A MOST REMARKABLE CREATURE :: Jonathan Meiburg

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

If a bird can be said to have inappropriately flown beneath the radar of public fascination, that is the caracara. Jonathan Meiburg's fabulously epic account, A Most Remarkable Creature, sets the record straight. Meiburg is frontman for the band Shearwater (named after a long-distance marine bird); in 1997, he received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which awards a year's travel to remote communities, sparking his enchantment with islands, birds and natural history.  

In the falcon family, caracaras are unlike other birds of prey, who focus on hunting. Caracaras, innately curious and "disarmingly conscious," seek out interaction regardless of food. Calling a caracara a bird of prey, says Meiburg, "feels like calling the painters of the Italian Renaissance a group of unusually gifted apes." Caracaras fascinated Darwin, who wrote more about them than any other bird.

Caracaras will "pluck the cap from your head, tug at the zippers of your backpack, and meet your eye with a forthright, impish gaze." This "earnest, playful quality" is what spurred Meiburg's research, yet A Most Remarkable Creature is much more than a scientific profile. It is a grand intellectual adventure involving dinosaurs, DNA, naturalists, exploration and survival. Meiburg is a gifted storyteller, and one can't help but fall under the same spell he did, daydreaming about "keeping a striated caracara in my apartment. It would be the world's most exasperating roommate, but watching it build a nest of shredded T-shirts, LP jackets, and guitar strings in my bookshelf might be worth it."

THE BOOK OF EELS :: Patrik Svensson

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

 An eel's testicles don't usually leap to mind when one thinks of Sigmund Freud. Yet Freud discovered this "holy grail of natural science" when the answer had eluded many before him. The eel is unusually difficult to study-- "Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel." Some of the most famous natural scientists in history have tried to find answers, mostly in vain.

In The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson, a Swedish arts and culture journalist at the newspaper Sydsvenskan, traces the history of efforts to unfurl the enigma of the eel. Though we know more today than when Aristotle gave it his best shot, the eel remains a fascinating puzzle in the modern era. "Somewhere in the darkness and mud, the eel has managed to hide away from human knowledge," forcing scientists to rely, to some extent, on faith.

An eel can live 50 to 80 years, during which time it metamorphosizes multiple times, dictated not by time, but by migration location. We "know" the eel procreates in the equally curious Sargasso Sea, yet no one has ever seen a mature eel or eels mating there. Answers seem only to create more questions, rendering the eel a perpetually interesting riddle with no end. Winner of the 2019 August Prize for nonfiction, The Book of Eels is nature writing at its finest. Svensson's memories of eel fishing with his father speak to the intersection of life and science, and add to its heart.

STREET SENSE:  This in-depth investigation into the scintillating and mysterious life of eels is super fun reading. I thought I knew a few things and it turns out I knew very few things. I had no idea just how cool eels are.

COVER NERD SAYS:  Totally dig everything about this. Color, image, cute face on that little f'er. It's pretty clear the book is non-fiction, but the small subtitle confirms it if there is any question. I like the font, type size, everything about it. The #1 bestseller "sticker" is not obtrusive and I don't have a problem with that like I do with blurbs. In fact, it's more helpful information than a blurb. This gets a solid A in my book.

CAT TALE :: Craig Pittman

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

Equal parts cautionary and alluring, Cat Tale is a story about which Craig Pittman warns, "This being Florida, there's going to be some weirdness sprinkled into this tale." The state's reputation as home to the bizarre is enhanced by Pittman's recounting of efforts to save Florida's official animal (and how that came to be is itself an oddity within oddities). A Tampa Bay Times journalist and author of several books about zany goings-on in his native state (Oh, Florida!), Pittman turns his environmentalist eye to the plight of the Florida panther.

Panthers (aka cougars, mountain lions, catamounts--all pumas) once ranged across North America, playing a crucial role in ecosystem health. As development expanded, so did conflicts between fierce predator, man and machines, until just between six and 20 big cats remained in the state. Those stragglers were in bad shape, and at risk of disappearing altogether by 2016. Cat Tale shares the extraordinary efforts of the individuals who set out to save the Florida panther from extinction.

As advertised, Pittman provides plenty of the peculiar, sprinkled liberally over absorbing science (and attempts to undermine it), dedication and courage (panther mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, anyone?), colorful heroes and villains, local lore and, naturally, political and governmental shenanigans. Pittman admirably distills decades of history and research with a reporter's acumen and a humorous soul. An enthralling story that begins with "a fussy archaeologist, a tiny wooden carving, and a wealthy playboy with a ninety-foot houseboat" ends up as a timely cautionary tale of what it takes to undo humanity's continuing ravaging of the Earth.

STREET SENSE: Florida. Need I say more?

COVER NERD SAYS: I'm not entirely sure why this cover is yellow/orange (Sunshine state? Oranges? Eye-catching?) Whatever the reason, the striking coloring along with the funky font makes this cover stand out and marks it as a little nutty. I love that the panther is rolling its eyes at its own story. That look was EARNED.

SNOW :: Giles Whittell

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

When Giles Whittell's mother read him Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, it made an instant, indelible impression, like "air conditioning in book form" for an eight-year-old in the thick of a Nigerian summer. As an adult, Whittell's fixation gave rise to Snow, a comprehensive look at the science behind, impact of and somewhat surprisingly vast cultural influence of flakes. "Snow irrigates. It gives skiers something to slide on. It covers mountains... like thick icing. It is the only thing on Earth that brings quiet to New York City, and it makes curlicues out of molasses."

From this soul-felt introduction, U.K. journalist Whittell shovels into heady science, including the mystery of snow's formation. "We can edit genes and create membranes a single atom thick, but we still don't know how snowflakes grow." Not that we aren't trying. Machines at Caltech create "the world's most perfect artificial snowflakes" for study. Who knew dust was a key? But why always six sides? The complex answer lies in angles, atoms, molecules and temperature.

Further evidence of the extraordinary nature of snow follows in chapters about snow's impact on the natural world (how polar bears came to be), culture (star of the most courageous stunt in cinema history) and transport (for survival and for chasing Olympic medals). Snow isn't all fun and games; it's big business, and a marker of seasons that some take for granted. Although our relationship with snow is "complicated and expensive," we must pay attention lest snow's retreat become irreversible.

ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? :: Frans de Waal

"The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind." ~Charles Darwin

I finished this book several weeks ago and have had a difficult time figuring out how to write about it. Author Frans de Waal has summed up the premise with that lengthy title, but the execution of the premise is multi-faceted. It's fascinating, to be sure, especially for those of us who believe animals capable of more cognition than they've historically been given credit for, particularly in Science Land.

Yes, there are those of us who tend to be more anthropomorphic than others (anyone name their cars or other inanimate objects - show of hands?). This doesn't mean you've been wrong about animals. They are more than "stimulus-response machines" or "robots genetically endowed with useful instincts" and humans have been a bit more than merely egocentric when it comes to handing out awards for intelligence. What de Waal has done in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is point out (1) just how smart many animals really are and (2) how we need to smarten ourselves up since many of our testing techniques have been flawed.

It's one thing to put an animal through a set of tests intended to measure its cognition. It's yet another to acknowledge the fact that cognition might exist that's different than our own (great discussion on Umwelt) and a need exists test animals in a way that accurately represents their cognitive abilities.

In other words, is it really fair to test the intelligence of a chimp using tests intended to measure the intelligence of children? Of course, chimps often kick human ass in some of those tests anyway, but the point is made. We need to set aside our egos and be smart enough to create tests that accurately measure the intelligence of different species of animals.

Short example: Chimps were thought to lack the ability to recognize faces when shown photographs of various people. Someone eventually wised up and began showing chimps pictures of other chimps, and it became clear chimps could recognize other chimps just as we do other people. We got smart enough to figure out how smart they really are.

In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, de Waal discusses different schools of thought regarding animal intelligence and the history of discourse between them. He also, as a proponent of viewing human cognition as a variety of animal cognition (we are, after all, animals), shares a number of animal cognitive discoveries over the past twenty years that highlight the idea that perhaps we're not quite as special (or alone in our cognition, at least) as we think we are.

The studies and discoveries presented by de Waal come from various scientists studying different species, in order to provide an overview of advancements in the field using both testing and observational methods. Most of it is quite engrossing, some of it surprising, and all of it educational. These portions were the highlight of the book for me.

Overall, I didn't often feel overwhelmed by the content, but did at times feel I was getting mired in the length and breadth of it. A few times I found myself feeling like it was too much and/or too long. In those instances, I just picked and chose which issues I wanted to read in depth. The book is written in a fairly engaging manner, despite some of the heady material. If you're at all interested in these issues, de Waal generally did a great job presenting the material for various levels of knowledge and interest.

My friend Marisa over at The Daily Dosage also recently reviewed this book and we had somewhat similar experiences. But her review, found here, also includes a neat list of interesting nuggets of information she pulled from the text, along with a link to a TED Talk video of de Waal's presentation on Moral Behavior in Animals. Go check it out Marisa's review for another viewpoint and extra source material on the subject.

STREET SENSE:  If you are into animals, science, and intelligence issues presented in an engaging and fairly straight-forward manner, even infused with a little humor, I recommend de Waal's work. Even if you just wanted to skim through and read the studies, this book would be worth the read, it's really compelling stuff.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  And why is humanity so prone to downplay animal intelligence? We routinely deny them capacities that we take for granted in ourselves. What is behind this? In trying to find out at what mental level other species operate, the real challenge comes not just from the animals themselves but also from within us. Human attitudes, creativity, and imagination are very much part of the story. Before we ask if animals possess a certain kind of intelligence, especially one that we cherish in ourselves, we need to overcome internal resistance to even consider the possibility. Hence this book's central question: "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?"

Couldn't resist this one as well, which kind of sums up the whole shebang in one fell swoop:

However good our relations with apes, the idea that we can test them in exactly the same way we test children is an illusion of the same order as someone throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool and believing he is treating them the same way.

COVER NERD SAYS:  A big cat and a title that (however long and ungainly) intimates we're going to delve into animal intelligence? Doesn't take much more than that to suck me in. This cover isn't something I'd hang on my wall, but it certainly gets the job done. Part of me thinks the title could have been a bit less of a mouthful, but then again, it sums up what the book is about pretty much to a "T," so I really can't take that much issue with it.

A THOUSAND NAKED STRANGERS :: Kevin Hazzard

"I did nothing to save the first person who died in front of me. 

I simply stood watch and let her go."

If, like me, you are curious about and fascinated by the mindset and daily grind of first responders, run and pick up a copy of Kevin Hazzard's A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back. Thoughtful, intense, humorous (often morbidly so), and compelling, Naked Strangers is a fantastic look at the frenzied world of EMTs and paramedics through the lens of someone who lived it in often too-vivid color.

Forty-three paramedics and EMTs were killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. A reporter at the time, Hazzard felt his days had become too safe and routine. Wanting to test himself, to see if he could stand and respond in the face of exigent circumstances, he "almost by accident" enrolled in an eight-month EMT program. Thus began a ten-year career as an EMT and paramedic (you will learn the differences if you don't already know them), handling calls in some of the most dangerous and colorful areas of Atlanta.

Are there stories? Oh yes, not to worry, there are stories. Crazy stories, unbelievable stories, sad stories, stories full of grace and humanity. From haggling with the homeless for a fair price to clean the life detritus from the back of an ambulance to responding to calls during shootouts to having the ambulance stolen in the middle of a rescue.      

But where Naked Strangers really pays off is when Hazzard takes the reader through the emotion of the journey from the inside. Right up next to the fear, the angst, the power, the burnout, the glory (and the guts, literally), the helplessness, and how those impact his life, professional and otherwise.

Hazzard's story goes full circle, and he sheds bright light on his schooling, early EMT days, progress to paramedic, flirtation with burnout, and ultimate decision to lay down the stethoscope. I can't tell you how honest the book is, but it feels glaringly so. Hazzard does not only paint himself with the positive brush; we get good and bad, high and low, which ultimately makes the good better and the whole much more powerful.

