witnessed, and which started him down the road toward writing this book.

From that beginning, he moves to the story of the 50,000-year-old meteorite crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, which is a now a local tourist site. He explains how it was created, how it was “discovered” by white settlers in the nineteenth century, and how (as with other meteorite crash sites around the world) it was initially believed to be the residue of some sort of volcanic event. He then recounts the history of the clear-sighted individuals who eventually realized what it was, but then had to convince a skeptical worldwide scientific community over many decades that it really was the result of a massive meteorite impact.

Dillow then continues to weave together other aspects of the related scientific discoveries and events which inform our current understanding of the asteroid and comet threats to our planet. He explains how science had long had a consensus view that natural processes in the earth sciences were controlled by the uniformitarian doctrine, the idea that all changes were gradual, and caused by the same processes we now know about, a concept that was recently disrupted by the rise of the catastrophism doctrine. 

Catastrophism is the contrary view (to uniformitarianism) that contends that some major changes in earth’s history were the result of cataclysmic but rare events, such as asteroid strikes. Inevitably, this leads the author to a discussion of the changing scientific beliefs about what caused the end of the dinosaur era, a debate which has played out over the past half century or so in popular culture as well as the scientific community.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book detail several major asteroid strikes in historical memory, and how scientists came to understand and prove what they really were, in contrast to earlier religious and pseudo-scientific explanations (spoiler alert: they weren't caused by UFOs). 

The 1908 Tunguska explosion in Russia, which I can recall was still considered a scientific mystery when I was young, is one of the best examples, as well as the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid event (also coincidentally in Russia). Dillow includes fascinating descriptions of both, and the means by which scientists eventually were able to confirm and explain what happened, including being able to calculate the approximate size and speed of the asteroids, and explaining why they created the particular explosive effects they did.

From there, the story moves on to the networks of governmental organizations and resourceful amateur citizen astronomers who have gradually built a database of Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and have begun to plan for the planetary defense. Needless to say, there are some wonderfully interesting and eccentric personalities involved. Dillow also looks at the growing public recognition and acceptance of the risks posed by asteroid strikes, the strategies proposed for defending against asteroids on a collision course with our planet, the politics of it all, and also includes evaluations of the Hollywood science fiction movies that have been made about it.

This book was written just a little too early to include a discussion of Don’t Look Up, the satirical 2021 disaster film about an impending asteroid strike starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (previously reviewed here). It’s too bad, because at the time, most people (including me) thought the movie was really not about an asteroid strike, but about climate change, and our collective failure to do anything effective to stop it from destroying our planet and civilization. It was very much in keeping with a long history of popular culture and science belittling and laughing about the idea of giant asteroids striking earth, whether in the ancient past or in the future.

But in retrospect, Dillow’s presentation makes it clear that while a catastrophic asteroid strike may be a far less likely event in any of our lifetimes, it is one that is no less potentially devastating to us, our global human society and life on earth than the climate crisis. For that reason, he suggests, we should take it seriously too, and keep working on ways to try to protect our world from this low probability but very high-impact threat.

Fire in the Sky is an excellent piece of science reporting. It includes an enjoyable and educational mix of human stories of individual dedication and collective folly, along with plenty of science history. It also provides clear explanations of what we currently know and believe about asteroids, comets, and their frequent collisions with other celestial bodies, especially Earth and the moon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022). Douglas Rushkoff.

I just finished reading this interesting new book by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/CUNY, who is also an award-winning author of numerous books, a podcaster, and a long-time technology observer and critic. 

It’s not quite what I thought I was going to be reading, which was just a travelogue through all the ways in which the stupendously wealthy are planning to escape their most feared social and human catastrophes, although it does have plenty of elements of that.

Instead, the author had a broader criticism of the ultra-rich tech magnates in mind, which has to do with what he labels “The Mindset”. The Mindset as he describes it is an intellectual framework coming out of Silicon Valley and other tech centers that combines boyish fantasies and science fiction, “techno-solutionism” (the desire to find tech solutions to every human existential and social question), Ayn Rand-style selfish individualism and libertarianism, misogyny, and a desire to dominate the world while accruing vast wealth and power.

One ironic outcome of The Mindset for the tech billionaires, Rushkoff suggests, is a need to imagine and devise complex personal survival and escape plans, funded by their vast wealth, to survive the very crises their businesses and technologies are helping to cause. These crises include all the familiar ones we’re concerned about these days: political polarization, the climate emergency caused by our fossil-fuel based economy, civil unrest, the threat of war and nuclear disaster, and the rise of authoritarianism around the world.

In the course of the book, the author recounts many of the most egregious and often ridiculous ideas, pursuits and beliefs that have become part of what he calls The Mindset. For example, he talks about the obsessions of men like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson to somehow get themselves and their wealthiest peers into space, in the belief that if they can just make space travel and life possible, they can survive the global collapse on Earth they all fear is coming.

