Breath by James Nestor

I heard the author of this book interviewed on the People I (Mostly) Admire podcast. I heard a lot of amazing and seemingly outlandish claims about breathing. But the interviewer is someone I trust who had tried the things discussed. He was amazed at his results, so I decided to read the book myself.

The text tells the author’s journey of discovery. He suffered from pulmonary issues himself and sought out ways to improve his life. The journey took over ten years. He starts with an experiment that he did with a friend and colleague with lab results measured by Stanford University. They both got a long series of tests. Then they plugged their noses for ten full days so they could only breath through their mouths. For those ten days they ate and exercised to a precise schedule so they could reproduce the same activities when they were breathing through their noses for the following ten days. They got all the same tests at the end of the first ten days and at the end of the full twenty days. They had all sorts of issues when breathing through their mouths that simply went away when they started breathing through their noses. These included higher blood pressure, snoring, and mild sleep apnea. The rest of the book explores the author’s research on what affects breathing and how to breathe to improve health.

I was astounded by what this book uncovered! I am looking forward to putting much of it into practice myself. I already find myself keeping my mouth closed and breathing through my nose as much as I can. There is an appendix with breathing exercises as well as a link to videos that also show how they are done. The only quibbles I have are that due to the excellent structure for telling about all he learned, the author’s storytelling arcs are a bit confusing at times. He had to jump around a bit in his timeline to intelligently gather the details for the book. And there isn’t a coherent single description for what a reader should do with this information. The author isn’t a physician, so this is likely on purpose. He does support all that he presents, though, with scientific studies from doctors and other scientists. I am looking forward to building a breathing practice that I expect will help me to stay as healthy as I can as I age.

My rating: 4.5/5

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

I’ve heard about this book many times in the year since it was first published. I think I first read about it when Cory Doctorow reviewed it on his blog. But the most recent time it came to my attention and that finally nudged me to pick it up was Austin Kleon’s weekly Friday post on Substack. With all that is going on in the world with technology in general and AI in particular, I felt it was time to read this. In fact, I should have read it much sooner.

If anyone has heard the term “Luddite”, it was most likely used as a slur to refer to someone who doesn’t like technology and is vehemently against its adoption. This is a slander against the original Luddites. The book sets out to correct this mistaken myth about them and also to show how we can learn from them how to resist technology when it is bad for workers and for humans in general. The Luddites did not hate technology. They embraced it when it improved not only business but also their lives, both at work and at home. They began to resist when new machines became a danger to both. They took action to destroy those machines when their government would do nothing to protect them or their children against that negative present and future. Interestingly, they never set out to harm any individual, with a single exception.

The author definitely has a thesis that he sets out to prove. This is no neutral history. That said, his case is supremely persuasive. The background politics seem to rhyme with what is happening now, especially with the attitude of big business toward technology as an unmitigated good and the treatment of anyone who resists those technologies as ignorant fools fighting against the future. Ultimately, this is the story of power over others. It made me wonder why one small group of people is so unwilling to share the financial rewards of technology with the very workers who make that improvement possible? My entire life I have seen economic systems that represent capital (capitalism) and labor (socialism/communism) at war with one another. Is there no system that we can design that honors the value brought to economies by *both* capital *and* labor? This book creates the fertile ground on which we may one day find an answer to that question.

My rating: 5/5

Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State by Byron Tau

I am a subscriber to Reason magazine and have been since 2020. In the June issue is a review of this book. I am concerned about internet privacy so the review piqued my interest and I immediately requested a copy from my library.

This book outlines the history and growth of cooperation between technology companies and the government. The essential premise is that various levels of government are purchasing personal data of cell phones and the internet from tech companies. The level of privacy on this data would require a warrant if it was being requested directly from individuals. But because it is considered “digital exhaust” and therefore a product, governments can simply purchase it with no public oversight. This is deeply concerning to the author, a concern I share.

If you are wondering why we don’t have any federal laws that protect our digital privacy, this is why. Doing so would cut off their way around the Constitution, requiring them to have warrants to collect such data. Mass surveillance would become impossible because it would be illegal. The author has done extensive research into how this all came into being, who are the players, the whys and the hows. There is even an appendix written in plain English for things you can do to protect your own personal privacy while online. It is essential reading in our modern digital age.