Written in an easy-flowing style that brims with confidence and storytelling ability, Naked Strangers isn't just an entertaining and insightful read, it's a good one. Hazzard writes well, and paints vivid pictures of the environments he moves through on a daily basis:

Grady is an ecosystem. Swirling about it at all hours of the night are creatures from every level of the food chain. There's a woman who lives in the bus enclosure out front and sings at the top of her lungs. She's not singing songs but hymns, and when we arrive in the morning, we aren't merely punching in to work - we're receiving communion. Out in the streets, just beyond Grady's front doors, are ambulances, doctors, nurses, visitors, the homeless, half-medicated lunatics and patients who've dragged their IV poles outside to smoke. Huddled together on the sidewalks - which are dotted with chewing gum and droplets of blood and the occasional human turd - are anxious family circles praying for their loved ones, and the local news reporter who's camped out because something tragic has happened. Something tragic always happens.

Hazzard can also turn a nice phrase on a dime:

Just enough heroin is being kissed by God. Too much is a gentle ride to a breathless sleep.

EMS is wild and imperfect. Just like our patients, it's dangerous and a little mad and possibly contagious.

Hazzard's trip through emergency medicine is a strange, gory, and entertaining one. Ultimately, it's a human one, one man's journey to test if he has what it takes to walk towards danger unprotected, to act or simply bear witness, all while getting paid like a barista and missing holidays at home. Sound crazy? It just might be.

STREET SENSE: A smart read infused with humor and emotion, A Thousand Naked Strangers is well worth your time if you have any interest at all in the world of emergency medicine. Highly recommended.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Chris, like all True Believers, is something of a savant. He can quickly and, with great certainty, determine whether a patient's shortness of breath is caused by asthma or congestive heart failure. He can also control a crowd, deliver a child, and stop even the heaviest of bleeding - but he can't find Norway on a map. "No matter," he says. "I'm not here to save Norwegians."

COVER NERD SAYS: I like this cover. It tells a prospective reader, to a large extent, what can be expected inside. I like the palette, and the red ambulance is a nice set-off that certainly highlights the book's subject matter with even a glance. My only quibble is that the font is a bit on the casual/comic side. I had hoped the book was serious in tone and was pleased to find it was both serious and well-written. Humor runs through the book, no doubt, but not perhaps to the extent suggested by the cover. This one is no joke.

SATELLITES IN THE HIGH COUNTRY :: Jason Mark

What is wilderness? Does it even exist anymore? Does it matter?

These are some of the inquiries explored by adventure journalist Jason Mark in his compelling new book, Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man. There is a school of thought that believes we have entered a new era of planetary history - the "Anthropocene," or "Age of Man." Proponents contend "the human footprint is too big to leave any place untamed, and that all of Earth is a garden to be cultivated by us."

Mark is not ready to believe we must abandon our love of the wild, but it's obvious we're having difficulty creating an ecologically sustainable society. The ultimate question is whether "[o]ur numbers have grown too large for solitude, and our technologies have deleted all the blank spots on the map...filling them with gridlines." Do we now live in a "postwild world?"

Taking the reader along on several of his treks into the wild, Mark explores the history of "wilderness" in America, from the work of Teddy Roosevelt to our "burst of conservation" in the mid-twentieth century, to our current twenty-first century shift in thinking.

Today, according to Mark, our "overheated and overcrowded planet" has brought about a change in priorities. "Human self-preservation now trumps the preservation of wild nature." What does it mean if our love of nature is trumped by our current way of life?

To make matters more complicated, environmentalists often can't seem to agree on the issues. Take, for example, the Drakes Bay Oyster Farm controversy, where an entire community was torn apart by the fate of a local oyster farm. (Note: The story is the subject of a new book by Summer Brennan called The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America. The book is garnering critical acclaim and sits patiently on my shelf.) Each side of the controversy was backed by its own well-established environmentalists who thought the other side was nuts. If those who have devoted their lives to conservation can't agree, what chance do we have to preserve any "wild" land?

I found Mark's question of "what is wilderness?" quite fascinating. I hadn't thought about the fact that the answer changes generationally, but it seems so obvious in hindsight. What I thought of as wilderness growing up is vastly different than what kids today think of as wilderness. Mark shares a story highlighting the issue.

The author and his fellow hikers, the others not nearly as seasoned as Mark, came up on an area that made one friend exclaim about the beauty of nature. The area was the Hetch Hetchy Project, a man-made reservoir created when the Yosemite Valley was flooded upon completion of the O'Shaughnessey Dam. This "beauty of nature" wasn't really "nature" at all.

Mark shares this as an example of "Shifting Baseline Syndrome," or the way in which "each generation judges the environment based on the remembered nature of its childhood." Mark found troubling the "notion that a city reservoir was some kind of paragon of wilderness." Yet, it's understandable. The same hiker described his surroundings as "Game of Thrones." Says Mark:

The reference didn't surprise me. We have become such strangers to wild nature that we don't know how to process it, and often when people enter the wilderness for the first time their imaginations fall back on fantasy. The mind scrambles for some kind of analogy, even if that means resorting to fiction and fables.

The wild is seemingly becoming nothing more than a legend or myth, and Mark believes it to be a natural touchstone we can't afford to lose. Opines Mark: "When we search out the wild, we come to see that there is a world of difference between affecting something and controlling it. And in that difference -- which is the difference between accident and intention -- resides our best chance of learning how to live with grace on this planet."

Wilderness - or any self-willed land - can remind us that the rest of the world doesn't exist in relation to us, but that we exist in relationship to other things. The idea that every landscape should be a vehicle for our desires is specious narcissism on a planetary scale.

With nothing left to contest our will, we would be left all alone. "Do you know what happens to people who are placed in solitary confinement?" Mark asks. They often go insane.  On top of the simple intrinsic value of beauty, the wilderness serves as a living museum, a reminder of where we came from, a "historical asset."

I'm not sure anyone or anything has the ability to stop mankind from harmful progress. We started this country by taking it from others and our urge to rule and control hasn't waned since. Maybe that's doomsday of me, but when you see pictures of polar bears as living skeletons you wonder how much we really do, as a species, care about things other than ourselves. Mark calls for a new understanding of wilderness to match the new planetary age of the Anthropocene. An age where we know of wilderness other than as make-believe. If we don't stop developing to the degradation of natural systems, the wilderness "normal" for future generations may be little to nothing at all.

Current designated wilderness accounts for 5% of our national territory. Is it too much to ask for that 5% to remain outside our control?

