I first found this unique novel while browsing at a brick-and-mortar counterpart to Shepherd, namely, Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. I reread it this year because I loved it so much the first time. I doubt there are many other winners of the Man Booker Prize that are less well-known or more laugh-out-loud funny. The Sellout is a satire, ultimately about the meaning of blackness and segregation in an allegedly post-racial America, written in sharp, biting, ecstatic, jive-articulate first-person prose. The narrator is an educated, beta male black farmer raising artisanal weed, square watermelons, satsumas, and other succulent fruit on a small farm in a ghetto section of Los Angeles County. His efforts to restore a sense of identity to his unceremoniously decertified city end up getting him charged with promoting slavery (unwillingly) and segregation (willingly) and violating several Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The book begins and ends with hilarious scenes in the U.S. Supreme Court, where his case ultimately ends up. Along the way there are many wonderful riffs on American culture, especially the racist parts, often centered on his neighbor and would-be slave, a former child actor who was once an understudy to Buckwheat and a player in the Little Rascals and Our Gang comedies of the mid-20th century. Like all great satire, The Sellout may offend some readers. But I found it to be a literary blast.
'Outrageous, hilarious and profound.' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'The longer you stare at Beatty's pages, the smarter you'll get.' Guardian
'The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read.' New York Times
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged…
I am not usually a big science fiction fan. But I love Andy Weir’s novels because they are filled with a lot of real science and real optimism that scientists can solve seemingly intractable technical problems. We need that optimism at a time when many politicians are proposing policies strongly opposed to scientific findings. For my taste, Project Hail Mary is not filled with quite as much witty prose as his first novel, The Martian, but it more than compensates with an entertaining, imaginative, intricate, scientifically detailed plot. Two worlds, sixteen light-years apart, and their very different intelligent species are saved from a common extinction-level fate caused by the same abundant microbial species fueling their flight to breeding grounds by sapping energy from each planet’s suns. The salvation requires extraordinary, collaborative scientific and engineering efforts by one member of each species to overcome many obstacles along the way. The most interesting parts of the novel for me are the very plausible speculations on the unintended effects of directed evolution and on the influence of a planet’s local environment on the development of science there. Environment is the mother of science. Not many science fiction works treat this subject and Project Hail Mary does it admirably.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
This is a fascinating and lucidly written book, filled with individual stories, describing the author’s attempts to understand what he calls “the psychological alchemy of epiphanies.” It is particularly timely during our current period of pernicious partisan polarization reinforced by propaganda, social media echo chambers, and viral misinformation. From numerous discussions with psychologists and neuroscientists and consideration of psychological experiments, McRaney presents a coherent analysis of the human brain’s evolved resistance to change. That resistance is manifested by attempts, often without our conscious awareness, to reject or rationalize perceptions and information that appear to contradict the neural patterns and worldviews we have developed from previous experience and from trusted friends and family. Only when we are exposed to contradictory information above a threshold level do our brains begin to accommodate by updating those patterns and worldviews. There is an additional steep emotional barrier and even trauma when such updates threaten our standing or membership within our chosen tribes. Interviews with individuals who have managed to escape cults or break away from conspiracy theory groups illuminate the emotional triggers that occasionally fuel motivation to escape, allowing subsequent questioning of many of one’s previous beliefs. McRaney combines these observations with psychological research on the science of persuasion to offer street-tested prescriptions for empathetic one-on-one conversations, with deep and non-judgmental listening and questioning, to help receptive people probe the reasoning by which they have come to believe the things they believe. Such conversations may just possibly change minds. Maybe even your own.
Genes create brains, brains create beliefs, beliefs create attitudes, attitudes create group-identities, group identities create norms, norms create values, and values create cultures. The most effective persuasion techniques work backwards.
Ideas sweep across cultures in waves, beginning with early adopters who reduce uncertainty for the rest of the population. It's rarely because the innovation is amazing in and of itself, but because early adopters signal to the group that it's safe to think again.
This book explains how minds change - and how to change them - not over hundreds of years, but in less than a generation, in less…
How does the scientific enterprise really work to illuminate the origins of life and the universe itself?
The quest to understand our universe, how it may have originated and evolved, and especially the conditions that allow it to support the existence of life forms, has been a central theme in religion for millennia and in science for centuries. In the past half-century, in particular, enormous progress in particle and nuclear physics and cosmology has clarified the essential role of imperfections - deviations from perfect symmetry or homogeneity or predictability - in establishing conditions that allow for structure in the universe that can support the development of life. Many of these deviations are tiny and seem mysteriously fine-tuned to allow for life.
The goal of this book is to review the recent and ongoing scientific research exploring these imperfections, in a broad-ranging, non-mathematical approach with an emphasis on the intricate tapestry of elegant experiments that bear on the conditions for habitability in our universe. This book makes clear what we know and how we know it, as distinct from what we speculate and how we might test it. At the same time, it attempts to convey a sense of wonderment at the tuning of these imperfections and of the rapid rate at which the boundary between knowledge and speculation is currently shifting.
