Some book reviews

NB: The pictures of the books in this post are links to Amazon. They pay me a pittance if you buy a book, but my motive is to make it easy for you to get the book or books, and to have some kind of pictures in the post. I also think it's a good idea to check these books out at the library. That's free.

Lately I've been reading some thought-provoking books. I mentioned The Vegetarian Myth a couple posts back. In one sentence, the book says our bodies are not built to be vegetarian, and we should eat meat. The book says carnivory is the natural order of things, factory farms are not good but local farms are, and we will be improperly nourished if we don't consume meat.

One of the books in Vegetarian Myth's extensive bibliography was written in the 1930's by a dentist who noticed the deterioration of children's teeth over the course of his practice. He and his wife took an around-the-world research trip examining a variety of primitive peoples' teeth, general health, and diet. And the same for their countrymen who had lots of contact with western civilization. The book is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price.

One sentence summary: If you and your parents eat white flour and sugar, you will have bad teeth, hindered jaw development, and might get arthritis and tuberculosis, but if you stick with the traditional tribal diet you will be healthy and have perfect teeth. I kind of knew this, but the book is disconcertingly persuasive, and I have pretty much quit eating anything with containing flour or sugar. Took me about three weeks to get over the craving for carbs, but now I'm fine, and I've lost several pounds and feel even better than I usually do, which has been mostly pretty good anyway.

Another book in Myth's bibliography is Endgame, by Derrick Jensen. The author says you should stop reading Vegetarian Myth and go read Endgame if you haven't already. This well-researched and footnoted—and highly readable book is a wide-ranging treatise against civilization, beginning with the advent of agriculture several thousand years back. The book has so much background, facts, and detail that it's pretty hard to summarize in one sentence. But here's my take: We have been living unsustainably, and we're about at the end of what the planet can provide. He's pretty polemical, and advocates a harder line than I'm ready to adopt, but the info he supports his position with not only has the ring of truth, but his points are disconcerting in the extreme. It looks like our grandkids are in for a tough time of it. Remember—all you're getting  here is a really brief summary, so you probably will take what I say with more than a hint of skepticism, and well you ought. But if what he says turns out to be even partly true, you will serve yourself well to have read this book.

You might already have heard of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. You ought to read it if you haven't. (His other books, Blink, and Outliers are also worth reading.) I read Tipping Point some time ago, but its central premise fits well with the next book, Eaarth, by Bill McKibbin.

Tipping point says that under certain circumstances things absorb change apparently without effect, until all of a sudden, everything goes boom.

Eaarth is the shortest of these books I've just read. You might want to read it first. McKibben's thesis is that the change (tipping point) has already happened—we are living on a different planet now than the one we've been living on for millennia, and the "eaarth" is a harsher place to live than the earth was. He backs this up with a large array of statistics and other data (also well biblographied and footnoted) that are pretty persuasive.

I'm only halfway through the book, so I've just started his chapter on what he thinks we should do about it. It looks like he's going to suggest some hard albeit realistic things to do. No, he doesn't advocate stocking up on ammo in the basement, but he is convinced that by the middle of the century things will collapse disastrously if we don't make some changes, one of which is to eliminate dependence on oil. Another is to decentralize almost everything, it looks like—energy generation and food production, for two. His suggestions, as I've read so far, seem to be realistic and doable.

I'm not doing any of these books justice in these short summaries. Read them, especially Endgame and Eaarth. Then let's get together and talk about what we think about this. I'm also interested in your comments.