Early in the book, Rushkoff takes us behind the scenes, to visit some of the survival estates and hideouts the super-rich have created, to try to stay alive when everything on Earth goes to pieces. He provides insights into tech-driven phenomena like the rise of blockchain and crypto currencies, which I have long thought (as does he) are massively complex and costly solutions to non-existent problems. He also talks about the plans of some tech leaders to find a way to upload their minds to computers, and to thereby achieve immortality, removed from the needs or reality of our ties to our human bodies, or alternatively to discover and invent medical technologies that will eliminate aging for themselves and their families.

Rushkoff clearly has a political opinion about all this, and constantly contrasts what he characterizes as the cold and narcissistic nature of The Mindset, and its most powerful believers, with a more humane, cooperative and altruistic world view and way of being. And I’m very sympathetic to his general outlook and moral orientation, although in some cases his analysis seems a little too simplistic and rigid.

Nevertheless, Survival of the Richest is a very thought-provoking and detailed look at some of the peculiar fantasies, excesses, projects and ambitions of the super-wealthy tech leaders of our era. Recommended.

Book Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014). Steven Johnson.

For those who haven't heard of him, Steven Johnson is probably one of the top science historians writing for popular audiences today. Awhile ago, I reviewed his most recent book Extra Life (2021), his thorough inquiry into causes of the rapid increases in human longevity over the past couple of centuries. It’s the latest in his still-growing list of fascinating works of history about science, technology and innovation, and their roles in the development of modern social life and its conditions.

He has several other good books which I hope to review in the future, but for today I wanted to go back to the first of his books that I read, which is still probably my favorite of his. It’s called How We Got to Now, which might seem to be an absurdly broad and overwhelming topic, if he hadn’t limited it to looking at the outsized impact of a few discoveries and technologies which have had truly profound effects on the way we live, and what we as individuals and societies now have and can do.

As his fans know, Johnson’s strength as a historian of science, particularly evident in this wonderful book, is to notice obvious things hiding in plain sight, the things we are all aware of but rarely stop to consider how important they are, and to then explore them..

He begins with a chapter on glass, for example, that ubiquitous material that humans have made for millennia by melting sand, and even used to create art, windows and useful household objects. In Johnson’s telling, though, glass only began to have a truly revolutionary effect on the human condition when a few amateur experimenters learned how to create lenses with it.

As their experiments led to greater understanding of light and the visible spectrum’s physics, other researchers and hobbyists discovered that a lens could cure many eyesight problems (through the creation of glasses), while allowing scientists to far more effectively see and study both the grand and distant (the planet and the universe, via telescopes), and the very small and near (such as microscopic-sized life forms in the body and the environment). These new tools caused an explosion in our scientific and practical knowledge of the material universe around us, and the bodies we inhabit, over a relatively very short period of historical time.

From there, he explores yet more new inventions which have been made possible through our steady progress in learning how to mold and form glass, including the development of fiberglass and glass-based composite materials; the development of the fiber optics at the center of our global communications networks; the television screen that has so profoundly changed our societies; and the glass vacuum tubes that were prerequisites to the beginnings of radio, television, and computing. And that’s all just in one chapter!

For each such area of vital innovation he describes, he tells the fascinating stories of the people who in many cases stumbled unexpectedly into their discoveries, then shows the ways key information was shared and passed along, and how the initial discoveries had their impacts amplified through social networks of other curious and inventive people. He does a great job of tracing other serial developments that flowed from early breakthroughs, and illustrating the mechanisms by which invention and innovations spread and change through society.

It’s a surprising , eye-opening and highly entertaining tour through the science history of a half-dozen of the most important human discoveries that have shaped the world in which we live, told by an expert and insightful narrator. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Overstory (2018). Richard Powers.

I previously reviewed three books by Richard Powers, including his most recent novel, Bewilderment, and two older ones, The Echo Maker and Orfeo, each of which were powerful tales of well-drawn characters struggling with individual personal crises in the midst of the larger calamities of planetary environmental decline and threats.

Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory is very much in the same vein as these other works, but is perhaps the most remarkable of all of them, in that the central figure in the story is not the humans, but the ancient trees that surround them and sustain them. The dramatic tension at the heart of the story is the conflict between the humans who would destroy the trees, whose very existence supports their own lives, and a small group of humans who dedicate themselves to trying to save the trees and the forests, by whatever means they can devise.

Powers creates a powerful narrative story line about the trees themselves: he vividly describes their incomprehensibly long lives, their astonishing forms of communication and mutual support, and the complex planetary ecosystem which they have created over vast periods of time. In doing so, he provides a fascinating lesson in the contemporary scientific understanding of trees, and reveals many remarkable aspects of this ubiquitous ancient life form that is all around us, yet so often taken for granted.

However, there are important human characters in the story too. And here Powers uses a narrative device that is at first frustrating, which is that he slowly develops the backstories for a number of these characters in isolation from the others, one chapter at a time, so that deep into the book, it still seems that all we have is a series of short biographies of different people in different places, each in some way tied to a story of trees. 

Eventually, though, Powers brilliantly weaves all the threads together, as the characters meet each other, and begin to take individual and collective action, to fight for the trees, and to seek solutions to the environmental crisis they recognize. 

It was at this point, late in the book, that I began to recognize similarities to the real life story of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in the American West in the 1990s and early 2000s, whose idealistic young members’ first non-violent tree-sitting actions eventually led to the formation of an eco-terrorist group.  

