Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I started reading this book I didn’t think I’d end up liking it as much as I do. It’s pretty unexpected. I enjoyed all the information about plants and plant research, and the struggle of being a research scientist, but more than that, this book is a friend-love story.

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The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman

The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For some reason, I couldn't get through this at all the first time I picked it up, but it was no trouble this time and I flew through it. There is some belaboring in the examples of bird intelligence but overall pretty interesting.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It's a very entertaining history of scientific discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, biology, oceanography, anthropology, and evolution. Bryson attempts to familiarize the reader with the actual science as well, and not just the history. Most of the new things I learned were in the weather section- or if I'd learned them before I'd long ago forgotten them. I borrowed this from the library but I enjoyed it enough that I just bought my own copy.

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Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This had a lot of interesting ideas, some new to me. However, the author's hatred of outlines and organizations was apparent well before he confessed it. Taleb seems to appreciate randomness in life, but also in his writing. The central point of his book is that we fail to appreciate how much is attributable to randomness and not to causality or personal ability. He seemed to jump around between examples in various different fields (medicine, journalism, markets), ancient literature, and logic. I would have appreciated this book more if it had a tight structure.

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I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is about all the fascinating things bacteria do and are responsible for. It's very well-researched. I wanted to give it more stars but I didn't find it enjoyable to read despite already being very interested in the topic.

Part of the reason I didn't enjoy it was its organization. Another part of why I didn't like reading it was its focus on animals and insects. I know animal and insect research is necessary to lay the groundwork for human research. However, I preferred the small and largely split up sections about humans and human environments. To get to these human sections, I'd have to read through a long section about insects that eat their prey alive from the inside ... this caused me a spiritual crisis. Kidding, but only a little.

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new favorite! Harari covers the history and potential future of the human species, including the research of many other prominent authors. He organizes everything very well. The entire book is interesting, and none of it drags. I particularly appreciated his unique analysis. If an alien species wanted to read one book to understand the human species this would be it, although that might be unfortunate for us if they did.

Everyone should read this!

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The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution & Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was both very interesting and entertaining. It precedes Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It ties in pretty well with some other books I've recently read including The Sixth Extinction and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and even Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

It's a little out-of-date. For example, our ancestor Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed approximately 100,000 years ago. New research shows that many modern humans contain a little Neanderthal DNA showing that there was interbreeding, whereas Diamond was pretty sure that there was basically no interbreeding.

The title of this book comes from the fact that chimpanzees and pygmy chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to gorillas. Thus, especially from the perspective of chimps, humans are a third chimp.

Fun topics include the emergence of language in humans, male penis and testes size, sexual selection, adultery, racial variation due to sexual selection not natural selection, aging, menopause as an adaptive solution to childbirth, the arts, agriculture and animal domestication, drug use, the question of intelligent alien life, genocide, and extinction. Whoo. It didn't always feel like it was well-organized or related but it was all very interesting.

Personally, I don't think the menopause explanation makes a lot of sense. It seems like if you weren't well-suited to give birth to your partner's baby, a first or second birth would kill you. At the rate of a baby every 4 years from ages 16-40, you'd be up to 6 births before menopause. Instead, menopause seems to make grandmothers more available to tend to their grandchildren instead of having more babies of their own (think prehistoric Michelle Duggars).

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Breasts by Florence Williams

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent book that I recommend to all woman and to all parents. Discusses the purpose and evolution of breasts. She discusses issues important to feminism, breast health, and wider environmental issues. It's heaviest on the latter, but overall a very interesting, educational, and alarming book.

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is excellent. It's not just another eat-real-food book to make us feel bad about the horror of the food industry in our country. This book is inspirational, scientifically accurate, apolitical, and beautifully written. She practices what she preaches too (though she's not very preachy), so the book is full of her own challenges and reflections on eating locally. Her daughters have clearly gained a lot from this way of life as well. This is a new nonfiction favorite for me.