STREET SENSE: An important read, I think, and an interesting one for those of you who are curious as to matters of wilderness and how it currently co-exists (or not) with the progress of man and whether our views should be changed for the future. This basic exploration of whether humans have ethical responsibilities to non-human life is one everyone should think about. Are we conquerors or citizens? Rulers or neighbors?

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  But it's impossible to argue with the facts of our overwhelming power. Cities and farms dominate the terrestrial landscape. We've remodeled the seas and the sky, too, as our industrial effluent heats the atmosphere and alters the pH of the oceans. With our huge population, we are steadily destroying the habitats of plants and animals and causing a mass extinction not seen on the planet in millions of years. The list goes on and on: our synthetic products have disrupted the planet's chemistry, our lights have blotted out the stars, our accidents have created atomic forests. We've even created a new stone -- plastiglomerate, formed when plastic melts and fuses with rock fragments, sand, coral, and shells. There is no place and no thing on Earth that humans have not touched.

COVER NERD SAYS:  Beautiful work. The cover is what caught my eye and brought me to the book, so hard to argue this is anything other than well done. I love everything about it, from the image to the color palette to the fonts to the ratios. Great stuff.

VOICES OF THE WILD :: Bernie Krause

When I saw the cover of Voices of the Wild and read its subtitle, Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes, my inner science and nature nerd antennae starting pinging spastically. We all know how our fragile ecosystems can be knocked out of balance, and species are physically counted to determine their overall health. What if, instead of counting, we could measure the stability of an ecosystem and determine species populations just by listening?

Turns out, we can. Bernie Krause is an ecologist and the founder of Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to recording and archiving natural "soundscapes." Krause has a Ph.D. in bioacoustics (the study of the sounds living organisms produce) and has been recording natural sounds since the 1960s, originally for use as orchestration on a music album.

He found that soundscape applications are quite varied and include the assessment of environmental quality of parks, medicine, urban planning, mental health, and long-term monitoring of climate change, to name just a few. The collective and structured sound whole groups of living organisms generate can be used to measure status and the impact of change at a much higher level than visual perspectives, providing a 360-degree hemisphere of data.

For example, Krause has been recording at Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra Nevada for decades. In 1988, a timber company convinced local residents there would be no environmental impact from "selective logging," harvesting only a few trees rather than clear-cutting.

Krause's post-logging soundscape recordings tell a very different story. A year after the logging, stream sounds were still present, but sounds from living organisms were practically silent. He has returned to the site fifteen times over the past 25 years and the density and diversity of the area have never recovered.

Visually, the landscape remained virtually unchanged, but the soundscape told a story of a tragic impact. Reporting on these changes is one thing. Krause has gone a step further and made his recordings available on the Yale Press website. I loved this feature. It increased my understanding and fascination (and horror, frankly) to be able to hear exactly what he was writing about.

More than losing ecosystems, Krause believes we risk losing culture, since sounds are the basis for so much of our artistic expression:

They helped shape music, and if we lose the sounds of the wild, then we will also lose an important inspiration and resource for the arts. When you hear a chimp drumming in the woods against a buttress, that is the origin of drums. When you hear the melody of a bird, that is the origin of our own melodies. If they are gone, our own music will wither.

As a believer in Blue Mind, the mental and physical benefits to humans of being in, on, and around water (you can read more about that in my review of Blue Mind, by Dr. Wallace J. Nichols; a fascinating book), I was especially interested in discussions about the effectiveness of soundscapes at reducing stress indicators like high blood pressure. Studies have found soundscapes even more effective than music at reducing stress.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but according to Krause music sometimes failed to reduce stress, or increased it, due to cultural biases or physical reactions. Soundscapes, which are "culture neutral," did not have this effect. Soundscapes have also been used to help reduce PTSD in military dogs returning from Afghanistan, to identify the negative impact of man-made noise on the learning ability of students in schools adjacent to airports and highways, and to reduce recovery times and the need for pain medication in hospital settings.

For anyone interested in a primer on soundscapes, their history, importance, use, and impact, this is a great place to start. Krause is first and foremost an ecologist. You're not going to find lyrical prose here, but (fairly) plainly and well-stated information and theory.

It seems a no-brainer that there is a "growing distraction of extraneous noise in our environments, partly because natural soundscapes are disappearing, but also because of an increased human focus on visual events." Voices of the Wild is a compelling look at the use of sound to measure the impact of our own noise and "progress" on the world around us.

STREET SENSE: A fascinating, if somewhat scientific, look at the beginnings, growth, uses and impact of soundscapes. Highly recommended for readers interested in environmental and ecosystem issues, as well as the impact of sound, good and bad, on humans and nature alike.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: From my experience, it appears as if we find ourselves stuck midway between a past and a future where chance intimate encounters with what remains wild actually underscores our inability to escape the present. Our history confirms that we have the limited capacity to postulate and imagine aspects of the days ahead of us. In order to do that with some degree of confidence, though, we will need to more fully understand what exists. Natural sounds that define the field of soundscape ecology are the voices we need to heed closely. For they are balanced somewhere between creation and destruction -- and we silence them at our own peril.

COVER NERD SAYS: Clean, beautiful, and effective. I took one look and signed up to read Voices of the Wild. I really didn't even need the subtitle, I was hooked upon seeing the image, and think it serves the content well.

BLUE MIND :: Wallace J. Nichols

This review originally ran over at Jen's Book Thoughts in September 2014, not long after Blue Mind was first published. The book was important to me and I didn't have a blog at the time and Jen was kind enough to run my thoughts on her site. Now that I do have my own writing space and the paperback edition of Blue Mind is coming on July 21, I wanted to run the review again. The book has some relevant messages, not just for those of us who have a "blue mind" but for everyone who has concern for our environment and well-being. I've changed the review a little bit to fit the current format here at the MAR, but otherwise here it is in all its original glory, with another huge "Thank you!" to Jen:

I was raised on and in the water: swimming, sailing, bodysurfing, you name it. To this day, when driving home I feel a weight lift from my shoulders as I hit the final turn that takes me along the water. I’ve always known a connection to water is my thing, I had no idea it was a thing. A thing with some pretty spectacular science behind it.

