This week I finished: When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi: This book sold huge and I’ve seen it for years. I kept comparing it to Ikiru the movie by Kurasawa and Death of Ivan Illyich the novella by Tolstoy. They’re all works on evaluating and reevaluating life, how to live it, and what we value when confronted with mortality. Man’s Search for Meaning by Frankl too. People may look[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil deGrasse Tyson: I didn’t know how popular this book was when I read it. Now I see it was on the New York Times bestseller list over a year and has over 30,000 reviews on Amazon. I think of science as something you do involving nature. You can experiment, work with equations, or other active things, but I[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Animal Liberation Now!, by Peter Singer: Since I last ate meat in 1990 and any dairy or other animal products about ten years ago (I don’t remember when), I can’t remember first reading this book, but this new version is well updated. Now I’ve met Peter, spoken a few times, and read The Life You Can Save. I love how readable his writing is (also his[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg: Approaching a quarter-million burpees without missing a day in over a decade, among other habits, I always enjoy reading about habits. This book is engaging. Duhigg tells stories, presents science, and builds engagement over the course of the book well. I still haven’t found someone who treats how not[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: A powerful book about how Manifest Destiny manifested in the American west. Diverting rivers and depleting aquifers created some of the biggest bureaucracies and, as the book puts it, the biggest socialist projects for people claiming to loathe socialism. From this 2011 review from the Environmental Law Institute: “The year before Reisner’s untimely death[…] Keep reading →

You know several legumes that don’t need cooking, like string beans, garden peas, snap peas, peanuts, and snow peas. The bulk section of my coop also sells chickpea flour, which I believe is just ground uncooked chickpeas. At least I’ve put raw chick peas in a blender and gotten chickpea flour out of it, though not as fine as the store sells, and blending them is loud. I tried blending[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl: one of my favorite books since I first read it, probably in the early 2000s. I hadn’t read it in maybe ten years, which means since starting working on sustainability leadership. I find it more valuable than ever. It’s perfectly relevant to our situation today. The book led me to develop the approach to difficult times: “However difficult my[…] Keep reading →