Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Alfred A. Knopf Books, 2009. 294 pp. 978-1-61664-210-5.

... in which we learn about some of the terrible crimes being committed against women worldwide, and we learn of the various efforts underway to stop these crimes.

Anyone who is a regular reader of the Opinion section of the New York Times will likely recognize Nicholas Kristof's name. Kristof is the author of the blog On The Ground, where he writes mostly about international human rights issues. Others may recognize both Kristof's name, and his wife Sheryl WuDunn's name, as the two journalists who won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn tackle a variety of different types of oppression that women face. The majority of the stories come from southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Kristof and WuDunn traveled around the world and collected these stories from the women themselves, in addition to learning about various humanitarian efforts in each area.

The book starts out with a discussion on sexual slavery and forced prostitution. Many of the women and girls, especially in southeast Asia, were kidnapped or lured from their home villages. Some girls went willingly, believing that they were going to work at fruit stands in the city, and that they'd be able to send their wages home to feed their families. Instead, they'd find themselves beaten and locked in a brothel. The authors describe how various women made multiple attempts to escape from their lives in the brothels; some succeeded, some did not. Kristof actually visited a brothel, posing as a potential customer, and bought two girls from the brothel's owners. He took both girls back to their home villages and gave them money to start up their own little businesses; one eventually returned to the brothel because the owner had gotten her hooked on methamphetamine, and she was craving the drug.

The book segues from forced prostitution to the topic of rape as a weapon and method of social control. We learn about how gangs control villages through fear; if a family offends the gang, they'll rape the family's daughter and destroy the whole family's reputation (and make the girl unable to find a husband). It works on scales larger than just in villages, too; soldiers used it as a way of subduing local populations in times of war.

From violent rape, the book moves on to maternal mortality and health during pregnancy. In many villages, the women give birth with only a midwife untrained in medicine there to help. In one story, the midwife becomes impatient with a protracted, difficult birth, and jumps on the woman's abdomen, presumably to speed the process up. The rate of death in childbirth remains depressingly high in developing countries, particularly in rural areas. Much of this is due to a lack of education and funds, but a lot of it has to do with culture: it's not really worth the money to send a woman to a doctor. We also learn about the high incidence of death or permanent disability from fistulas, which are fairly simple and inexpensive to fix. A fistula is a consequence of many of these difficult labors, and occur when a hole forms in the lining of the bladder and/or rectum. As a consequence, the woman can't hold in her urine and feces and soon becomes a social outcast. Many women end up paralyzed and riddled with infection. They are often left to die alone.

We move on to the role of religion in misogyny. One chapter, titled "Is Islam Misogynistic?" is particularly interesting, mostly because it approaches its topic from a fairly unexpected angle. The instinctive answer to the question would probably be "yes", but the authors do a nice job distinguishing between the religion as the cause of the misogyny, vs culture as the cause. After all, they point out, the Christians living in primarily Islamic communities are just as prone to domestic violence as their Muslim neighbors are.

Throughout the whole book, there are two common themes: grassroots efforts and education. The authors show that while large aid groups are well-intentioned, they're often inefficient operations that are out of touch with the local culture, and are therefore unable to really mobilize the people to change. The smaller efforts, headed up by locals or by foreigners with a deep understanding of the culture, are better equipped to encourage people to change their behavior. This is partly because they're not seen as interfering outsiders, and partly because they understand the cultural nuances that contribute to the various horrifying practices. Education is highlighted as a partial solution to many of these problems: better-educated girls can find better jobs, stay out of the brothels, earn money and respect, and can learn to speak up when they object to something being done to them.

Kristof and WuDunn do an extremely good job of making it clear that none of these issues are black and white. In the section on female genital mutilation, they talk about how even though the practice is horrifying, many of the girls actually WANT to have it done to them. They also make it clear that the problem isn't just men; in many of the brothels in southeast Asia, the brothel owner's wife delivers the harshest beatings to the girls. Some of these prostitutes go on to become brothel managers themselves.

Despite the horrifying subject matter, the book itself is very easy to read. The book is extremely well written, and having so many of the stories told from a first-person perspective adds to it a lot. While the book is organized into loose sections covering different topics (prostitution, rape, etc), there aren't clear "boundaries" between the sections; instead, each topic kind of blends into the next one. This emphasizes the fact that these problems are not distinct from each other... they're all connected, and they're all symptoms of a common set of problems.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in human rights or humanitarian work. It's a fairly quick read, and the material is compelling enough that you'll want to keep reading, despite how unsettling it is.

The End of Food, by Paul Roberts

The End of Food, by Paul Roberts. Mariner Books, 2008. 400 pp. 978-0-547-08597-5.