I woke up to the science of water's impact on all of us when I spied a book with a beautiful splash of vibrant blue water on the cover sitting on a bookstore shelf and was immediately attracted to it (blue mind at work!). The book was Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do. Blue Mind's mouthful of a subtitle highlights the author's theory that the science and study of our love of water has:

significant real-world applications -- for health, travel, real estate, creativity, childhood development, urban planning, the treatment of addiction and trauma, conservation, business, politics, religion, architecture, and more. 

In Blue Mind, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols explores these applications from two fronts: head and heart. The heart part may be obvious to water lovers, though I have found it fascinating to be more mindful of my connection with water since reading the book (I've realized it impacts my attraction to art, media, clothing, environment, you name it). The brain part is intellectually challenging, but you will shine at your next cocktail party as you drop facts about the prefrontal cortex, evolutionary biology, and neruoimaging.

Put simply, Blue Mind is "a mildly meditative state characterized by calm...and a sense of general happiness..inspired by water and elements associated with water." It can be contrasted with Red Mind, "an edgy high, characterized by stress, anxiety, fear, and maybe even a little bit of anger and despair."

Red Mind's physiological stress responses evolved to help us survive; essential tools for escaping predators, and finding and fighting for food and mates. We need Red Mind. But today, the many non-life-threatening stressors we face in daily living activate the same biological responses. We're "drowning in a sea of overstimulation." Stress hormones keep us in an agitated state. The answer? Finding a way to reach a Blue Mind state. Finding water.

It makes sense that our need and ability to sense and locate near water is hardwired into our DNA. But that doesn't completely explain our emotional attachment to water. Why does nature, water in particular, make us happy?

"Time and time again, researchers have discovered that proximity to water strengthens the positive effects that environment has upon well-being." Scientifically speaking, Blue Mind is filled with fascinating studies correlating well-being with water. The highest increase in happiness in outdoor environments occurred in people near water. In fact, just being able to see nature has incredible benefits, and the "best" nature has water in it.

Even indirect exposure to water has been shown to help patients recuperate faster. In one study, heart patients were shown one of three scenes on a panel at the foot of their bed: a forest, open water, or an abstract/blank. Patients looking at the nature panels needed less pain meds and had lower anxiety levels. Even more fascinating, improvements were significantly greater in patients looking at water than those looking at the forest. Simply looking at pictures of water causes our brains to shift to Blue Mind mode. Great news for those of you who don't enjoy being in the water.

On the heart side of the Blue Mind equation, Dr. Nichols presents countless examples of the therapeutic impact of water on what ails us: addiction, autism, and PTSD to name a few. Particularly impactful is the story of an injured veteran who traveled to California to take part in Operation Surf, a surf camp specifically designed for veterans. He later disclosed to the group he had come simply to cross surfing off his bucket list, at which point he intended to return home and kill himself. Surfing not only changed his life, it saved his life.

Could that veteran have discovered and been saved by knitting? Perhaps. But he was saved by water. The "[g] oal [of attaining Blue Mind] is not to turn people into surfers, but to change brain chemistry. The chemicals that respond to activities like surfing have positive effects on how people deal with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health issues." Heart and science.

What, ultimately, is the point of Blue Mind, other than encouraging us to all get in and near the water, to find our own Blue Mind? Based on past experience, the author hopes increased awareness might also awaken our social responsibilities. Hopefully, "the recognition...transforms our sense of responsibility and renovates our list of priorities. Greater self-understanding leads to better choices that lead to a better future - choices that preserve the natural world and increase the chance for more access to the Blue Mind." Dr. Nichols wishes us all water. Read Blue Mind and see if you don't feel the same.

STREET SENSE:  If you feel a connection to water and want to understand more about why, this is your book. If you're interested in how water impacts all of us in work, play, stress, relaxation, rescue, and recovery, this is your book. If you wonder how water saves people, this is your book. If you get a chance to see J. speak, do so, he's an engaging, welcoming, and fascinating individual. Or attend one of the Blue Mind summits taking place in North America and beyond, something I'd love to do one day.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: One of my favorites was really just one line, but it requires context. Dr. Nichols took a a group of young Native American teens who live in the Sonoran Desert to the Gulf of California. Many of them had never seen the ocean before, and had no idea what to expect. They were provided masks and snorkels and set loose to explore. When asked how it was going, one young boy answered: "I can't see anything." Despite the snorkeling instructions, he had been keeping his eyes closed underwater. Dr. Nichols reminded him to keep his eyes open, which he did the next time he went under. Then he stood up and exclaimed about all the fish he was able to see. Laughing and crying, he shouted:

"My planet is beautiful!"

COVER NERD SAYS: If you want an example of Blue Mind at work, here it is. I saw Blue Mind on a shelf, immediately grabbed it, and felt/knew I had to have it. I didn't even know what it was. I just knew that splash of blue water on the front resonated with my core. Thankfully, the content of the book was something I was interested in, otherwise I'd just have a pretty book on my shelf. Needless to say, as simple as it is, I like this cover a whole bunch.

HOW TO CLONE A MAMMOTH :: Beth Shapiro

As science ideas and experiments go, the cloning or "de-extincting" of a mammoth may seem nothing more than a time-consuming (perhaps decades) and expensive (perhaps billions) act of ego and fancy. But is that really all it is? Or what it is at all?

Before sitting down with Beth Shapiro's How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction, I might have thought so. Hell, we can't seem to take proper care of the flora and fauna we have left and many of our own failures, intentional or otherwise, have been the cause of past extinctions. How would the ability to de-extinct impact our present complacency and interaction with the planet? Would it "let us off the hook" for past and future missteps?

Now that I've read Shapiro's work, I still have concerns (as one should), but much of the rationale behind the research as Shapiro sees it is geared towards restoring ecosystems we've lost or are in danger of losing. So how does one go about de-extincting a species and how close are we? You might be surprised.

Shapiro, an evolutionary molecular biologist and Assistant Professor in the UC Santa Cruz Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, knows of what she speaks. In How to Clone a Mammoth she discusses the hows, whys and should-wes of ongoing efforts in her field, whether they be geared towards an actual cloning, which requires a living cell, or the recreation ("genetic engineering") of various traits and behaviors of an extinct species in an existing one.

