The
Dr. Drew and Adam Book by Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla with
Marshall Fine
(Dell, 1998, ISBN 0-440-50836-3)
In early 1997 I returned to Los Angeles for an adjunct teaching post at Occidental College. I found myself battling my way through the downtown L.A. traffic to go to the Rockreation climbing gym two or three nights a week, and one evening on the way home I happened across Loveline on the radio, which I hadn't heard in a few years. After a couple of months, the show completely changed my understanding of human behavior and human society. Seriously - I sometimes feel that I've learned as much about human beings from the Loveline radio show as I did about the earth during college or graduate school. (and no, that's not a dig at either of my geology programs!)
In the early 80's, a USC med student named Drew Pinsky started helping out on a radio call-in show at KROQ, L.A.'s alternative-punky-teeny-bopper station. More than a decade and a half later, he's still at it, along with the wickedly penetrating insights of smart-ass sidekick Adam Carolla. (I take a particularly guilty pleasure in laughing at Adam's raunchy humor and withering diatribes.) The Dr. Drew and Adam Book summarizes a lot of the knowledge that they've gained about what makes people tick.
I honestly believe that a lot of the mistakes, misery, and anguish that people go through could be avoided, if they simply listened to the advice and insights on Loveline and at Dr. Drew's website, drdrew.com. Especially if they became aware of the "morning after pill"! (I'm going to assume that I won't get in trouble for mentioning this, since the community college where I work is the only place where I've ever seen a poster about the "morning after pill" displayed in public!)
Africa: A Biography of The Continent by John Reader
(Vintage, 1999, ISBN 0-679-40979-3)
When I got back from New Zealand in early 1996, a mining geologist that I knew gave me the impression that he'd be able to get me a job at a large mining company that he worked for in Johannesburg, South Africa. Anticipating moving to a new home in Africa, I spent several months reading about the country and talking to people who'd been there. I also got a job offer from a prospector who sent drilling crews to Ghana, collecting data and samples for the mining companies operating there. The thought of entry-level menial labor in the equatorial sun wasn't too appealing, so I held out for the higher-level job in Jo'Burg. The mining geologist was laid off, I never heard from him again, and I still haven't been to Africa.
Years later, I picked up a copy of John Reader's book at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and found it very interesting. Having read Michener's The Covenant while anticipating a move to SA, I suppose that Africa could be described an almost Michener-esque work of non-fiction. The sections on human origins, the slave trade, 'Zulu myths and reality', 'Settler myths and reality', and the chaos of the post-colonial era were particularly fascinating. A great book to read by headlamp while camped in one's tent or truck in high, cold mountains.
Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared
Diamond
(Norton, 1997, ISBN 0-393-31755-2)
The history of everybody, for the last 13,000 years. Really!
Another winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
This book can probably best be summarized with some excerpts from the preface:
"We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shdows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitiute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial..."
"This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren't: as you will see, the answers to the question don't involve human racial differences at all..."
Jared Diamond goes far beyond the sorts of "proximal" causes that we read about in most history books. He explores, in fascinating detail, how the "ultimate" causes of these historical inequalities are related the development of food production and 'farmer power', which are in turn related to plant and animal biogeography, and even to the shapes of the continents! I can't recommend this book highly enough.
A
Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew
Chaikin
(Penguin, 1994, ISBN 0-14-00.9706-6)
I've read umpteen histories of the space age since I was a kid, and Chaikin's book was remarkably compelling. This book inspired the Tom Hanks / HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon". I particularly enjoyed the attention that Chaikin pays to the scientific side of Apollo, especially the geology. The chapters on Lee Silver and the geologic training, Apollo 15, and Jack Schmitt warmed my geologists' heart.
So why am I putting this book in the "Human Beings" section? Because I think that's the level on which this book will best appeal to most people. The giant technocratic dream of Apollo was, of course, badly tarnished by Vietnam, Watergate, and the Cold War, but I can't help suspecting that Arthur C. Clarke may be right in the end..."Apollo may be the only achievement by which our age is remembered a thousand years from now." If there is ever to be a return to the moon, I think that people need to feel the human side of Apollo, and that's what this book communicates.
