Over my years of offering this weekly posting of Nonfiction Views, I have several times mentioned my fascination with the natural world. I find it all bedazzling, insanely complex and quite frankly, nearly impossible to even believe. I’m the sort of person who can’t even eat a meal without feeling the weight of everything involved: the profuse extravaganza of plants and animals from which we derive our nourishment, the billion or so microbes found in a mere teaspoon of the fertile soil from which those plants grow, how we humans have used our mysterious brains to develop cooking techniques and creative recipes to turn these foods into the most elaborate and sensual eating experiences, how in just seconds after we thrill at consuming these delicious meals the food all turns to slop that is attacked by acid and another hundred trillion microbes in our digestive system which in turn tears out minerals and vitamins and fats and proteins that our body engineers to keep us alive, and then whatever is left of our delicious meal after this wholesale destruction is expelled from our bodies in disgusting fluids and pastes.
I mean, c'mon. Am I supposed to really believe all that? Who could imagine such a thing?
I’ve been browsing through a recent book which takes a very engaging look at many of these incredible mysteries of the natural world: Why Rats Laugh and Jellyfish Sleep: And Other Enchanting Stories of Evolution, by David Stipp. I was first drawn to it by the table of contents, and one chapter entitled Is Sleep the Biggest Mistake Evolution Ever Made? Because YES! This is exactly how I feel! I do not like sleep at all. Who in the hell thought up this system?! With all the wonderful things to experience by being alive, with all the things we are blessed with the potential to accomplish with our miraculous minds and bodies in our limited lifespans, why in the hell are we forced to spend so much of our precious lives in an unconscious state, vulnerable to danger, and mentally wandering through some unreal dream state? Okay, our bodies need to rest, our minds need to synthesize our experiences...but is this really the best evolution could come up with? And it’s not just us!
Scientists attached tiny sensors to killer jellyfish and discovered that only a third of their day is devoted to hunting for food. The rest of the time they lie on the seabed floor, completely relaxed and immobile. But as author Stipp points out, scientists don’t rush to call this sleep in the sense of restoring the body’s energy and the brain’s neurons, it simply made sense to not be active during the hours of darkness when food hunting wasn't as profitable, and during which turtles, who LOVE to eat killer jellyfish, are most active.
So is it the same for humans? Evolution blacked us out for a period of time each day to keep us quiet and still at night when hunting was difficult and predators active, which in turn increased our chances of survival? But hey, haven’t we moved beyond that? We have ways now to be active 24 hours a day and to handle predators through our alertness rather than shrink from them in unconsciousness. And if sleep was supposed to keep us hidden from predators, why did evolution invent snoring?
Anyway, it’s a fun book. Other chapters tell the tale of the fun you can have reading it. Can Earthworms Act With intelligence? (Hey, if Trump can be said to have a brain, it isn’t a huge stretch to consider the earthworm’s two rudimentary ganglia of nerve nodes a brain.) Why is Caffeine the Most Delightful of Poisons? (This chapter begins with an aside of Agatha Christie’s early career in pharmacy, which triggered her interest in poison, which figures in so many of her mysteries.) Has Human Smarts Rubbed Off on Rats? (Our evolving invention of methods to exterminate rats and/or to keep them from eating our food has in turn made them evolve ever-smarter ways to thwart our attempts.) How Did Wolves Become Man’s Best Friend? (Is that slobbering tongue of your dog from excitement that you are home or from a barely contained appetite for your flesh?)
And there’s more. Much more. It’s a fun book. Read it.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature, by Adam Morgan. The life and times of literary pioneer and queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, who risked everything to be the first to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in America.
Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early 20th century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.
But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labeled “a danger to the minds of young girls” by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialized James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernization. “Morgan captures the hopes, ambitions, feuds, and foibles of the American avant-garde with exceptional care and clarity on matters that still hold great relevance, such as the nature of censorship, community building, and artistic innovation." —Rebecca Romney, author of Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
- After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America, by Sara Moslener. With a blend of history, current research, and sustained analysis, Moslener explores how white evangelicalism has become so politically powerful, why gender and sexuality are positioned at the center of debate, and how those debates aim to obscure deeper histories of white evangelical racism. She describes the full disturbing effect of the “True Love Waits” movement and how purity teachings displaced all other forms of religious education in evangelicalism. From her interviewees in the After Purity Project, she shares stories of oppressive personal piety, sexual repression, disembodiment, self-hatred, mandatory hetero-normativity, and the many layers of obligation and shame in sexuality before reaching adulthood and navigating their way out of the church. Moslener also describes her own story of being a teen advocate for purity culture to becoming a researcher, scholar, and advocate for people harmed by purity. “Purity culture was presented as a way to keep believers’ souls free of sin. In After Purity, Sara Moslener shows that, all along, purity culture’s true focus has been controlling people’s bodies, marking some as superior, innocent—and others not.” —Sarah Stankorb, author of Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning
- Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russia, by Maria Alyokhina. From a member of the Pussy Riot collective: An urgent, intimate, firsthand account of grassroots dissent, bravery, art, and spectacle in Putin's Russia.
Picking up where Riot Days left off, Maria (Masha) Alyokhina takes us through her activist experiences between 2014 to 2022. In vivid, diary-like vignettes, we follow her as she goes in and out of Russian prisons, continually dodges police violence, protests at the Sochi Olympics, flies to Kyiv to stand in solidarity with Ukraine, defends the high-level dissident Alexi Navalny, drops banners at Trump Tower, and—in 2022—flees from Russia in disguise to escape a new prison sentence.
Spanning settings from Moscow to London to New York to Harvard, Political Girl has an artistic sensibility, a punk ethos, a deep moral clarity, and an inimitably dry Russian wit. It portrays not only Masha’s political activities but also her personal arc: the friends she makes in prison, the woman she falls in love with, her bond with her young son Filip, and her deep passion for art and history.
- The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age, by Alex Wellerstein. The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or instead, use the atom bomb in the hope of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils. But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened.
Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used. The weight of that decision, and that misunderstanding, became the major reason that atomic bombs have not been used again since World War II.
Wellerstein makes a startling case that Truman was possibly the most anti-nuclear American president of the twentieth century, but his ambitions were strongly constrained by the domestic and international politics of the postwar world and the early Cold War. This book is a must-read for all who want to truly understand not only why the bomb was dropped on Japan but also why it has not been used since. "Alex Wellerstein clears away the dead timber in this gripping investigation of President Truman’s relationship with the atomic bomb. I thought I knew the story but learned much that I didn’t know. Outstanding!"- Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
-
The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World, by Tilar J. Mazzeo. Nineteen-year-old and pregnant Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit—into the most treacherous waters in the world.
As their ship, Neptune’s Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. With no training and equipped only with nautical almanacs and how-to guides for sea navigation, Mary Ann faced down the deadly waters of Drake’s Passage, determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future. The Sea Captain's Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten—the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain — her due. Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women’s maritime journals.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but if you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
I’m adding more books every week to my RESIST! 20% off promotion. The coupon code RESIST gets you 20% off any of the books featured there.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.
