Book Review: The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff Goodell (2023).

I read this climate change non-fiction book some months ago, and it’s taken me a while to get around to writing a review of it, but I believe it's still an important review to write and share. The author, Jeff Goodell, is an editor for Rolling Stone magazine who has written several environmental “travelogues” of sorts, which combine accounts of his eco-tourism trips (for journalistic research purposes) with focused discussions of specific elements or results of the climate change phenomenon, the effects of which he observes and recounts from his travels.

In one of his other books, for example, he did a global review of the impact of rising seas from melting ice on Earth’s geography, mankind and our technological civilizations. In this one, he looks at the impacts and feedback loops of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.

 

He begins with an introduction and an overview about a fact which most of us already know and acknowledge is happening: the earth is warming rapidly due to our reliance on burning fossil fuels for much of the energy that powers our societies. He then gives some well-chosen examples of calamitous effects of heat which we are already seeing around us.

 

Next, he moves on to the topic of the effects of heat on the human body. He begins with the particularly grisly and heartbreaking story of a young California couple a few years ago who died with their infant child on a backpacking trip when they failed to plan for the dangers of heat exposure during a family day hike. From this, he moves on to clinical descriptions of how rising heat affects the human body, and how it will soon make increasing numbers of currently-inhabited places around the world no longer fit for habitation, particularly during the warmer months of the year.    

 

From there, the author provides well-researched and organized chapters on a number of other aspects of the effect of rising temperatures on the world. In one chapter, he explores the threat to crops and global food supplies. In another, he discusses the increasingly dangerous effects of heat on outdoors workers, including how extreme heat might prevent the delivery of crucial services in the future. He also explains why we need to develop new work health and safety standards to protect our essential workers who must work outside in hot weather from the extreme heat conditions of the near future.

 

Another chapter provides a close-up look at Antarctica, and the particular dangers to the planet from melting ice there, especially including the potential for sea level rise. He also reviews some of the scientific and engineering ideas that have been proposed to try to slow down and minimize the damage from warming on the polar ice fields and glaciers.

 

Goodell then proceeds on to hotter climes, and raises the problem of tropical insects like mosquitoes and ticks now on the move into many warming temperate zones. He analyzes the extent to which those insect migrations to new ranges will likely spread tropical diseases and epidemics into new regions and human populations, ones which haven’t previously been affected by these problems.

 

In another interesting chapter, he provides a description of how air conditioning works, and how current air conditioning technology actually makes the heat situation worse, both from burning fossil fuels to power them, and because of the heat released in the air conditioning process, but is still necessary to make many parts of the world habitable during the warm season of the year.

 

Toward the end of the book, he moves more toward creative problem-solving, by attempting to identify ways we can adapt to and survive the ongoing rising heat which seems inevitable. For instance, he talks about large-scale “heat events”, like the high pressure “heat dome” that has been over much of the country this summer, and asks whether we should start naming and tracking these high-heat extreme weather events the way we do tropical storms and hurricanes. He goes on to propose some possible approaches and ideas about what it would take to retrofit our modern urban areas for heat survivability in the near future.

 

Much of what is in this book has been in the news in various forms for years for those who are paying attention, as the age of human-caused climate change has settled upon us. However, the author has done a very nice job of focusing the conversation on the heat-related elements of the problem. He does it by taking us on a world tour to see some of the areas where rising temperatures are having early effects, analyzing how the various elements and impacts of rising temperatures fit together, and reporting on some of the means by which we humans may try to mitigate and adapt to the worst environmental effects of rising temperatures around the globe.

 

This is an excellent primer on the coming crisis of heat, and rising air temperatures around the world. Recommended.

Book Review: Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian Klaas (2024).

In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?”  Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.

 

Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores  these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.

 

Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.

 

In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.

 

In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.

 

One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.

 

The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.     

 

I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.

 

In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.

 

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.  

 

Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of  contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended. 

Book Review: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019). Ronan Farrow.

An extremely well-written, fast-paced true-life autobiographical thriller, in which the multi-talented NBC reporter and New Yorker writer describes what it took to break through the wall of lies and defensive mechanisms that had protected Harvey Weinstein and other wealthy and powerful sexual predators for decades. 

It was Farrow, along with a couple of women journalists at the New York Times, who investigated, wrote, fact-checked and finally published the story of Weinstein's predatory sexual behaviors toward women in Hollywood.  His stories played a critical role in bringing Weinstein to justice, and also helped trigger the #METOO movement that brought other powerful sexual predators in media to light.  

In his book, Farrow details how he was strung along for over a year by his supervisors and higher-level executives at NBC who were bent on undermining and burying his story.  He only gradually learned as the investigation developed of the extent of  Weinstein's ongoing active measures to protect himself, including a well-financed private media and intelligence campaign to track Farrow's progress, and prevent the story from being told. 

Along the way, Farrow also uncovered The National Enquirer's "catch and kill" tactics for protecting rich celebrities (including Donald Trump), and was himself surveilled and subjected to negative media attacks to try to derail and discourage his investigation. 

An inspirational and exciting tale of journalistic heroism, integrity and dogged persistence in tracking down and exposing the crimes of the corrupt rich and powerful men who control many of our media and entertainment businesses.  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.