The
Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, and Power by
Daniel Yergin
(1991, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-79932-0)
Yet another Pulitzer Prize winner. I swear, I don't pick 'em this way. There must be something to this Pulitzer business.
(Note added in April 2001: I think I originally wrote this recommendation in 1999 or 2000, during the height of the Silicon Valley boom. I find it somewhat interesting to re-read in mid-2001...)
As a student of a relatively obscure science, I love "the story behind the story". Turn on the news or open a newspaper, and it seems that everything is controlled by politicians or economic movers and shakers. But what controls them? Resources and their uneven distribution. And in the modern world, that means one thing above all else (except maybe water): OIL. Black gold. Texas tea. Yergin's book is as epic as the quest that his title alludes to. I especially enjoyed the section on World War II , and how strongly the vagaries of oil supply influenced that war. As a geologist, I'm in the one profession that would benefit if world oil prices spiked upward, while the rest of the world economy would suffer. If we had another 70's-style oil shock, you could forget about the dominance of the dot-coms - the real money would be in looking for oil. The students would all be clamoring to be geologists, as they did in the 70's. Those circumstances will probably never come again, and so geologists will probably never again be the kings of prosperity. Even if that particular fantasy won't come true, it's nice to read The Prize and be comfortingly reminded of 'the real power behind the throne' of the world economy.
The
Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy by Robert D.
Kaplan
(Vintage, ISBN 0-679-75123-8)
This is perhaps the ultimate "travel book". In the early to mid-90's, Kaplan traveled from West Africa to Southeast Asia, to paint a "state of the world" portrait at the end of the 20th century. His main thesis is that 'nation-states', as we've come to know them, are rapidly breaking down. This is due not only to environmental factors, but to the artificial nature of most national boundaries, when compared to ages-old patterns of ethnic geography and conquest. Sound dull and academic? Not on your life - this was the most riveting non-fiction book I've ever read. (well, maybe second, after Joe Simpson's Touching the Void)
I read this book during a five-day session of geological field work a few years ago, and each day I would hurry back to camp at dusk, cook a quick dinner, curl up in my sleeping bag in the back of the Suburban, and devour another couple hundred pages. An excerpt from the first chapter gives some idea of Kaplan's quest. At first blush it may sound highly 'political', but what I loved about this book was that it was so apolitical. To me, it seemed neither liberal nor conservative, just a fascinating depiction of the forces that really make the world go around.
' "Cartography" deploys its vocabulary... so that it embodies a systematic social inequality. The distinctions of class and power are engineered, reified and legitimated in the map.... The rule seems to be 'the more powerful, the more prominent.' To those who have strength in the world shall be added the strength of the map," writes the late University of Chicago geographer J. Brian Harley. Maps, so seemingly objective, are actually propaganda. They represent the lowest common denominator of the conventional wisdom.But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the Mediterranean basin is no longer the center of civilization? What if there are really not fifty-odd nations in Africa as the maps suggest - what if there are only six, or seven, or eight real nations on that continent? Or, instead of nations, several hundred tribal entities? What if the distance between the hotel in Danane to which I had just been directed and a town over the border in Guinea or Liberia, though only forty miles on the map, was really greater in terms of time than the distance between New York and St. Louis? What if the shantytowns and bidonvilles sprouting up around the globe that do not appear on any maps are far more important to the future of civilization than many of the downtowns and prosperous suburbs that do appear on maps? What if the territory held by guerrilla armies and urban mafias - territory that is never shown on maps - is more significant than the territory claimed by many recognized states? What if Africa is even farther away from North America and Europe than the maps indicate, but more important to our past and future than Europe or North America?
I thought of my wanderings in almost geological terms. As John McPhee set out to do in Basin and Range - mapping "deep time" in a journey that mocked the "unnatural subdivision[s] of the globe... framed in straight lines" - I wanted to map the future, perhaps the "deep future," ignoring what was legally and officially there and, instead, touching, feeling, and smelling what was really there.
Here's a link to a review of Kaplan's work. It appeared in the online magazine Salon.com on April 17, 2001