As to the hows, if it's down and dirty science you're after, this book will be nirvana. I found the science portions read a bit like a textbook, which is perhaps impossible to avoid when you're dealing with such a heady subject. Shapiro discusses pure cloning to some extent, but the focus is on genetic engineering.

The book is therefore unsurprisingly full of discussions about genotypes and phenotypes, gene fragments, gene stitching, and gene base pairs to name just a few phrases I'll be dropping at my next cocktail party. I have trouble with a sewing machine, so getting a firm (ok, ok, semi-firm, leaning towards loose) grasp on the concept of gene stitching and the like took some reading and rereading.

The whys and the what-ifs and the should-wes were, in this instance, more thrilling subjects for me, a science layperson. The idea that we can resurrect extinct traits by engineering them into living organisms and use the "new" species to change an ecosystem for the better is a bit mind-blowing and, as stated by Shapiro, "the real value of de-extinction technology."

If an extinct species filled an important niche within its ecosystem, its loss likely resulted in a "chaotic destabilization" of that ecosystem. Restoring the traits of that species in an existing one may enable a restoration of species interactions and restabilize the ecosystem, saving other species from extinction. If you've at all followed the story of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, that's a great example of this theory in action. Taking what we can learn from ancient DNA sequencing and using genetic engineering, we could do the same thing in habitats that have lost the benefit of certain animal traits altogether through extinction.

Even niftier, Shapiro reports that genetic engineering can also have a positive impact on global warming. This one blew my mind. I won't spoil the story with too much detail, but suffice to say reintroducing "mammoths" (i.e., cold-tolerant Asian elephants genetically engineered to be mammoth-like) to Siberia may actually slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

Shapiro asks plenty of good questions in How to Clone a Mammoth, many of which obviously don't yet have answers, only possibilities. But they provide good fodder for the issue of whether and how such science and research should and might continue to advance. And while these ideas may seem a bit scary, Shapiro convinced me of the value of genetic engineering for ecological resurrection purposes. I'll even forgive her for confirming DNA is not preserved in amber, thus debunking the science of Jurassic Park.

STREET SENSE:  Whether you're into deep and heady science, just want to know more about how genetic engineering might impact your world, or both, this book is for you. If you're the latter, you might skim some of the heavier sciencey parts, but there's still a ton of fascinating information to keep your mind spinning.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  I underlined a ton of passages in the book and take this section of my reviews quite seriously, but today I have to share what kept making me laugh out loud (because I'm 5). The author works in the field of ancient DNA and works in a lab, so the lab is always referred to as the "ancient DNA lab," which kept giving me visuals of an old, creepy laboratory where Gene Wilder was conducting experiments on mammoths. Sorry, not sorry.

COVER NERD SAYS:  I really liked this cover, it was clean and simple and got the point across. However, there is nothing clean and simple about what is inside, and I was somewhat surprised at the level of science imparted by the author. Not that it wasn't welcome, but I think the friendly nature of the cover lulled me into a false sense of "you'll understand everything the author is going to tell you." If you do, I want to have you over for dinner so you can explain a few things.

WHAT STANDS IN A STORM :: Kim Cross

I was born and raised weather-stupid. In other words, in perpetually-70-and-sunny Northern California. But not long ago I spent a few years living in the SE Kansas town where my mother was born. Come to find out it's smack in the middle of "Tornado Alley." Yeah, no one had mentioned that. I learned right quick that tornadoes and the weather that produces them scare the living bejesus out of me.

It took well over a year after moving back to California for the mental and physical Pavlovian responses to a strong wind or rain to subside. Kim Cross' What Stands in a Storm brought those feelings roaring back with her visceral recounting of three days in April 2011 when the South's Tornado Alley suffered the worst superstorm ever to hit the area.

Between April 25th and 28th, 355 tornadoes touched down, leaving 348 dead over six states and causing $11 billion in damage. April 27 was the worst of it, with "ground truth" of 211 tornadoes, 4 of which rated E5 on the Enhanced Fujita scale used to measure the destructive force of tornadoes. How serious is that? The scale only goes to 5. In a typical year, the United States experiences ONE E5 tornado. In 2011 there were six, and four of those took place on April 27.

What Stands in a Storm is much more than weather data and a report of an apocalyptic superstorm. It is an epic recounting of the before, during, and aftermath of that deadly storm from several compelling viewpoints: the meteorologists and their support people trying to forecast and predict it, those in its path, and those responding to the disastrous results of its passing. Cross has managed to capture the intense anticipation and tension of waiting for tornadic weather, the gamut of emotions experienced while waiting it out, and the heartbreak and devastation that can follow for the randomly unlucky. Her descriptions of severe weather and the destruction it leaves behind are both spot-on and horrifying, painting a sadly accurate picture for the reader:

The supercell towered three miles above the earth as its funnel-child tore mercilessly through the heart of Smithville in a tantrum of annihilation. It plucked a red Ford Explorer up like a Matchbox car and hurled it into the town water tower half a mile away. The SUV flew another quarter mile and cratered a field. The storm lifted the cab of a tractor-trailer, flung it more than a quarter mile into a field, where it landed and crumpled like foil. It blew the town hall apart, wrapped cars around trees, and smashed apart buildings as if they were Legos, sending concrete cinder blocks careening through the air. It plucked trees from the ground; the few still standing were stripped of their bark.  The tornado sucked homes right off their foundations, leaving nothing behind but a lonely slab with anchor bolts that had once held down the walls. It sucked people into a hateful sky and pelted them to death with shards of the places they trusted to protect them. 

Cross does spend time, and rightfully so, on the scientific aspects of the weather and severe storm forecasting. Not to worry, she does so in a manner factual yet non-technical enough to hold the interest of the weather neophyte. The reader also gets a bit of background on tornado science, from its humble beginnings in the 1870s, to the inception of the Thunderstorm Project in 1945 (where pilots spent hours flying through storms to measure conditions - not a study for the weak of heart), to today's modern technology. Which is, despite advances, still something of a crapshoot.  This only heightens the danger and resultant heavy responsibility carried by the meteorologists who provide warnings (or not) of impending severe weather:

It could be anywhere. In an age where we can map the human genome, gather dust from a comet hurtling through space, and engineer synthetic DNA, science cannot predict exactly when and where a tornado will form. A radar cannot "see" tornadoes. It can only detect conditions known to be present when they form, such as signs of strong rotation. And the presence of those radar features does not prove that a tornado exists. The only way to confirm a tornado is for a human to lay eyes on it.