This book is fictional, and not in any sense a historical account, but the group's development within the novel, the psychological evolution of the members within the group as they become increasingly desperate to stop the logging of old growth forests, and many other aspects of the story seem reminiscent of what is known of the ELF, as well perhaps as that of many other small militant groups of young idealists throughout history.

The Overstory is simply a stunningly powerful novel about trees, our dependence on them, and the increasing urgency and desperation of sensitive souls among us who recognize the destruction we have wrought as a species on the trees and the planet, and try to take collective action to stop the devastation and save the forests. In the process, they run into the limitations of individual and small-group solutions, and are forced to face their own powerlessness to compel the outcomes they believe are necessary to save the world.

Although his most recent novel Bewilderment is also outstanding, and has very similar themes, I believe The Overstory is Powers’ greatest novel thus far, a marvelous book which has forever changed my own understanding of trees, their lives and the essential role they play in the environment of our world. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021). Michael Lewis.

On the back cover of Michael Lewis’s latest non-fiction book, The Premonition, there is a single quote of praise for the author from reviewer John Williams of the New York Times Book Review. The quote says, “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.”

That is high praise, but an apt description of the quality of Lewis’s story-telling and his books, which among others include The Fifth Risk, which I previously reviewed; The Big Short, his insightful and scathing story of Wall Street and the financial and political shenanigans that caused the 2008 financial crisis; and also Moneyball, his fascinating account of how a gifted young statistician and Billy Beane, the unconventional general manager of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, upended Major League Baseball's traditional player evaluation process and built a winning baseball team of young “dark horse” players on a limited budget. Moneyball was also later made into a popular sports drama movie starring Brad Pitt.

The Premonition takes a look at a topic you’d think none of us would ever want to read another word about, the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It brings to light a gripping story behind the stories we’ve all heard, and it's a story most of us knew nothing about, despite the endless media coverage of the pandemic and how it's been handled here in the U.S.

At the center of his narrative is a small group of unheralded experts in the field of public health, including a 13-year old girl whose school science project turned into a key tool for modeling disease spread within social networks; a California doctor and public health officer whose relentless drive to save lives by taking action based on scientific knowledge constantly ran afoul of political actors and their self-serving agendas; and a small group of epidemiology policy outsiders across the U.S., heavily steeped in the research and history of the 1918 Flu epidemic, who recognized the pandemic’s potential danger almost the moment it first appeared in Wuhan, but had to fight against medical and political establishments in Washington D.C., in the states and at the CDC to make their voices heard, and to come up with effective means for combating the pandemic’s spread.

In the course of telling this inspirational yet depressing story of how the U.S. bungled its early response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lewis demolishes the image of the CDC as an effective instrument of pandemic response and management. He paints it as it ultimately was seen by this small group of outside experts, as a stuffy and self-serving academic bureaucracy, reluctant to make recommendations or take action that might not succeed, and reflexively protective of its data and knowledge in service to its production of academic research papers rather than the sort of rapid “break the glass” action required in the face of a public health emergency.

Lewis also goes into some fascinating detail about the impact of rapid genomic testing for the first time in this pandemic, and how our ability to quickly read the genetic code of the disease as it mutated from person to person created at least a theoretical means to map the spread of the disease, and better understand what people and events were the “super-spreaders” that needed to be isolated to slow the disease’s spread. This little understood capability was not used very effectively, due to the lack of interest in resourcing widespread testing early on.

The book is a riveting story of private insights and urgency, contrasted with public delay, inertia, inaction and incompetence. In addition to these little known public health and epidemiological heroes behind the scenes, who ultimately ended up providing much of the most effective public health advice for fighting the pandemic, we see a few political figures who did listen, and acted relatively promptly upon the science-based advice coming from these experts, including Governor Gavin Newsom in California, as well as a few senior figures in the Trump administration and at the CDC, who had to operate anonymously and stay “below the radar” to try to steer the federal government toward an effective response.

For all of us who followed the news throughout the pandemic, and were trying to make sense of how the government and the CDC could seem to be so slow, so disorganized, and so lacking in preparedness for a pandemic like COVID-19, The Premonition provides much needed clarity.  It highlights many of the reasons for our national failures in responding to the pandemic quickly and effectively, and puts a spotlight on the small group of people who ultimately had the right answers, but were often thwarted in being able to get federal, state and local governments to follow their advice, and swiftly take the necessary steps to stop the spread of the disease.

It's a powerful, intriguing and illuminating account of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some of the previously unknown human dramas and events behind the scenes that played out as our health system and society struggled to find answers to the emerging public health crisis. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999). Tom Shroder.

In previous reviews I discussed the research and books by two successive University of Virginia psychiatrists over the past fifty years who have done extensive research around the world into the strange phenomenon of small children who appear to remember significant details about previous lives recently lived.   

These two doctors are the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, who started the ongoing study at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, and Dr. Jim Tucker, who was a student and the eventual successor to Dr. Stevenson.  Both of these doctors have written books about their careers, their research, and the many "solved" and "unsolved" cases in their case files.  