My rating: 5/5

Here by Richard McGuire

I first learned about this book from a movie trailer I randomly came across on YouTube. The director who made Back to the Future, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump is directing the movie Here staring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. To be honest, the movie didn’t look that interesting to me. The fact that it told the story of one corner of a house throughout thousands of years of history just seemed too limiting to make for a very interesting movie. But when I heard that it was based on a graphic novel, I was intrigued. As a book, that concept might work. So I requested it from my library.

The graphic novel focuses on a corner of a living room in a house somewhere in North America, perhaps New England. The panels on each page show things from different times in that same room. Here is a sample of how it looks.

There are very few words on the page. The “reader” is left to contemplate the juxtaposition of the collages on each page. It explores how similar we are across the ages, while at the same time illustrating the enormous change across our planet over the millennia. It’s not a riveting piece of storytelling. But it is a unique experiment in storytelling. It doesn’t take very long to get through and is worth each moment spent in contemplation.

My rating: 4/5

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Earlier this summer, my partner and I took a week-long vacation in northwestern Montana. A big part of the trip was the beauty of Glacier National Park. Learning about the park involved learning about the Native Americans who were there before white people moved in and took over, particular at Two Medicine Lake. The park also butts up against the reservation of the Blackfoot tribe to the east of the park. This reminded me of a book I had queued up to read called 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. I started reading it the night before we left.

Since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by the history of the Americas before they were invaded and plundered by Europeans. What was here before my ancestors came? How did they live? What could we learn from them? The consensus at that time was that there wasn’t much to learn. They were just small bands of tribes sprinkled throughout the Western Hemisphere living with and respecting the land. The premise and research of this book show something else entirely.

There are two main takeaways for me. The first is that the Americas may not have been quite so sparsely populated as scholars previously thought. In fact, there may have been more Indians in the Americas than in all of Europe. So where were they when the colonists of the Americas started showing up? It is likely that many, if not most, were dead from disease. Smallpox was brought by the first explorers. With no natural immunity to such diseases, as much as 90% of the population may have been killed. By the time colonists arrived, the populations were sparse and no longer able to maintain their previous ways of living.

And that is the second takeaway. The previous understanding of the natives of the Americas is that they were nomads who lived with the land, never changing it, farming very little if at all. New discoveries have changed this thinking. One mind-blowing idea shared is that the Amazon River basin (referred to as Amazonia in the book), was cultivated! No, it wasn’t one big native garden. But rather than simply accepting nature for what it was, they nurtured it to their betterment and the environment’s. Indians often used fire to manage their surroundings. In Amazonia, they burned only to charcoal (not ash) which made the soil more fertile, planting orchards that today we think of as fruitful jungle.

This book is filled with new ways of understanding and thinking about the experience of Native Americans before the Europeans arrived. And this brings a whole new perspective to what happened after the arrival of the first Europeans. We still have much to learn from those who lived here before our ancestors arrived. Hopefully one of those lessons will involve a greater respect for the native people where we live.

My rating: 4/5

The Postcard by Anne Berest

Once a year our book club reads a book in translation. This year, that book was The Postcard by Anne Berest, translated from the French by Tina Kover published in 2023. It is a semi-biographical novel that tells the history of the author’s family. Her grandmother received the titular postcard in 2003. On it were the names of her mother, father, sister, and brother who were all murdered in the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. The story opens with the author’s mother showing her the postcard and then going on to tell her the history of the people on the postcard until they were deported from France by the Vichy government. The rest of the tale is the author’s journey to discover who sent the postcard and why.

This book was a mixed bag. The writing was vivid, really connecting with lived experience. The translator must be credited with taking the original French and making it feel like it was written in English. A sample: “Her legs feel as if they’re still vibrating from the train, the same way the ground seems to shift and heave after a boat trip.” On the other hand, the characters feel a little too stuck. Or maybe the author just dwells on a particular aspect of a character a bit too long, making it feel like they are a little unreasonable. For instance, despite the growing restrictions on Jews in Vichy France, the father on the postcard insists on doing everything the government asks of him in the hopeless effort to become a French citizen. In the end, he willfully and meekly goes with the police when he is finally arrested and deported. It made me want to scream at the book, “What are you doing!?” I suppose that this sort of thing really did happen, but it just left me empty, sad, and a little angry.

The conclusion of the book comes a bit too quickly for my taste. There is a revelation and then it feels as if the book just ends. It does tell the complete history of a family’s experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and for that is unique and valuable. But overall this book was only okay. I liked it. But I didn’t love it.

