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Nonfiction Views: A selection of this week's new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-11
A busy week, so just the selection of the week’s nonfiction. My upgraded website should go live sometime next week. There will be a day or two that The Literate Lizard will be offline as the American Bookseller Association migrates all my past orders and customers over to the new site and makes sure all is working properly.
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell. Heat is the first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis. And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow. Stop burning fossil fuels in 50 years, and the temperature will keep rising for 50 years, making parts of our planet virtually uninhabitable. It’s up to us. The hotter it gets, the deeper and wider our fault lines will open.
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event— one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic. This link to an opinion piece by the author in last Sunday’s New York Times should be free for all to read.
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, by David Lipsky. With narrative sweep and a superb eye for character, Lipsky unfolds the dramatic narrative of the long, strange march of climate science. The story begins with a tale of three inventors—Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla—who made our technological world, not knowing what they had set into motion. Then there are the scientists who sounded the alarm once they identified carbon dioxide as the culprit of our warming planet. And we meet the hucksters, zealots, and crackpots who lied about that science and misled the public in ever more outrageous ways. Lipsky masterfully traces the evolution of climate denial, exposing how it grew out of early efforts to build a network of untruth about products like aspirin and cigarettes.
Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It, by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. The original internet was not designed to make us upset, distracted, confused, and outraged. But something unexpected happened at the turn of the last decade, when a handful of small features were quietly launched at social media companies with little fanfare. Together, they triggered a cascading set of dramatic changes to how media, politics, and society itself operate—inadvertently creating an Outrage Machine we cannot ignore. Author, designer, and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell shares the defining shifts caused by these technologies, and how they have ignited a society-wide crisis of trust. Drawing from cutting-edge research and vivid personal anecdotes, he illustrates how social media has bound us to an unprecedented system of public performance, training us to react rather than reflect, and attack rather than debate. Outrage Machine reveals the triggers and tactics used to exploit our anger, unpacking how these tools hack our deep tribal instincts and psychological vulnerabilities, and how they have become opportunistic platforms for authoritarians and a threat to democratic norms everywhere.
Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See, by Richard D. Kahlenberg. The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes
First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent, by Lorissa Rinehart. From the beginning of World War II through the early days of Vietnam, groundbreaking female photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chapelle chased dangerous assignments her male colleagues wouldn’t touch, pioneering a radical style of reporting that focused on the humanity of the oppressed. She documented conditions across Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War. She marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the South Vietnamese Army and across the Sierra Maestra Mountains with Castro. She was the first reporter accredited with the Algerian National Liberation Front, and survived torture in a communist Hungarian prison. She dove out of planes, faked her own kidnapping, and endured the mockery of male associates, before ultimately dying on assignment in Vietnam with the Marines in 1965, the first American female journalist killed while covering combat. Chapelle overcame discrimination both on the battlefield and at home, with much of her work ultimately buried from the public eye—until now.
Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, by Jacob Mikanowski. A masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires—Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian—the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of Fascism and Communism, as well as Capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity, and eclecticism, and a people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating.
Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, by John McPhee. The master essayist John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design. In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee at age 92 looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a “reminiscent montage” from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee’s singular planet.
Fragmented: A Doctor's Quest to Piece Together American Health Care, by Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD. There’s an unspoken assumption when we go to see a doctor: the doctor knows our medical story and is making decisions based on that story. But reality frequently falls short. Medical records vanish when we switch doctors. Critical details of life-saving treatment plans get lost in muddled electronic charts. The doctors we see change according to specialty, hospital shifts, or an insurer’s whims. Physician Ilana Yurkiewicz calls this phenomenon fragmentation, and, she argues, it’s the central failure of health care today. In this gripping narrative from medicine’s front lines, Yurkiewicz reveals how a system that doesn’t talk to itself puts insupportable burdens on physicians, patients, and caregivers, forcing them to heroic lengths to hold the pieces together—barely. The stories she tells are at once harrowing and commonplace.
Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, by Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham. Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—Jena and Worsham do more than offer readers colorful stories. They help us see the way our health is shaped by forces invisible to the untrained eye. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Do you choose the veteran doctor or the rookie? Do you really need the surgery your doctor recommends? These questions are rife with significance; their impact can be life changing. Addressing them in a style that’s both animated and enlightening, Random Acts of Medicine empowers you to see past the white coat and find out what really makes medicine work—and how it could work better.
The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, by Martin Peretz. Peretz is viewed with suspicion and hostility across the political spectrum, and this memoir in his 84th year doesn’t deny that. I think I’ll choose this quote from Jacob Heilbrunn’s recent review in the Washington Monthly, rather than the publisher’s blurb, to contribute the capsule description here:
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