Old Souls, written by a career journalist with long tenures at the Washington Post and the Miami Herald, is an "outsider's" account of his own investigation into Stevenson's work and research methods, which he pursued by accompanying the 79-year-old Stevenson on his last two major foreign research trips, first to Lebanon after the civil war there, and then to poverty-stricken rural parts of India.  

 

It's a  fascinating journalistic account by a skeptical observer, who by the end was forced to a very similar position regarding these cases of children's memories of past lives as that expressed by both Stevenson and Tucker: that is, that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this phenomenon is real and not fabricated, that Stevenson's and Tucker's research methods and protocols are scientifically sound, repeatable and appear most likely to be evidence of reincarnation, but that we may well never be able to understand or scientifically prove it, or understand it, unless we can somehow learn far more about the scientific nature of consciousness and of reality itself. Recommended.

Book Review: How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going (2022). Vaclav Smil.

This latest book by Vaclav Smil, a distinguished Canadian emeritus scientist at the University of Manitoba, and author of over forty books, is a stern warning and wake-up call to both extreme climate disaster predictors and optimistic climate change remediation advocates. Its main message is that we need to truly understand the extent to which modern life and all of its benefits are predicated on complex systems and materials that are currently impossible to have or maintain without the use and consumption of fossil fuels, in order to have a realistic view of what it will take to solve the problem of human-caused climate change.

It would be easy to misinterpret Smil’s objections to many of the common beliefs about climate change (both fearful and optimistic) held by most of us, based largely on the political statements and mass media reports we all read and hear constantly, as being signs that he is a fossil fuel apologist. That would be a big mistake, because a careful reading of this dense and data-filled book reveals no such thing.

It’s not that he doesn’t agree that we need to act, to try to save the world and its climate from the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels. Instead, he is arguing strongly that we need to understand just how extraordinarily difficult that process will be in order to have reasonable expectations, and that no outcomes – either extremely positive or negative – can be assumed or confidently predicted based on our current state of knowledge and the existing global political and economic situations.

His chapters lay out his logical and fact-based arguments in a steady, relentless fashion. In chapter 1, he begins with a deep discussion of the history and nature of our energy systems, and how important energy conversion and supplies (from whatever sources) are to the existence of modern society. 

In chapter 2, he focuses on explaining food production: both the extent to which modern industrial farming and its output that feeds the world depend on mechanization that currently requires massive fossil fuel inputs, and the additional role of fossil fuel by-products in fertilizer production which makes current global crop yields possible.

In chapter 3, Understanding Our Material World, he suggests that there are four pillars of modern life, supporting the 7+ billion people alive today. In his view, unfortunately well-supported by the facts he presents and by our own knowledge of the world around us, they are: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. He then explains in detail why these four materials are essential to sustaining life in our advanced economies, and why at this time it is impossible to jump quickly and fully to alternative materials and products derived from non-fossil fuels and carbon-free processes.  Moreover, he explores how even trying to move to sustainable energy sources like wind and solar, and producing electric cars, will require massive inputs of these fossil fuel derived materials to get there.

Again, he’s not saying we shouldn’t be trying to do so, and he even explores possible alternatives that have been proposed, or ones that could be envisioned. His point is that it is futile to hope that solutions to replacing all the key requirements for supporting modern life can be imagined, designed and implemented on the massive scale necessary to quickly replace today's sources of these materials – certainly not in the short time frame suggested by those who say “we need to get to net zero carbon by” some near future year ending in a 0 or a 5, as he puts it.

In the remaining four chapters, he tackles and explains other key elements of the climate crisis puzzle that we need to understand: globalization, actual versus perceived risks, what is and is not at risk in the planet's environment, and the difficult nature of attempts to predict and control the future. In each case, he carefully demolishes simplistic popular notions, establishes logical inter-dependencies between important factors and considerations, and provides needed rational perspectives on the complexity of the many challenges to be confronted.

At the end of the book there is a References and Notes section, which contains 70 pages of exhaustive footnotes and citations for each of the chapters and topics covered. These notes alone would be a gold mine for serious climate policy analysts, historians, social theorists and others who want to do a deeper dive into the question of how we got ourselves into this climate change situation as a species.

This book provides much needed history of the fossil fuel era, a sober, clear-eyed and data-based analysis of our modern economy and technology, and a rational discussion of what we can and can’t do to solve the climate crisis, within what likely time periods. It’s not surprising that Bill Gates, whose results-based approach to global health and philanthropy is well-known, cites Smil as his favorite author. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and Unexpected Solutions (2018). Johann Hari.

This is an excellent and unusual exploration of the psychology of depression, which posits a 9-point spectrum of situations and causes in peoples' life situations that create most depression, rather than the more conventional medical view that depression is primarily a biologically based condition, and therefore something that can be easily treated with medication and other psychiatric therapies.

The author reviews the scientific literature in each of the different life experience areas, then moves on to the second section, which talks about the sorts of changes in lives and society which can help control, reduce and eliminate depression.

This book is ultimately political and economic in its view of depression and its sources in modern society. The main thrust of its arguments is that we live in human societies where too many people are economically disadvantaged, politically powerless, and have too few meaningful and supportive relationships with other people in our families, friendship circles, work organizations and communities.

