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Background photo on right: Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, by Sebastião Salgado

A mere sixty years ago, seventy miles deep within a pristine rain forest in New Guinea, a mountain considered sacred to the local indigenous population rose 14,000 feet into the sky. Visit the crest of that mountain...

I found Zahra Hankir’s new book Eyeliner: A Cultural History to be a fascinating and entertaining read. That’s quite an accomplishment, because I wouldn’t think of myself as the audience for such a book. I honestly had almost never consciously noticed eye makeup, though I’m sure at some level the...

Here's a couple of facts about me. First, I love travel, and second, I’m not particularly interested in books about family dynamics and parenting. So here comes Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, a book by the actor Andrew McCarthy, who first rose to fame in...

I love travel. I love maps. And I’m devoted to suffering a great deal of angst over the potential for disaster due to climate

change. So Christina Gerhardt’s recently published Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean was irresistible to me.

The book covers 49 islands, island groups...

The author’s note that opens No Ordinary Assignment, the new memoir by foreign correspondent  by Jane Ferguson, states:

I wrote No Ordinary Assignment with one main purpose in mind: to answer with total honesty the question Why do you do this work? Really, why? I am asked this question often...

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, by poet and essayist Camille Dungy and published last week, is just a lovely

book in so many ways. The descriptions of the natural world, in particular of her garden and the plants she fills it with, are very finely observed and evocative. The portrait...

It’s not often that I review a book by a right-winger, but I’m making an exception with You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together, by Gutfeld! co-host and Fox News contributor Kat Timpf. Fortunately for my self-respect and sanity, another...

The early years of Helen Keller’s life were first portrayed to a great extent in the same way as I learned about her late in her life, as a boy growing up in the 1960s. My knowledge of her was almost entirely shaped by the 1962 movie The Miracle Worker: a girl rescued from the limitations of being...

I do love travel, as you’ve probably gathered by the number of globetrotting tomes that have made it into my weekly reviews. And I’ve long enjoyed the tales of daring women who undertook adventures around the world, having read books by or about such adventurers as Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird, Ne...

I enjoyed Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, by Kathy Kleiman, published last July. In truth, I’m not really a tech kind of guy, and so much of the bulk of the story, taking us through the programming puzzles that had to be worked...

If you’re expecting to simply kick back and cackle to yourself over the insane conspiracy ravings of MAGA and QAnon adherents, Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent will disappoint. Oh, there’s plenty of that rightwing insanity dissected in the book, to be...

The End is Near. The end of the year, that is, and if you’re the type who makes New Year’s resolutions, it’s the time to think about what you want to do better. You are not alone. Self-improvement books continue to have a huge market, and its only getting bigger. According to NPD Bookscan, sales...

I said it in my review back in May of David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction: “I already live on a knife-edge of awe, stunned disbelief and overwhelmed incomprehension when it comes to the natural world we inhabit...

I picked up Chelsea Manning’s new book README.txt: A Memoir at the library on a whim, and I’m glad I did, as I've found it a thoroughly enjoyable read. You probably know the basics of her story: while still living as a male in 2010, she used her position as an intelligence analyst in the US Army...

I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting any of the truly ancient trees of the world. The closest I came was during my boyhood in 1960s San Jose, California, where we would sometimes visit Big Basin State Park, home to some 1800-year-old redwoods. A wildfire ravaged 97% of the park in 2020...

Last week was my 67th birthday, so Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph, by Richard Lacayo and published today, seemed to be a vitalizing choice.

The book gives a quick sweeping overview of artists who have worked to a ripe old age.

It’s surprising how many artists...

I must be getting old and sentimental. There were times while reading astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson’s new book Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization that I found myself getting a bit misty-eyed. Sometimes it was a reaction to specific images, as he recounts the social impact...

I Ain’t the Right Kind of Feminist

by Cheryl West, 1983

First Off I’m too confused

Secondly you know my blackness envelops me

Thirdly my articulateness fails me

When the marching feminists come by

I walk with them for a while

And then I trip over pebbles I didn’t see

My sexist heels are...

No exaggeration: Rolling Stone played a huge role in making me the liberal I am today. My family was conservative Republican. Not crazy wingnuts, though we did have an aunt who was a John Bircher, but solidly Republican enough to roll their eyes at my solidly Democratic paternal grandmother. In my...

The dawn of the Covid-19 era in some ways seems so long ago, and in other ways remains perilously present. Makes me wonder why I would be attracted to the recently published Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic, by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin. I...