[book_info title=”Upheaval: How nations cope with crisis and change” author=”Jared Diamond ” publisher=”Allen Lane” title_link=” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/253/253251/upheaval/9780241003398.html”]
A NEW book by Jared Diamond should be something of an occasion, and Upheaval is unlikely to disappoint, especially in our turbulent times. Diamond won a huge global following with Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005), when he drew on ecology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and geography to help us rethink the way we understand civilisations. Now his latest, Upheaval, is being touted as the final book in this trilogy.
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This time, his mission is to reveal how nations can successfully recover from crisis by taking a close look at how seven countries survived major upheavals in their recent past. His case studies range from the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile from the 1970s to 1990.
But the big lessons for now come when he asks if we are squandering our resources and advantages to the point of inevitable catastrophe. Can we, will we, learn from the past? Should nations and individuals withstand disaster by becoming more resilient? Brace yourselves.
A nice counterpoint to the monumental Diamond is by Mike Berners-Lee (Cambridge University Press). This is a wonderfully comprehensive round-up of everything you need to know to (possibly) survive, from climate change to veganism to flying in a low-carbon world to the end of antibiotics – and which of our myriad problems is most pressing. Liz Else
[book_info title=”Becoming Human: A theory of ontogeny” author=”Michael Tomasello ” publisher=”Belknap Press” title_link=”http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980853″]
WHAT makes us human and when does that happen? Evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello has produced a book that anyone really interested in one of the big questions will take on many a holiday (it is a demanding read).
Tomasello identifies eight developmental pathways that differentiate us from our closest relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms and moral identity. These exist in great apes at rudimentary levels, but our capacity to develop shared intentionality over the first few years of life transforms these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality.
And in (Profile Books), Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist, picks up on one behaviour that may be near-exclusive to humans: despite being less violent than most undomesticated animals, we may be the only ones that go to war. LE
[book_info title=”Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond the quantum” author=”Lee Smolin” publisher=”Allen Lane” title_link=” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/269/269402/einstein_s-unfinished-revolution/9780241004487.html”]
IN AN obvious if rather lovely irony, quantum physics has always led a double life. It fundamentally shifted our world view by building a new picture of life at the subatomic level, explaining everything from elementary particles to the behaviour of materials. But it also created bitter divisions over which interpretation best describes our world.
For a few years now, theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, a pioneer of the theory of loop quantum gravity (one of the big hopes for developing a quantum theory of gravity), has thought he has an answer. The reason quantum physics is still so contentious is that the theory is incomplete, that quantum mechanics doesn’t provide an explanation for what happens at a larger scale because it leaves out aspects of nature needed for a true description. In Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, Smolin works through alternative interpretations, from pilot wave theory to the many worlds interpretation – only occasionally, becoming textbooky. He ends up with his own theory – and that, as your parents might have said, you will have to discover for yourselves. LE
[book_info title=”The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain” author=”Gina Rippon ” publisher=”Bodley Head” title_link=” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1114075/the-gendered-brain/9781847924759.html”]
WILL 2019 see an end to the “neurotrash” we talk about women’s and men’s brains? In The Gendered Brain, Gina Rippon clearly hopes so as she sets out to tear down the idea of describing a brain as “male” or “female”, and mapping onto those descriptions everything from behavioural differences to life choices.
It is, she writes, a notion that has driven brain science into a bad place, and hemmed us in with “damaging stereotypes”. The neurotrash must go, she says, along with binary views about ourselves. Embrace instead the most up-to-date science showing that brains are highly individual, adaptable, complex organs with amazing potential. #LetsHope. LE
[book_info title=”Underland” author=”Robert Macfarlane ” publisher=”Hamish Hamilton” title_link=” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/560/56082/underland/9780241143803.html”]
THIS summer, Robert Macfarlane takes his unique and influential brand of culturally aware nature writing to subterranean territory. Covering graves, mines, caches and temples, he brings to light a history of eerie, sometimes epic human journeys into the earth beneath our feet.
We have always, he says, plumbed Earth’s depths with the same three ideas in mind: “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful”. It is a timely project as the melting of Arctic ice is causing ancient methane deposits to leak into our carbon-burdened atmosphere, along with anthrax spores from freshly defrosted reindeer corpses.
But Macfarlane isn’t warning of some future apocalypse so much as writing about the world we are living in now: a reality we are just too confused, distracted or afraid to face; a world in which all the “things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden”. Underland is a profoundly beautiful, and profoundly disturbing, book. Simon Ings
[book_info title=”Do Statins Work? The battle for perfect evidence-based medicine” author=”Ben Goldacre ” publisher=”Fourth Estate” title_link=” http://www.4thestate.co.uk/book/do-statins-work/”]
IN 2014, rationalist campaigner and Bad Science blogger Ben Goldacre wrote that he was thinking of “rattling out a very quick 90-page book on statins”. Some five years later, his Do Statins Work? is more than 300 pages long, and no wonder. These cholesterol-reducing medications are the single most prescribed drug in the developed world, but big pharma’s inability to measure and discuss side effects properly means the rest of us can’t make informed decisions about their use.
This can be fixed, argues Goldacre, by wedding big data to the art of medicine. Has he hit on a solution, or is he courting even bigger controversy? SI
[book_info title=”Luna Moon Rising” author=”Ian McDonald ” publisher=”Tor Books” title_link=” “]
[book_info title=”Zero Bomb” author=”M.T.Hill ” publisher=”Titan Books” title_link=” https://titanbooks.com/9725-zero-bomb/”>Zero Bomb”]
THE Luna trilogy by Ian McDonald has been optioned for TV by CBS. But there is no need for any of us to wait for the televised version: Luna, the final volume, is published this spring, and promises an even bigger than usual helping of dynastic infighting, espionage and murder. Of the five clans who control its biggest industries, who will, at last, rule the moon?
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a grief-stricken, middle-aged bicycle courier finds himself without insurance, terrorised by a fox, and caught between worlds in M.T.Hill’s Zero Bomb. This is arguably the finest post-singularity escapade since Matthew de Abaitua’s sci-fi novel, If Then. And if you haven’t read that, then look forward to a delightful time catching up. SI
[book_info title=”The Demon in the Machine: How hidden webs of information are solving the mystery of life” author=”Paul Davies ” publisher=”Allen Lane” title_link=” https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305/305448/the-demon-in-the-machine/9780241309599.html”]
EXPLAINING one of the oldest questions – what is life? – is physicist Paul Davies’s quest in his latest book, The Demon in the Machine. He searches for answers beyond the known, venturing into a place with no name where computing, chemistry, quantum physics and nanotechnology intersect, thanks to the idea underlying them all – the concept of information. LE
[book_info title=”Apollo 11: The inside story” author=”David Whitehouse ” publisher=”Icon Books” title_link=” https://iconbooks.com/ib-title/apollo-11/”]
WE MAY not make it to the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, killed off instead by a meteor shower of celebratory books.
On the bright side, one of the best so far is Apollo 11, by former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse, who happens to have an asteroid named after him (asteroid 4036 Whitehouse). This is a terrific and enthralling tale of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins (as pilot of the command module, he was clearly the drummer in the band) and glory on the moon. LE
This article appeared in print under the headline “Books of 2019: Get even smarter this year”
