Short Book Reviews
Collection of short book reviews on pieces/books I’ve read in an attempt to encourage some more ‘reflecting’…
When Breathe Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Paul Kalanithi’s When Breathe Becomes Air radiates the passion Kalanithi has for his work that I would be happy to achieve even half of in the span of my career. It’s a truly wonderful, soul affirming thing to read about someone whose service is so in tune with their ultimate truth, that it results in everything they do becoming essentially a labour of love. Where even the most mundane of tasks has a sacred place within the ecosystem of his altruism. A much needed reminder that we must seek out the ways we can help our world and shape the future of progress and well-being in our society and thus, by default, feel a sense of peace and belonging that could only come from serving others.
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
I think a part of me was too terrified to read David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, I attempted it once many months ago and failed, my environmental grief was palpable, the anxiety about my, our, future intense. I have often seen it referred to as a “terrifying yet necessary read”, and exactly that it is. If you are concerned about the future of our shared existence on this planet, the only planet the human species has, then it is well worth your time, and well worth the perseverance it takes to read the horrifying account of what mankind has done and continues to do to our home, the earth. Wallace-Wells’ dedication to consistent and informed climate reporting during his time as New York Magazine’s Deputy Editor is reflected in the wealth of knowledge he possesses about environmental issues across the globe. The Uninhabitable Earth discusses in depth our most urgent and physical climate concerns: the depleting supply of freshwater to widespread hunger to climate refugeeism in the Global South to the increasing numbers of wildfires in the US and Australia.
Which he then feeds into the more philosophical essence of this all-encompassing existential threat — what will our ethics look like at the end of the world? How does one make the most important decision about how to spend ones, what looks to be much shorter than once anticipated, life? What can we do for humanity from the stand-point of climate doom? Despite what seems like this book’s constant blows, delivered through substantial, thorough and often worrying climate research, Wallace-Wells is keen to cut through this with a message of radical hope for his reader.
His belief in the human species to overcome is endearing — he decidedly stands against the growing nihilism in climate science circles that does nothing in the way of providing a solution, nothing in the way of giving us a chance to prove that we can, with the right mix of sustained behavioural modification and overarching systemic change, reverse the currently daunting story of our shared future. Of course, this will by no means be an easy nor simple process, he remarks at one point: “We are destroying our planet every day, often with one hand as we conspire to restore it with the other. Which means, […] we can also stop destroying it, in the same style — collectively, haphazardly, in all the most quotidian ways in addition to the spectacular-seeming ones.”
In the end, this book encourages us to show up for ourselves and protect all that we have known and loved in our brief lives, all that has existed on this one, precious earth of ours.