A well-presented case for the need for major changes in our political, social and economic conditions, in order to live happier and less depressed lives, and avoid many of the negative personal and societal effects of depression. Recommended.

Book Review: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (2017). Jennifer A. Doudna & Samuel Sternberg.

This is a personal account by one of the principal inventors of the CRISPR gene editing technology of how she created these astonishing tools for manipulating the underlying chemical structures and design of life forms, with reflections on the ethical and political issues, and technological potential of these new tools for humans to engineer and alter not only nature, but our own inheritable traits as human beings.

It covers some of the same territory with respect to genetic engineering and humanity's future as Bill McKibben does in Falter (previously reviewed here), but from a perhaps more optimistic perspective.

Since this book first appeared, there is now a new version or off-shoot of CRISPR technology which provides far more advanced and specifically targeted gene editing (think character-level search and replace) than the first generation CRISPR tools did, a development which will only increase and accelerate the risks and possibilities explored in this book.

The author, Jennifer Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her work. She is now also the subject of a lengthy biography by the noted biographer Walter Isaacson, called The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and The Future of the Human Race (2021).

A Crack in Creation, though, allows this brilliant chemist and researcher to explain her life and her groundbreaking work in her own way, and to share her own thoughts on the ethics of the technology she has helped to invent, and what it all means for the future of humanity. Recommended.

Book Review: Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001). Ian Stevenson.

Some years ago I heard about the work of a University of Virginia Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, who has spent his long academic career (up to the present) researching thousands of cases of the phenomenon of very young children who claim to remember details of previous lives, which has been reported in societies around the world. I then read two earlier books he had written, recently combined into one, Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2021), which I reviewed here. From this I learned that Dr. Tucker is almost certainly the world’s current leading academic authority on this unusual phenomenon.

However, as I learned from Dr. Tucker’s books, an earlier researcher, Dr. Ian Stevenson, was actually the original study founder, and Dr. Tucker’s predecessor, mentor and academic advisor in the long-running University of Virginia research study of children with previous life memories, which has now been underway continuously for the past fifty years.

In Dr. Stevenson’s book, which is remarkably dry, clinical and scientific for a topic which you might expect to be eerie, sensational and speculative, he presents an intellectual defense and report on his life’s work, his approaches to compiling and analyzing reports, and the rigorous research and interviewing methodologies he devised early on, with which the study has been conducted.

He begins by describing how the study came into being. He lists all the countries around the world where he and his colleagues have collected reports, and discusses cultural factors and differences between sets of reports from different countries. He delves into many aspects of solved and unsolved cases (a solved case is one where the deceased person whose memories the child claims to have is identified, so that the facts claimed by the child can be compared to official documents, and usually the memories of families and friends of the deceased).

Stevenson reviews the frequency and characteristics of many of the common elements of reports, such as: average time between lives in reports from different cultures, familial connections between current and reported previous lives, birthmarks coinciding with circumstances of death of reported previous lives (such as birthmarks or deformities in the same place on the child’s body as the site of wounds on the deceased), frequency and behavioral effects of sex change between lives, presence of vivid “announcing dreams” to pregnant mothers of children who subsequently report memories of a past life, and many other commonly-occurring features of cases.

Stevenson also evaluates alternative explanations to reincarnation in these cases, the effects of widespread cultural belief or disbelief in reincarnation on the frequency of reporting and the characteristics of reports taken from different parts of the world, and considers philosophical and religious implications of differing proposed explanations relative to the major world religions.

Most importantly, he makes it clear that as a scientist, he doesn’t claim to know whether this phenomenon and his study of it “proves” reincarnation. But he does suggest based on exhaustively documented reports from thousands of case histories, and the fact that young children don’t have the experiential knowledge or the access to information to make up the detailed, very specific sets of facts they frequently recount (which are often verified in solved cases), that reincarnation may provide the least convoluted and perhaps most likely explanation to fit the inexplicable nature of this phenomenon.

This book is an important foundation for understanding the study of children who remember past lives, by the leading and original scientist in this unusual research field. It can be heavy going in parts, because of Stevenson’s dry, dispassionate and unsensational writing style, but that in fact lends to its credibility. Recommended.

Book Review: Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from Bubonic Plague (2019). David K. Randall.

This is an interesting social history about the appearance of Bubonic plague in California at the end of the 19th century, which was the last major appearance of the plague on the North American continent.

The narrative covers the careers of the two successive key figures in the nascent U.S. Public Health Service who tried to track down and fight the spread of the plague, particularly in the oppressed and socially isolated Chinese immigrant community in San Francisco.

In the process, Randall describes the complex set of factors, including poverty, terrible tenement housing conditions in Chinatown, an out-of-control rat population, international trade pressures and local racism which had to be understood and overcome in order to put an end to the last major plague outbreak in America.

This book is an excellent piece of social history, weaving together a rich mixture of people and populations, racist movements, the science and development of modern epidemiology and public health, crime, “great man” biography and San Francisco local politics at an early stage of the city’s rise. Highly recommended.