It remains to be seen if I can implement some of the changes she's inspired, but I'm very optimistic I'll at least make some small but meaningful changes thanks to the book.

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The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I'm pretty clear on the ongoing sixth extinction and am totally horrified by it, one thing that irked me the whole time was wondering what the other five extinctions were. Though she covered some of the others in the book as well, since nothing was in chronological order, I felt a little confused at the end. So here they are:

1. Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. About 75% of all species became extinct. In the seas all the ammonites, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs disappeared. Kolbert talks at length about the ammonites. All non-avian dinosaurs became extinct during that time. This is the one that was probably caused by a huge asteroid hitting the earth. Kolbert talks about the asteroid idea in an earlier chapter than the ammonite chapter which is confusing.

2. Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (End Triassic): About 70% to 75% of all species became extinct.
It was between the Triassic and Jurassic, but I don't really understand this one, and scientists don't really know what caused it.

3. Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian): Earth's largest extinction killed about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species, including insects. It's called the "Great Dying" and apparently it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles? Not sure what those were? Furry reptiles that took care of their young? Scientists also don't know what caused it, but possibly a climate change event.

4. Late Devonian extinction: A prolonged series of extinctions eliminated about 70% of all species. This extinction event lasted maybe 20 million years, with a series of "extinction pulses." Maybe because of more climate change?

5. Ordovician–Silurian extinction events which occurred 443.8 million years ago. Two events occurred that killed off 60% to 70% of all species. Together they are ranked by many scientists as the second largest of the five major extinctions in Earth's history in terms of percentage of genera that became extinct. Not sure what caused this one either. Possibly a combination of climate changes including some freezing.

6. Holocene- 10,000 BCE — now, not even sure yet how many species have been killed off. Caused by humans. Kolbert discusses the American mastodon, Auk, rainforest frogs, coral, bats worldwide, and some other species.

These extinctions are especially terrifying because we're destroying entire areas, changing the climate, destroying food chains, spreading weird diseases. Attempts to stop the damage have largely failed so far. Even if we manage to survive what we're doing the earth might be a really bad place to live for a long time. So... not exactly beac reading.

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The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is part history of the development of genetics, part explanation of the working of genes, and part explanation of how genetics influences or causes certain diseases or traits. There is also a discussion of current capabilities in gene-editing and its ethical implications, though this feels too brief especially as it leans on a familiarity with the movie Gattica, which I have not seen. I regularly read science news and listen to science podcasts so I didn't feel like I learned much from this book, though I think it's a good general overview for someone who doesn't follow science in the news. I found the sections on individual diseases and traits to be the most interesting and would like to read more about that. Overall, not as in-depth or engaging as Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee's tome on cancer.

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Undeniable by Bill Nye

Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation by Bill Nye
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn't need to be convinced about the veracity of evolution but I found the numerous fields of study that are evidence of it really interesting. He also talks about the many applications of the study of evolution. So here's a short break down of some of the specifics fields he discussed: physics (including Thermodynamics, and measuring the age of the earth and universe), the desirability of sexual selection versus asexual reproduction, biodiversity, geology, the fossil record, mass extinction events, population bottlenecking and DNA mutations, drug resistance, vaccines, the genetic basis of altruism, genetically modified foods, cloning, and racism. Though I had some familiarity with some of the topics and studies he mentioned there was so much I learned in this one. This was a wide survey of some of the most interesting aspects of biology.

My only small criticism is that he doesn't talk about how some of Lamarck's ideas have been reconsidered in the field of epigenetics.

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The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In order to illustrate the very close relationship between certain plants and humans, Pollan uses the examples of apples (I will be drinking more hard cider), tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. It's a bit slow in places, especially the tulip chapter. The marijuana chapter is very entertaining and informative, and the potato chapter is the most terrifying.

I might reread Omnivore now as it's been a decade since I read it, and I didn't then have the same background info I have now. Also, this book encourages a lot of Pinker and Dawkins reading, so I might do that as well.

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