At the beginning of 2020 I intended to post book reviews after each book I read. It worked okay for the first two months, then the famous “I’ll do it later in the day/week” won. And well, here we are, January 2021.
I don’t think all the books I read in 2020 deserve a special blog post here though (yes, I mean you, Sinek…). However, if you’re interested in other reviews or books I’ve read that you’d like to discuss, let’s meet in goodreads! Without further ado, I leave you here some of the books I read in 2020 that I think you should read too:
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Necessary.
“When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren’t.”
It definitely expands the mind and is a necessary read to learn about other experiences, feelings, and daily struggles that not all of us live and perhaps will never understand. That we don’t live them does not mean we can continue to ignore them. Especially knowing that we all probably continue to support or allow racism in its various expressions to be part of everyday life – even if “unconsciously”. We need to become more conscious about what that we do can do more harm than good or the so-called “neutral”. For some reason, many “whites” still take discussions about racism as a personal threat. I think this book is a good start to begin to expand, learn and work on ourselves.
Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In 2018 I lived in a building where every December some generous neighbor would place a stack of books to give away on top of the buildings’ mailboxes. One of those books was “Flu”. Naturally, I took it. However, I had it in the huge pile of “books to read” and it was until April 2020 where I thought it couldn’t stay there any longer. It seemed appropriate, given the circumstances.
Only a few doctors and historians of the time devoted a few lines in their memoirs to the 1918 pandemic. Back then no one really knew what had happened! People fell ill and died “mysteriously”. At the time, the development of microbiology and other areas of medical science was not even close to what it is today.
Before this book, I had no idea that it had taken us almost 100 years to incriminate the microorganism/virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic. Almost A HUN-DRED years! And it was a discovery that “we” almost missed and almost didn’t happen. In “Flu”, Gina Kolata recounts everything from the direct impact the 1918 pandemic had to ending World War I; the digging up of corpses some decades later – with very little care – that perhaps could have borne better results if done a few years later; to the pseudo-accidental secrets that waited preserved in alcohol in a U.S. military laboratory.
I recommend this book not only as an important historical reminder, very well narrated and researched, but also to better understand and appreciate the current scientific development and status and the impressive efforts being made in the current 2020 pandemic, in which in less than 1 month we already had even the genomic sequence of the virus.
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Gould is undoubtedly one of the best science communicators of the last century, and with this book, he brings unpopular periods and animals to the forefront and makes them as interesting, if not more so, than the much-hyped dinosaurs. As a paleontological text it is already somewhat outdated, of course, but that does not make it any less entertaining or important; moreover, more than a paleontology text, it is an important history of our planet and species. It tells the way in which different scientists over time work together in one way or another to piece together possible scenarios of the past, and is replete with reasoning lessons.
The way in which Gould ties together the stories of different paleontologists, in their time and within their limitations, breaks down several stereotypes that still exist about how science is done and about scientists. Also about how we know what we know and why we will probably always be wrong, without this uncertainty having to be a reason to stop investigating. Through common errors in interpreting the fossil record and events so far back, Gould discusses different biases we all have and how we easily fail to reason and adopt new ideas and evidence because of our logical way of thinking, which is not always necessarily chronological.
“No two observers or participants will ever recount such a complex tale in the same manner, but we can at least establish a groundwork in chronology.”
It is also interesting to learn about some fossils that for decades were interpreted as a complete animal until years later they found the complete fossil and it turns out that what was thought to be a species of jellyfish was actually the mouth structure of another organism (Walcott’s Peytoia, now Anomalocaris).
As for scientific communication, I rescue from the first part of the book the importance of taking care of the art and the images or diagrams we use to communicate science (iconography), because sometimes we can inadvertently create something that transcends the same scientific updates and an outdated and/or misinterpreted idea lasts for centuries – as the example that Gould shows about the erroneous idea of evolution being something linear.
Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As a limnologist and an algae enthusiast, reading this book seemed like an obvious thing to do. However, the angle was not what I expected – but the book did NOT disappoint. Definitely a book I recommend to anyone.
Ruth Kassinger summarizes the evolutionary history and importance of these organisms and then quickly delves into different current applications – many of which I had never heard of. The book is full of personal stories and interviews written in such a way that you feel like you witnessed them. It is entertaining, light, and easy to read.
Discovering the history, utilization, and applications of the different types of algae around the world, I also felt that the book constantly reflects the importance of basic research for industry and development. For example, how describing the life cycle of Porphyra – by an almost unrecognized female British scientist – after WWII managed to save the fishery industry in Japan and Korea. This book is a constant reminder through human-algae relationships that the world is one and environmental impacts recognize no borders.
“Algae are not only our past, they are also our future.”
View all my reviews
That’s it for 2020, despite it all it was a good reading year. Let’s see if I can keep up the monthly review post in 2021!