Books like The Malay Archipelago — picked by fans

First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?

This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover. 

Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.

As in my second recommendation, Harari adds the historical perspective to humanity’s survival.

The coming battle with AI is just the latest for humans. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six humanoid species inhabited the Earth and battled for survival. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.

Harari does a beautiful job of explaining how our species succeed in the battle for dominance. He describes how our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms; how did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

We need to understand our past to properly control our future with AI.

My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creatures—surprisingly unfamiliar—unlike anything alive today.

This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.

It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adult—now old enough to understand it—it immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remains… show more.

This book was a pertinent reminder of the prevailing yet misplaced, western-centric historical epicenter by realigning the map toward the East while providing a fresh, cosmopolitan perspective of our shared saga. Frankopan traverses the dynamic Eurasian Steppe and Silk Roads, which, for millennia, have connected and coupled people, products, pathogens, economies, armies, inventions, and ideas that shaped our global village.

My father, who had spent three years at sea before going to college, used to tell me stories of adventures in the Pacific when I was a small boy, which is perhaps the reason I was drawn to Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad’s story of a failed romantic, a hero in all his youthful dreams who became notorious as a coward and then known everywhere as the truly heroic Lord Jim. 

The story of living with, and then overcoming, my own cowardice was not some made-up tale of the past for me; it was, and it remains, a reminder of things I should have done and did not and what, if anything, I did later to make things right.

An unusual one, this collection of short stories and historical fiction rarely appear in short form. But actually, I was just blown away by the writing! The first story, "Death of the Pugilist" is magnificent, and hard-hitting, if you’ll excuse another terrible pun, but the second, about Alfred Russel Wallace, is both exquisite and exquisitely painful. For those of you who are wondering who Alfred Russel Wallace was, he was a naturalist and explorer, whose contributions allowed Darwin to develop his theory of natural selection and evolution. Obviously, most of the credit has been given to Darwin for this world-changing theory while Wallace, who did not have Darwin’s social standing, remains overlooked, in one of those twists of history that speaks volumes about what is commemorated and what is not. Mason’s wonderful story implicitly questions the historical record, and by implication, history itself.

This book, by Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the story of a bizarre heist that took place at the British Museum of Natural History in 2009.

The thief, Edwin Rist, was a 20-year-old American flute student who broke into the museum to steal hundreds of priceless, exotic bird specimens, many of which were collected by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century.

What first drew me to the book was that I knew Edwin’s dad back when I was in grad school. But what kept me turning the pages was the writing and story. The book explores the world of Victorian-era fly-tying and the obsession that collectors have with rare feathers.

Rist, who was also an avid fly-tier, had planned the heist to obtain feathers for his own collection, which he intended to sell to other collectors. Many of the collectors and fly-tying enthusiasts knew that the feathers probably… show more.

David Blitz offers both a comprehensive selection of broadly diverse themes investigated by various theorists and the specific elements of the diverse theories these authors espouse.

This is a perfect “first book” in an emergence-theory reading list because it provides an encyclopedic account of both the variety of issues that have arisen in this area, as well a variety of responses...by such theorists as Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, C. D. Broad, R. W. Sellars, J. C. Smuts, Donald T. Campbell, Roger Sperry, Mario Bunge, and others (numbering close to a hundred individuals in all).

This variety allowed me to develop a broad view of this entire problem area and identify those issues that were most relevant to my interests.

I did my PhD in biology, but one of the books that affected my thinking the most was written by a philosopher: Samir Okasha’s Evolution and the Levels of Selection. I came to biology not through a love of natural history, but through a fascination with the logic of evolution by natural selection. The debate over the gene’s-eye fitted perfectly into this and it led me into the huge literature in the philosophy of biology that deals with the so-called levels of selection debate – does natural selection act on genes, individuals, or groups? Okasha’s book is a great demonstration of how philosophy can help science. 

This selection is as much about its author as the book itself. It is one of a series of books, written in Dawkins superbly approachable style, on the subject of Darwinian evolution.

Dawkins began writing with his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene. Unfortunately, the latter was rewritten so many times as to lose its initial impact, and this overshadowed the much better book The Extended Phenotype due to the forces of popular science publishing.

This newer book, with illustrations by his then-wife Laila Ward (of Dr Who fame) is a fine example from the man who brought us the Selfish Gene theory of forward evolutionary selection and multi-scale thinking. It’s a wild ride, written by a great writer and explainer whose role in modern science writing should not be underestimated.