Spying on Whales by Nick Pyenson
★★★★☆ Is there anything more awe-inspiring than watching a whale, the largest creature on earth, gliding through the ocean and breaching, slapping its flukes onto the water? We travel and pay good money to...
Category: Nonfiction
Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright
★★☆☆☆ The promise of Robert Wright’s title is not fulfilled in this personal narrative of his journey toward enlightenment and a deeper understanding of Buddhism. The Appendix of Why Buddhism Is True finally reveals...
Milk! by Mark Kurlansky
★★★★☆ Mark Kurlansky writes that milk is a “10,000-year-old controversy. When you think about it, it was a pretty weird thing to begin with, the idea that we could replace mothers with secretions from...
Darwin Comes to Town by Menno Schilthuizen
★★★★☆ The Earth is human-dominated; humans consume one quarter of all plant-produced food and half of the world’s fresh water. In 2007, the number of people living in urban areas passed the number living...
Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs
★★★★☆ Half a lifetime ago my graduate minor was anthropology with a smattering of archaeology. It was so long ago that none of the giants whose works I read and studied are even mentioned...
Voices from the Rust Belt, edited by Anne Trubek
★★★☆☆ Walter Mondale said that “Reagan’s policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl” during a 1984 campaign rally in Cleveland. The press picked up and transformed the statement into the phrase...
No Immediate Danger by William T. Vollmann
★★★★★ William T. Vollmann is one of the world’s best living writers, and his versatility and productivity is paramount: in the last four years, he has published over 2,500 pages across three books of varying...
Napa at Last Light by James Conaway
★★★★☆ The genesis of Napa at Last Light, the final volume of a trilogy, began with Napa: The Story of an America Eden (1990), “a journalistic foray to California in the early 1980s.” What...
Built by Roma Agrawal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The wind blows, the ground shakes, and your home remains standing whether it is stick-built or a skyscraper of steel and concrete. There are specific reasons why this is...