My rating: 3/5

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

I first heard about this book last year when someone suggested it in my book club. It didn’t get chosen then, but I heard more about it on a podcast episode. I was blown away by the story of these young women (girls, in many cases). So when this book came back around this year as a possibility for our book club, I was excited when it was selected.

It is the well-researched history of mostly teenage women who worked painting luminous watches and other instruments in the early part of the twentieth century. What made the watches glow was radium in the paint. At that time, they weren’t fully aware of the dangers of radiation. In fact, radium was often seen as a miracle cure. But as the dangers became known to the employers, they did nothing to protect their employees. These young women would even put the tip of the paint brush in their mouths to get a fine point. And they were playful with it, painting themselves with it like makeup before they went out after work.

Years down the road, they started having medical problems that no one understood. The most common was their teeth falling out and their jaws literally coming apart. Eventually they discovered that it was the paint that had caused their issues. They hired lawyers to sue the employers who fought them with everything they had.

This is a hard read, but not because of the writing. The writing is excellent. But to read what these women went through physically and emotionally due to the negligence and heartlessness of their employers was deeply effecting. If this had been fiction, I would have had a hard time finding it believable. It is important to remember what these women went through to fight for workers’ rights.

My rating: 4.5/5

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

For Black History Month (February), my book club read this book. The author is a former host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. It is the story of his growing up in South Africa, both during and after apartheid there. It was educational, funny, and at times emotionally challenging.

Each chapter tells of a part of his life. These include a wide variety of experiences. There was the time he pooped on the floor of his house as a small boy because it was raining outside and he didn’t want to go to the outhouse. He once spent a week in jail for borrowing his step-father’s car without permission due to it having no proper title. Most emotionally and in the final chapter, he tells of how his step-father shot his mother in the head and left her for dead.

Throughout the book, he made me laugh. He also made me feel deeply for the people, like himself, that struggled through apartheid in South Africa and the challenging times afterward as the society adjusted to the new reality. But most of all, this was the story of a boy who loved his mother deeply and experienced the many ins and outs of growing up in a difficult time, coming out of it a wise and compassionate young man.

My rating: 4/5

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

I love this book. It is informative and nerdy yet eminently readable. It is about the seemingly boring subject of infrastructure—how it came to be, why, what it is for, and what it’s future is. Not exactly your modern day thriller. Yet Deb Chachra somehow tells the story of infrastructure and makes it, if not fascinating (though it is to me), interesting and approachable.

The first part of the book lays out what infrastructure is and why we have it. In brief, it is how we manage our access to and use of energy. And we have it to enable humanity as a whole to do more with less. She then pivots to discussing infrastructure in the context of global anthropogenic climate change. And this is where the book really shines.

Her premise is that we need to move from combustion as our source of energy (fossil fuels) to renewable sources of energy (geothermal, wind, solar). This is hardly new or surprising. What is surprising is that she argues that doing so would move us from energy scarcity to energy abundance. After all, there are only so many fossil fuels on our planet to burn and burning them is causing catastrophic harm to our environment. But renewables are abundant. We just need to learn how to harness them for the use of all.

The rest of the book is a vision for how this is possible, desirable, and most of all essential to the well being of all humankind and our planet. That the author has told such a clear, hopeful story about such a challenging subject around a bleak prospect is a credit to her ability and passion for such a project.

My rating: 5/5

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

This book is narrative non-fiction at its best. It tells the story of corruption and prejudice in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. When the government came for their land, the Osage tribe negotiated a settlement that gave them rights to everything below the surface. These were called head rights, and every member of the tribe held them in the land. When oil was discovered there, the Osage became rich. The jealous white people appealed to the government that the natives were not fit to manage their own money. But apparently that wasn’t enough. Many tribe members began to die unexplained deaths while other were outright murdered.

The fledgling FBI led by a young J. Edgar Hoover, sent Tom White to investigate. What he uncovered was a deep, dark conspiracy to kill all the members of one family to gain access to their head rights. The worst part was that the ring leader was a self-professed “best friend” of the Osage whose nephew was married a member of the family. The investigation is slow going due to those involved stymieing the investigators at every turn. How it turns out is stranger than fiction.

The most tragic part of this story is covered in the third section of the book where the author uncovers the vast extent of the corruption. It went far beyond the subjects of the investigation covered in the book. The details may never be known and the guilty parties will likely never face justice.

My rating: 4/5