5 Books to Consider as a New Year Approaches
Photo by Kuma Kum
As a new year approaches, we present five books that helped shape our thinking during 2020. Enjoy the holiday season and get ready for 2021!
"Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures“ by Merlin Sheldrake (published May 2020)
“Expands our conception of the living world… laced with intriguing details.”- Financial Times
“This book is like one surprise after another.” - David Byrne (Rolling Stone)
“Provocative chapters describe the “radical” decomposing powers of fungi, their implications for pollution remediation and their ability to transform industrial and agricultural waste into a variety of new materials, from building blocks to vegan leather.” - Wall Street Journal
"Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” by Michael Fox (Feb. 2013)
“The chilling story of how the food giants have seduced everyone in this country … We are fundamentally changing our lives—and the world around us.” - Alice Waters
“If you had any doubt as to the food industry’s complicity in our obesity epidemic, it will evaporate when you read this book.” - Washington Post
"Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives" by Daniel J. Levitin (Jan. 2020)
“Masterfully lays out the evidence that what we thought of as old age is in fact a unique developmental stage in which extraordinary contributions become possible." - Stanley Prusiner, M.D. Nobel Laureate, Director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of California, San Francisco
“An extraordinary “map” to a place each of us eventually journeys to. In it, he explains and demystifies the aging process in layman’s terms. Don’t grow old without it.” - General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army (Ret.)
"If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future" by Jill Lepore (Sept. 2020)
“A beautifully written and intellectually rigorous account of the origins of the science of predictive analytics and behavioral data science in the cold war era.” - Financial Times
“A plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behavior—including, most insidiously, our behavior as voters.... It didn’t have to be this way … history is not inevitable.” - James Gleick, New York Review of Books
"I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life" by Ed Yong (Jan. 2018)
“Offer[s] engrossing-and gross-details about how an invisible world shapes our species…Mr. Yong’s book lives up to its title, containing multitudes of facts presented in graceful, accessible prose….The author wonderfully turns to the humanities again and again to enrich the book’s scientific detail…And he’s funny.” -Wall Street Journal
“Synthesizes literally hundreds and hundreds of papers, but he never overwhelms you with the science. He just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next … science journalism at its best.” - Bill Gates