To warn or not to warn is a delicate balance, and meteorologists are constantly upping efforts to increase the accuracy of weather warnings in order to save lives. A heavy burden for sure, and Cross details what meteorologists go through as weather patterns move towards severe. Over-warning breeds complacency, a major cause of weather-related injury or death, but giving people sufficient warning is vital to their ability to seek adequate shelter.

Cross vividly portrays what television meteorologists, professional storm-chasers, and volunteer storm-spotters go through in order to make the best decision when lives are at risk. The author's year of research and more than 100 hours of first-person interviews pay off, as the stress and anxiety faced by these folks, not to mention the physical risks to those in the field, are palpable.

Hitting closest to home, What Stands follows first responders, professional and otherwise, and several ordinary people as the storm approaches and passes through. A few of these stories have "happy" endings despite the physical and emotional ruin of the supercell, others are heart-rending tales of violence and death, some so random and discrete as to not seem real.

Days later, I'm having trouble forgetting some of these people and their stories, the arbitrary inches or seconds that sometimes made the difference between life and death. But despite the devastating losses of loved ones, property, and infrastructure (in some agonizing instances the very places and materials set up to help in the aftermath emergency), it is clear that what stands after a storm is the resilience and determination of these people and their communities.

STREET SENSE:  You don't have to be a weather nerd to appreciate this story of nature and human nature. It's a difficult, emotional read, but one that is quite worthwhile. Additionally, "[t]ornadoes have been observed on every continent and in every American state at every hour of the day and in every month of the year." Reading this book will hopefully open some complacent eyes about our weather and how to survive when it becomes destructive.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  The thunderstorms began as the innocuous white cauliflower cumulus clouds that formed n the beautiful dance of convection that resembles a boiling pot in time-lapse movies.

COVER NERD SAYS:  Frightening and a bit beautiful, this cover pretty much says it all. I get angina just looking at it.

ANIMAL WEAPONS :: Douglas J. Emlen

If you are any kind science and nature nerd and have a minutia of interest in how such influences as mating, territory, and predation impact how animal forms evolve (sometimes even in one direction and back again), stop reading and just go get Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle. If you need a little convincing, read on, I welcome the challenge.

Animal Weapons is the most geeked-out fun I’ve had reading in a long time. Author Douglas Emlen has brilliantly laid out all kinds of super cool, sciencey principles in a manner that’s engaging and easy to understand. Animal Weapons kept me as engrossed as a top-notch thriller.  I was grinning from ear to ear from the time I read this early synopsis to the end:

This is a book about extreme weapons, structures so gargantuan and bizarre they look like they shouldn’t be possible—so awkward that the animals who bear them ought to tip over, or trip, or get tangled each time they attempt to move. Why are these weapons so big? And is there such a thing as too big? To answer these questions, we’ll delve into the murky forests and mountainsides where animals do battle, immersing ourselves in the details of their lives in order to identify patterns: things these wildly different species all share in common, and things that illuminate the logic behind such extraordinary animal forms. 

Of the estimated 3.1 million known species, only about 3,000 wield an extreme weapon of some sort – from tusks and horns to crazy protrusions from the head or shoulder blades. While sizes range from the ginormous (16’ Mastodon tusks) to the miniscule (1/4” fly antlers), all weapons are relative to the size of the animal. Growing weapons consumes valuable resources, so animals only enter an arms race when certain factors dictate.

What factors could have such an impact, you ask? The basic equation illustrated in Animal Weapons is this: sexual selection (i.e., the women get to let the men fight over them) + economic defensibility (a need to secure territory for breeding, grazing, etc…) = extreme weapons. Those elements and many more are dissected in captivating detail in each chapter, with real-life examples. Here’s a brief look at one to whet your appetite:

A particular beetle has to guard a tunnel where the female he wants to mate with resides. Because he has to compete with other males for that tunnel and the affections of Mrs. Beetlicious, evolution has provided him with some substantial horns to use as weapons. Not all the beetle dudes are blessed with horns as big (or even any horns at all). So the under-endowed beetles often become “sneaks.” These sneaky bastards make their own tunnel not far from well-endowed beetle’s and then tunnel SIDEWAYS into macho man’s castle to mate with his lady on the sly. How super cool is that? (For beetles. Human dudes? Not cool at all.)

But it gets even better. Nature will tolerate a certain percentage of procreation by sneaks. But if the sneaks start to have too much success, the extreme weapon, in this case the beetle’s horns, may be deemed unnecessary (no need to guard the female if the sneaks are getting so much of the action anyway), and not worth the resources the beetle requires to grow and sustain them. Therefore, the horns may begin to evolve back out of the species. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

But wait, it gets awesomer (not a word, don’t care). Turns out, very similar principles apply to the human arms race. Emlen provides human-specific examples of the animal-world principles discussed in most chapters, and it’s unreal to see how they apply. The entire structure of the Royal Navy evolved along these same principles. When sneaks (German U-boats) began attacking cumbersome battleships, those battleships evolved into aircraft carriers.

If this book is making me sound like a 6-year-old who just opened the dog breed picture book that was all she wanted for Christmas, then my enthusiasm is being properly expressed. The only part that didn't have me completely riveted were the few sections at the end dealing entirely with the arms race of mankind. I just don’t find us or our (modern) military as interesting as the animal world, and while I thought the analogies in the animal chapters were super, the military-only sections just weren't as smack in the middle of my wheelhouse.

STREET SENSE: It’s only February, but I’d be shocked if Animal Weapons isn't in my top ten reads of 2015. Top 5 isn't even a stretch, it was that fantastic. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you’re at all interested in the animal world and/or principles of evolution.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: I must have been distracted, because I never noticed the blade sliding across my thumb until it was too late--I’d sliced clean through to the bone. We were miles away from civilization with no easy way to get to a hospital. So we sterilized the wound with rum and sutured it with ants.

(Yes, you read that right, SUTURED IT WITH ANTS. To get the whole story, you’ll just have to read the book.)

