This week I finished: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, by Christopher Ryan: This book covered a huge part of what I've understood about how our culture formed. I didn't learn much anthropology in school, maybe none. I woke up to it starting with podcast guest James Suzman's book Affluence Without Abundance, about the San in southern Africa. It revealed to me that people I thought were living in the Stone Age weren't suffering or hopelessly behind the times. On the contrary, they were living in tune with their environment. In many ways, they lived in ways many in what I thought of as modernity would envy. Later I found the book Tribe by podcast guest Sebastian Junger, the book The Dawn of Everything, and the videocast What…

This week I finished: The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, by podcast guest J. B. MacKinnon: I read this book years ago, before recording the episodes with J. B. I reread it for the book club of the alumni of my workshop. It made a big impression on me then. I like it even more today. It was coincidental how timely it was as a counter to Julian Simon's work. This book illustrated the depletion and homogenization humanity has unleashed on the world. J. B. uses the term "ten percent world" to describe the amount of wildlife left. He portrays how earth used to be. It has never been static, but there was a lot…

This week I finished: Gates of Fire, by podcast guest Steven Pressfield: The moment I finished listening to this novel, I restarted from the beginning and I'm a third of the way through my second time. I loved it, especially about halfway through, when the Spartan characters, way of life, and values start coming through. I loved The War of Art, but didn't cross over into Steven's fiction until a few months ago with The Arcadian and Man at Arms. I wrote about a section that hit me in Wounded Warriors, by Steven Pressfield, and Ourselves. Gates of Fire treated fear, love, duty, honor, masculinity, femininity, and other values in a way I don't know how to describe, but I'd say both subtly and head on. He broke a…