Books like Two Lights

Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that. 

I loved this book because it’s hugely informative and completely inspiring.

It charts the way in which nature restores the author after he has slid into a period of severe depression, one where the entire foundation of his existence—a unique bond with the natural environment, established in childhood—suddenly seems pointless and irrelevant. He moves to East Anglia and, with the support of friends, slowly recovers a sense of meaning as he starts to write again about the changing seasons. 

There is a wonderful eloquence to the way that he describes his regeneration. Nature is never a question of dry facts, it is a living, sensual experience that elevates the human soul. You also feel you’re in the presence of a very special observer, one who really understands the ancient rhythms of the universe in a way that few do.

The book is an educational experience that also manages to be… show more.

I learned some practical lessons about the mailability of my mind and how certain cultural “truths” most modern people take for granted are just tinted versions of reality that distort not only my ideas but also my behavior towards other people and nature.

I particularly appreciate the author’s efforts to contrast the modern American worldview with that of Native Americans. The differences are stark and continue to profoundly influence my evolving sense of reality. 

Hailed as a “new genre of nature writing,” Mueller’s book is species-specific, dwelling upon the lives and deaths of salmon, yet the subject matter could apply to any creature that has become a commodity within late-stage capitalism. Mueller contrasts the Norwegian farmed-salmon industry and the increasing mechanization and reduction of living beings to things with wild salmon populations and Native people’s perspectives from the Pacific Northwest. Critically, he dares to take on the perspective of salmon, sprinkling memorable and moving vignettes throughout the book, helping readers imagine the world from a salmon’s-eye-view. This work of interspecies empathy is a rare and welcome contribution to thinking about personhood through a lens that is other-than-human.

Newell’s Globalization and the Environment provides a thorough overview of the international political economy forces which shape global environmental governance. 

He applies a critical gaze to the roles of capitalism, trade, finance, and multinational corporations, along with a focus on the power exercised by the private sector which makes effective global environmental governance difficult. 

This book provides a detailed and trenchant analysis of how African novels have sought ways of reflecting and resisting the destruction wrought by colonial occupations and neo-colonial extractive capitalism. This analysis thoughtfully includes ‘nonhuman life’ and the need to ‘redefine our notion of personhood to include other beings that we do not normally ascribe to this (yet with whom our ecological history remains deeply entangled).’ Iheka also points out how Africa has ostensibly been demarcated as a ‘sacrifice zone’ by other major global powers (many of who benefited from the colonial enterprise) and how African fiction attempts to decentre narrative perceptions from the Global (and anthropomorphic) North. I enjoyed the subtle and inclusive approach of the author, who emphasised the porous nature of borders and the ethical need to reengage with what it means to be human as a way of finding our way out of a ‘slow apocalypse.’ 

I love this book because it is a science and philosophy education bound together between two covers.

The book is thick, and its title is intimidating, but once I started reading it, I became engrossed in the story it tells. The mystery of the fine-tuning of the cosmos is the same mystery encountered by thinkers throughout the ages.

In recent decades, this mystery has evolved into the anthropic principle, the notion that because we are participants in this finely tuned universe, the properties of the universe must, in some way, be geared to allow us to exist.

Last, I enjoyed this book because it combines insights and ideas from science, philosophy, and even visionaries, like Pierre de Teilhard Chardin, as it ends with the thought that life evolves to the Omega Point, where life finally gains control of the inner workings of the universe.

This is an entertaining and lighter read than my other recommendations about AI. It is specifically about chatbots trying to pass the Turing Test, and ultimately is a witty story of what it means to be human. For anyone who has ever mistaken an answerphone for a person, or a person for an answerphone!

This is the most readable philosophy book I know. Nietzsche wrote it in his brilliantly witty, epigrammatic style. Each episode is about a page long.

Concentrate on "Book Four." There, Nietzsche famously tells us that God is dead. Find out what he really means. (We criticize everything and can feel no true reverence.) Consequently, we seek convenience and flexibility over and over again. Stunningly, Nietzsche sets out four contrarian, incompatible good lives. (Philosophers have always sought to define one good life.)

If you read nothing else, read epigrams 290, 295, and 303: "The life of constant revision to perfect a style," "The life of short stories," "The life of brilliant improvisation," and "The risk-taking life." I use Nietzsche’s model of good lives to help business leaders restore their businesses and themselves.

Wow, what can I say about this little gem? It still makes me dizzy to think of myself as a sort of ‘intracellular organelle’ belonging to the great organism Gaia. Can more be said in fewer pages and with such humility from the master?

I recall the words of physicist Richard Feynman (which, incidentally, Klein quotes in my previous recommendation) when he says something like If you think you understand quantum mechanics, that can only mean that you don’t truly understand quantum mechanics.

Well, how can you not love Lovelock, who, after more than 50 years since he first proposed the Gaia hypothesis, admits that after the first decade or so, he still didn’t really understand it himself? There can’t be a more pedagogical pocketbook that you can read at a bus stop. Lovelock had to have come very far to explain it all so well and in so few… show more.