Book Review: A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (2015). Matt Richtel.

This morning, I read an excellent opinion piece from yesterday's New York Times by Jay Caspian Kang, entitled "Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn't Have".  It describes the evolutionary design process by which for most new cars today, the designers have replaced the old familiar knobs and buttons that were simple to find and easy to use for controlling all the car's environmental systems, with ever larger touch screens that require the same sort of complex viewing, touching and menu-searching we have to do with our phones.

In the article, Mr. Kang argues that not only did we not need these new solutions to how to control the heat, air conditioning and sound systems in our cars, but in fact these screens have created a major new safety problem, by creating an array of new distractions that take our eyes off the road and our minds off the task of driving, while we search for little icons and  hard-to-find virtual buttons, and page through menus of options to try to manage our cars' systems and environment.

With this in mind, today I'm posting a short review of the 2015 book A Deadly Wandering, also by a New York Times writer, which is the brilliantly told, gripping and emotional account of one of the early cases of a fatal automobile accident caused by a teenager texting while driving. 

The author weaves a spellbinding story, as he cycles the narration between the personalities and lives affected by the accident, the psychologists working on trying to understand the brain and the science of attention, and the political and legal players trying to adjust and respond to new distracting technologies as they affect drivers and the public interest.   

One of the most important points the book drives home is what the scientific research has shown about how long it takes our conscious minds to return to fully and effectively doing what they were doing before (such as driving the car and being road-aware) after changing focus to send a text, or otherwise engage in some computer-related activity.  The numbers are sobering: in the case of Mr. Kang's article this morning, the figure he quoted for the new touch screens was 40 seconds.  That's a long time to have nobody driving your car while it's in motion.

A Deadly Wandering is a crucial book for all of us as drivers, to understand what we risk in trying to operate our phones (or our touch screens) while we're driving.  It ought to be required reading for automobile designers and manufacturers, and government safety regulators as well.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021). Bruce Greyson, MD.

This recent book by one of the world’s leading scientific experts on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) is an account of what is now known about NDEs, based on his career of collecting data about them, analyzing the data, researching historical NDE anecdotes and beliefs, and working with other researchers. It is also an account of his personal journey in deciding to study them, and then dedicating a major portion of his career as a physician to designing and carrying out this unusual research on what he knew from the outset was a controversial topic.

Dr. Greyson faced many of the same sorts of institutional skepticism and resistance to his pursuit of understanding of this phenomenon that other researchers have confronted in what I call “mysteries of life” topics (i.e., frequently-reported phenomena that are “paranormal” or unexplained by conventional materialist science). Nevertheless, as a practicing psychiatrist, he kept hearing descriptions of these strange and psychologically impactful experiences, many of them sharing common features, and ultimately couldn’t avoid trying to understand this puzzling reported experience which kept turning up in patients he treated who had been through serious medical emergencies.

It was intriguing to me that although he has taught at several different prestigious university medical schools during his career, he ended up at the University of Virginia, working closely with both Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker, two of the leading psychiatrist researchers into the phenomenon of young children who appear to remember details of past lives.

All three of these doctors, and others among their colleagues, seem to share a deep curiosity about what is behind the shades of what we normally accept as material reality, and particularly the nature of the relationship between mind and brain, which has been a central philosophical and religious issue since antiquity.

As with recent attempts to study other “paranormal” phenomena using scientific methods of interviewing via a structured approach, and applying quantification and analysis of frequently recurring aspects to patients’ stories (techniques that Greyson pioneered with respect to NDE research), at the end we’re still left with unresolved questions. Do minds exist independent of physical bodies and brains? We still don’t know, but Greyson’s account adds more evidence to the possibility that they do.

But beyond those cosmic questions, Dr. Greyson’s research also yields many fascinating insights into the psychological impacts of NDEs on experiencers, and the people around them. There is an insightful exploration of how NDEs can change the personalities of those who have them, not always for the better in terms of their own happiness, although gaining a heightened appreciation for preserving life and being more kind and loving to others seems to be a common tendency among many survivors. 

He reveals other surprising commonalities across reported NDEs. One category of cases involves people in the near-death state who seem to know about the deaths of other people in remote locations, before it is known to them in their waking state, or to the people around them.

He describes other cases where patients in this NDE unconscious state seemed to have viewed details of what was going on around them and nearby (outside the room where their body was lying) when they were definitely unconscious, including one eerie episode which happened to him when he was first practicing medicine, and played an important part in convincing him to undertake this line of research.

Another fascinating finding he revealed was that while most NDE experiences seem to involve meeting or becoming aware of an all-powerful deity of some sort, there was no consistent correlation between that and the experiencers’ prior or subsequent religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

For anyone interested in NDEs, and how they fit into the other mysteries of our existence, this is an intriguing, compassionate and ultimately comforting introduction. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (formerly two books, Life Before Life and Return to Life) (2021). Dr. Jim Tucker.

I recently reviewed Soul Survivor, the astonishing story of a small Texas boy in the early 2000s who appeared to have detailed memories of a previous life as a World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. 