COVER NERD SAYS: A great drawing of a saber-toothed cat on a book about animal weapon evolution? I ordered this book based on the cover and title alone. Although I was a bit concerned about the knight on the cover, the image was small enough I figured the book concentrated on the weapons of animals and not those of men. The proportions turned out to be pretty right on, so I think the cover served the book (and the reader) exceptionally well. (The analogies to knights and their armor were stellar, by the way.)  I love this cover.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES :: Caitlin Doughty

Like most of us, author Caitlin Doughty was shielded from death as a child, right down to the dead goldfish switched out for a live lookalike before she noticed anything amiss. But at the age of 8, Doughty witnessed the horrific death of a little girl, after which she understandably became a bit obsessed with the subject. Years later, somewhat aimless, Doughty took a job as crematory operator at a local funeral home, Westwind Cremation and Burial. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: & Other Lessons from the Crematory is Doughty's account of that job and its impact on her thoughts and beliefs on death and dying, on both a personal and global level.

Smoke is a fascinating account of the inner workings of a crematory, as well as an eye-opening look at how death in America has been commercialized and removed from tradition. Although Doughty's main job was to run the cremation machines ("retorts"), she also assisted her co-workers in body pickups and burial/cremation preparations, including makeup and embalming. Presented in a straight-forward manner infused with Doughty's sly humor and vibrant personality, the book is far from morbid or gross (there was only one short cringe-worthy scene; bet you'll know it when you read it).

Smoke is full of fascinating and educational stories on Doughty's daily responsibilities that alone make this book worth the price of admission. But Doughty has a much broader purpose in mind. Whether she's shaving her first corpse or loading a body in a retort ("Each machine had a metal door that slid up and down, the chomping mouths of an industrial children's fable"), Doughty wants us to find a comfort level with the subject matter, aware of just how far removed we've become from a healthy relationship with death and dead bodies:

Every culture has death values. Those values are transmitted in the form of stories and myths, told to children starting before they are old enough to form memories. The beliefs children grow up with give them a framework to make sense of and take control of their lives...[T]here is something deeply unsettling -- or deeply thrilling, depending on how you view it -- about what is happening to our death values. There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.

Doughty explains how these breaks were often necessitated by circumstance. During the Civil War, for example, the sheer volume of bodies, combined with insufficient time and transportation, increased the need for embalming. But death rituals have also historically been driven by religious beliefs. As society becomes increasingly secular and commercialized, we worsen our relationship with death, hiding from it at every turn. Of course, this is all to the delight of plastic surgeons, rest homes, hospitals, and funeral practitioners, each of which plays a part in separating us from the death process and, perhaps, self-awareness and closure.

Left to their own devices, human bodies rot, decompose, come apart, and sink gloriously back into the earth from whence they came. Using embalming and heavy protective caskets to stop this process is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, and demonstrates our clear terror of decomposition. The death industry markets caskets and embalming under the rubric of helping bodies look "natural," but our current death customs are as natural as training majestic creatures like bears and elephants to dance in cute little outfits, or erecting replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Venetian canals in the middle of the harsh American desert.

Doughty ultimately left Westwind to attend mortuary school in order to get an inside look at how our death practitioners are being trained. She has since worked towards bringing more traditional rituals and natural deaths back into focus. She believes we are missing "rituals of true significance, rituals involving the body, the family, emotions." Rituals that can't be replaced with buying power and that provide the gift of facing our own mortality and finding closure and perhaps some comfort. You can read more about Doughty's mission at her website, Order of the Good Death, where she and other funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists "explore ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality."

As a side note, the MAR was lucky enough to be selected to contribute to Pop Culture Nerd's Nerdy Special List, 2014 Favorites Edition (which you can find here), and Smoke was my contribution to that list. There are great picks from all the contributing bloggers, go check it out. And give PCN's blog a follow, she always has great reviews and information on books, movies, and other pop culture goodness (the fashion editions during awards season are not to be missed).

Final thoughts on Smoke:

STREET SENSE: Whip-smart, wickedly funny, and a natural storyteller, Doughty turns what could be a dry and morbid tale into a fascinating and enlightening must-read.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves. It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink razor in your hand.

COVER NERD SAYS: I really like this cover.  Neat and clean, it's nothing fancy, but gets the point across. While the coloring, bordering, and main title text can be interpreted as quite formal (perhaps even funereal?), the artwork and set-off of the subtitle text dial the formal back and bring in a little, dare I say, warmth.

FLASHBACK FRIDAY :: The Martian

Flashback Fridays are set aside for a few words about a book, movie, television show, album or other favorite thing from my past I think may be worthy of your time.

Today is a trip into the not too distant past necessitated by news trickling out about a movie based on the best book I've read this year: The Martian by Andy Weir. To be directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Drew Goddard (World War Z), the cast thus far includes Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Donald Glover, Kristen Wiig, Michael Pena, Sean Bean, and Kate Mara. Reportedly these folks are taking less than their usual payday in order to be part of the movie. If I could buy a ticket today for a November 2015 release, I'd do it.

Why so excited? The Martian blew the doors off my pressure vessel. In a nutshell, Mark Watney is part of a mission to Mars gone wrong. He's stranded with insufficient provisions and no way back. Martian toast. In his own words in the opening line of the book:

I'm pretty much fucked. 

What follows is a logbook of Mark's efforts to get off the Red Planet. I was somewhat reluctant to read it. I don't read a great deal of science fiction. I have no lifelong astronaut dream. I do not work in a job requiring much in the way of math or equations for very good reason. What the hell about this book was going to interest me? Turns out: Every. Damn. Thing.

I don't care who you are or what you read, this book is the first recommendation out of my mouth to anyone who asks (and many who don't), without hesitation. To date, no one has been disappointed. In fact, everyone raved. The Martian has something for everyone. Are you going to understand everything that's going on? Hell no. Does it matter? Hell no.

The Martian is hilarious, sciencey, ulcer-inducing, edge-of-your-seat reading.  If I could force you to read one book this year, this would be it.

I'm also a little partial to Andy as he's a local author and a really nice guy.  If you get a chance to see him at an event, do so.  Ask him how The Martian came to be a book, it's a fascinating story.