Aug. 7: Books Published This Week

Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World by Joel Berger

Climate change is causing the snow patterns in the Tibetan Plateau to shift, and with the snows, the entire ecosystem. Extreme Conservation is an eye-opening, steely look at what it takes for animals like the musk ox to live at the edges of existence. But more than this, it is a revealing exploration of how climate change and people are affecting even the most far-flung niches of our planet.

Publishers Weekly says, ““In language by turns lyrical, despairing, and hilariously funny, conservation biologist Berger relates stories from a life spent studying little-known animals….  The narrative is sprinkled with quotes from early Arctic explorers and anecdotes from other scientists, with Berger’s own wry humor added to the mixture. His experiences while wearing a bear suit to get closer to the musk ox, to pick one particularly delightful example, are pure slapstick. Informative and impassioned, this will be enjoyed by adventurers and environmentalists alike.”

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf 

A kind of follow up to Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf’s exploration of the connection between the brain and reading, this new book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens. Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

BookPage says, “Reader, Come Home is essential, arriving at a crucial juncture in history.”

Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality by Anil Ananthaswamy

The intellectual adventure story of the “double-slit” experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself–and continues to almost 200 years later. How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality, as the textbook “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics seems to suggest? How can particles influence each other faster than the speed of light? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there’s no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double-slit?

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) says, “A thrilling survey of the most famous, enduring, and enigmatic experiment in the history of science.”