 

In that review, I mentioned two psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School who are considered the leading experts on the scientific study of the phenomenon of very young children with apparent memories of past lives, and who (between the two of them) have been studying thousands of cases from around the world for over a half-century:  Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim B. Tucker.

 

Dr. Tucker is the latter of these two researchers, who is still alive and actively writing about his research.  He has an endowed Professorship at UVA in Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and is the director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies, an academic unit within the medical school that includes several other noted UVA researchers working in related areas, such as Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and other forms of paranormal mind/brain/body and perceptual phenomena.

 

In this newly combined version of his two earlier books, Dr. Tucker shares some of his most surprising and convincing cases of past lives memories in children, and describes the process by which he conducted and organized his research. 

 

Like his predecessor Dr. Stevenson, he is intent on demonstrating the scientific and repeatable nature of this research, and describing the methods used for objectively collecting and analyzing the data from their case studies. 

 

He also refrains from insisting that these cases are absolute proof of reincarnation, but makes the case for reincarnation as the simplest and most likely explanation for small children being in possession of verifiable facts, personality traits, behaviors and physical stigmata associated with a deceased person, by also considering and comparing the arguments for other possible interpretations of the strange facts of these cases.   

 

This two-volume book is probably the most accessible and engaging account of the state of the academic research into this phenomenon by these two doctors and their colleagues over a fifty year period, and contains remarkable descriptions of a number of the better-documented cases from their files.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010). Leslie Kean.

The author of this book is the award-winning New York Times journalist who later co-wrote the explosive 2017 story on the U.S. government’s admissions that a major naval carrier task force had experienced repeated encounters with UFOs, and that the government had in fact been actively studying the phenomenon for decades while denying its existence.

In this book, the author includes summaries of major reported UFO sightings from around the world since the 1940s, followed in each case by the detailed written statements of some of the many highly qualified observers, such as government leaders, military and commercial pilots, police and astronauts who witnessed them. 

After reading this compilation of so many extremely specific and detailed eye-witness reports, it is much harder to believe that UFOs (or UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, as they're now sometimes called) aren't a real, physical occurrence. 

Kean makes the case that UFO encounters and sightings are almost certainly far under-reported due to the social and institutional disincentives to event reporting.  She also highlights how the U.S. government’s policy of constantly debunking and ridiculing them (at that time), while almost certainly maintaining a deniable, highly-classified program to continue collecting data, is at odds with the more open approach of many other countries, and does a disservice to the world's ability to study and investigate UFOs/UAPs scientifically. 

Many other countries in the world (including England, France and many NATO countries) do in fact encourage UFO/UAP reporting, and have open programs for sharing information between countries.  Kean's approach to her material, which is dispassionate, seemingly skeptical and does not assume any particular explanation for UFOs/UAPs, is convincing in making the case for more open scientific investigation of these mysterious phenomena.

This book is probably the best place to start in delving into the current state of knowledge about UFOs, and what our government has been doing (and not doing) for most of the past century to collect and study the phenomenon.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015). Yuval Noah Harari.

This widely heralded book by an Israeli professor is nothing less than a history of the human race.   It combines anthropology, archeology, history, sociology, and philosophy not only to tell how we came to be (and when), but to explore why we became the dominant species on earth.  

There is much here that is fascinating.   For example, we typically think of humans as having been around for a long time, but Harari explains what the most recent archeological research has shown, which is that Homo Sapiens only appeared and replaced all the other earlier human species within the relatively short time period of the past 70,000 years.  

During that time, we invented government, agriculture, writing, science and other “force multipliers” that extended the reach of humanity’s power over the natural world and other species, by harnessing the collective resources of large numbers of us in pursuit of goals set by the much smaller number of people who emerged as leaders down through the ages.  

A delightful read that provides much food for thought, by looking behind the curtain of our evolution and history as a species, in order to explain how things came to be the way they are.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021). Michael Pollan.

Michael Pollan has built a career and following as a writer by specializing in telling stories about food, and our relationship to it.  In past books, he has delved deeply into many aspects of food production: how food can be more sustainably grown, what foods are healthy for us, the problems with industrialized food and how it’s manufactured, interesting ethical discussions about meat as a food source, and the difference between eating meat that you’ve hunted versus meat grown under factory farm conditions.

 

In his past two books, he has branched out to writing about different kinds of natural things we eat and consume: namely, drugs.  His previous book, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2019), discussed the renewed interest by researchers and clinicians in psychedelic drugs as a tool for behavioral and psychological therapy, after the long post-1960s period during which psychedelics were considered anathema (and illegal) by the psycho-therapeutic community, as well as government and law enforcement.

 

In This is Your Mind on Plants, Pollan focuses on three different naturally-occurring drugs: opium, caffeine and mescaline.  The opium section is unusual, in that a portion of it was written by him a quarter century ago, but could not be published until recently because of his fear of falling afoul of law enforcement and politics during the “War on Drugs” period of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

 

This fear was the result of a strange factual and legal situation.  As Pollan explains, contrary to popular belief, many types of common poppy plants sold in America as lovely garden flowers do contain the essential pharmacological ingredient of opium, and yet the seeds are legal to sell and grow, but only if you don’t have provable knowledge of the ability to convert the flowers into a narcotic.  This paradox put him as a journalist writing about poppy cultivation (along with his readers) in a position where his personal cultivation of poppies could be considered illegal, due to his admitted knowledge that opium production was possible from his otherwise innocent and legally acquired garden plants.    

 

In addition to describing his perilous journey as an investigative journalist and amateur gardener decades ago in experimenting with poppy cultivation, Pollan tells some of the history of the misguided federal efforts to suppress opiates during the War on Drugs period, and shows how these suppression efforts backfired, while causing other collateral social damage.  He also reveals something of the history of poppies and opium use in the American colonies and early years of the United States, where during some periods opium (frequently consumed as a tea) was valued for its tranquilizing and pain-relieving qualities, while at the same time in some of those periods, alcohol was being actively discouraged or suppressed.     

 

In the section on caffeine, Pollan dives into the research on the effects of caffeine on individuals as well as on society, going back to its first introduction into Europe in the late middle ages, and continuing up to modern times.  As with his other book topics, he also adds a personal experimental element to the story, by going on a months-long “abstinence” program from caffeine, in order to try to determine what changes in his mind and body he experienced as he came off the effects of caffeine, lived for a period without it, and then eventually resumed his morning coffee habit. 

 

The section on mescaline covers many aspects of the history, cultivation and harvesting of mescaline from the cactus plants on which it grows, as well as the spiritual use of it by native peoples, and his own search to learn more about its traditional use, and to sample it in a traditional ceremonial context, without somehow wandering into a state of cultural expropriation of traditions and meanings that are not his own.

 

As usual, there is much to learn from Pollan about the natural world and the things that grow in it from which we derive meaning, sensations and sustenance.  His engaging writing style, historical and sociological perspectives and his own self-reflective personal journeys as he explores his interests and gives rein to his curiosities continue to make for enjoyable and educational reading.  Recommended.

Book Review: Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot (2009). Bruce & Andrea Leininger.

Soul Survivor is the story of a modern boy from Texas who had detailed and accurate memories of life and death as a World War II fighter pilot, starting with terrifying dreams at night of burning up and falling that began before he even learned to talk. 

This was the first account I had read about the strange and widespread phenomenon of small children with apparent memories of past lives.  It is considered by experts in this field to be one of the most thoroughly researched and documented of thousands of these cases that have been collected and studied now for more than 70 years. 

It is also very powerfully told, through the experiences of the child’s parents, as they began to piece together the meaning of what their son was saying to them and doing in his early childhood, and then slowly validated dozens of specific factual statements made by their son about his memories of his previous life as a young fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, despite their own resistance to accepting as true what they were hearing from him, and their own religious discomfort at the outset with the whole idea of reincarnation.

Most of the books I have read by now on this topic concern the work of two eminent psychiatrists at the University of Virginia Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson (who began the study of this phenomenon in the 1970s, and worked on it throughout his long career there, traveling all over the world to gather case histories from different cultures), and Dr. Jim Tucker, who began as a student of Stevenson’s, then became an expert on the subject in his own right. 

Between the two of them, they continuously collected and studied thousands of case histories from around the world for more than fifty years.  Many of those cases, which they gathered with meticulous care under research protocols originally developed by Stevenson to screen out falsification and bias, are considered “solved”, which means they believe with a high degree of certainty that they have identified the past life (the person) to which the child subject refers, even though those people were not typically public figures or celebrities that would likely have been known to the child or the family involved.

The boy and family in Soul Survivor were not among their many astonishing cases, but as a starting point for reading about and understanding the phenomenon of children who remember past lives, it is excellent – moving, almost like a novel in style and persuasive enough to make you want to know more about it.  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (2021). Steven Johnson.

Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers on the history of science, and this book is definitely up to his usual standards.   Although he does delve into some of the same topics of contemporary research and prospects for life extension addressed in Dr. David Sinclair's book Lifespan, which I previously reviewed, this book is primarily about the history of how whole populations have begun to live longer lives, and indeed, how we have doubled human lifespans in the past century. 

During most of human existence, including prehistoric times, ancient civilizations, the Dark Ages, and all the way up through the Renaissance, it doesn’t appear that human lifespans grew very much.  Indeed, by using and explaining some of the research and statistical methods that have been used to guess at population longevity from before the time of censuses and population health record-keeping, Johnson shows that even when average lifespans grew slightly longer in the past, they were also likely to grow shorter again with regularity as a result of plagues, famines and other natural causes. 

In the past two centuries, though, a series of innovations that you might not have assumed would help many people live longer have indeed begun to do so.  Johnson describes how these innovations (such as public plumbing systems, clean water systems, vaccines, seat belts, refrigeration and better food distribution) have each played a role in adding years to our life expectancy.  

This is a timely reminder in the years of the pandemic how much benefit science (and the scientific method), enlightened public policy and rising prosperity have played in giving us all the  expectation of an “extra life” worth of time to live.  It’s very enjoyable and informative; this is science history at its best and most accessible. 

Extra Life has also been accompanied by a four-part PBS Mini-series of the same name, which I haven’t yet seen.  Highly recommended.