... in which we learn about the relationship between large-scale food production and nutrition, and the paradox of food surpluses and world hunger coexisting.

Paul Roberts is well-known for his previous book, The End of Oil. As a writer and lecturer who often focuses on resource economics and politics, oil and food are two topics which he is very qualified to discuss. The book opens with a quick history of humanity's relationship with food: hunter-gatherer, simple cultivation, small agriculture, big agriculture. The majority of the book focuses on post-Green Revolution agriculture, which seems to subscribe to a policy of "bigger, faster."

Unlike previous books on this topic that I've read, this book approaches the issues from both a nutritional and an economic perspective. He describes how the current situation came to be, as a result of economic factors, and how the current state of agriculture is not really economically sustainable, but the amount of resources needed to break free from the current trend will be large enough to require a significant effort from consumers and producers. Despite a fairly refreshingly different approach, however, I didn't find that he really had anything new to say. I expect there are only so many books that can be written on a single topic, before all following books end up just being repeats of the previous books.

The recommendations for the future that Roberts makes are basically the same recommendations you see anywhere: more sustainable farming by growing crops that require fewer inputs, eat local, eat less meat, etc. However, despite the fairly redundant nature of the content, the writing is quite good. He keeps the narrative moving along at a nice pace, and his writing makes the material easy to read, and it holds your interest. Because of this, I would recommend this book to people who don't know much about the topic, but are interested in educating themselves. However, if you're one of the people who's already read numerous other works by people like Michael Pollan etc, I would suggest that you move on to a different book.

Cool It, by Bjorn Lomborg

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, by Bjorn Lomborg. Vintage Books, 2008. 252 pp. 978-0-307-38653-6.

... in which an economist tells us to stop fussing over global warming because it's a good thing, and nothing we do will make a difference anyway, so let's spend all of our money solving something else.

Anyone who has taken any kind of class in environmental policy, philosophy, etc. has almost certainly read at least an excerpt from Bjorn Lomborg's many writings. As a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Lomborg's writings are usually related to welfare economics and global human welfare. He is most famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which has been hugely controversial and influential in environmentalism, both by enraging some environmentalists against him, and by forcing some people to stop and take a step back to evaluate the problem.

In Cool It, Lomborg's main point is this: yes, global warming is happening, but all of the proposed solutions will cost billions of dollars but the improvements will not be monetarily equal to the amount spent. In other words: don't waste your money on the Kyoto Protocol and other nonsense; accept global warming as an inevitability and put your money towards some other problem, like malaria and AIDS.

In Lomborg's praise, the book is an easy, fast read, and seems to be very well researched (the last ~90 pages are citations and footnotes). It's also refreshing to read a book that simply assumes that the reader understands the concept of global warming; Lomborg clearly states from the beginning that he is one of the people who does actually understand that it's happening. Instead, his argument is about what we should do about it. For the lay reader, I have no doubt that this book's arguments would prove to be very convincing. However, for those familiar with Lomborg's work, the fact that the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty proclaimed Lomborg's previous book (The Skeptical Environmentalist) to be scientifically dishonest makes it hard to always take his statistics and data seriously. But, as I am not an ecologist, or a statistician, or a global health expert, or an economist, there's not much I can do about proving the validity or honesty of his claims.

Lomborg's argument suffers from one crucial problem. His argument is predicated on the assumption that if an investment project doesn't bring back all the money put into it, then it's not worth it. In business, that might be true... why invest billions in a project that will only give back millions? A simple cost-benefit analysis doesn't work for a problem of this magnitude. As anyone who's studied the core issues in environmentalism will know, the inherent value of an unaltered ecosystem or landscape doesn't always translate literally into a financial value measured in dollars. As an extension of this argument, I reject his premise that global warming could be a good thing, since the number of people who freeze to death is greater than the number of people who die of heat exhaustion. Do we only care about humans in this argument? At the risk of sounding callous, isn't the skyrocketing global population one of the factors that put us in this pickle to begin with?

I do agree that a lot of the changes that are becoming popular now will probably make a minimal effect, and some may cost huge amounts of money. But for some people, if the only change they can make is by using just a little less electricity, I don't see the point in condemning their efforts. And yes, the Kyoto Protocol will cost huge amounts of money to implement, but it's an indicator that (most) major governments are willing to move in the right direction. And yes, malaria and food insecurity and lack of access to clean water are important issues and are deserving of significant amounts of resources, but I don't think we have to necessarily choose between problems to solve. Also, many of those problems are related, in some way, to climate change.

I will agree strongly with Lomborg that part of the issue with proposed changes is that legislators seem to think we need to solve the problem right now. Rushing in and trying to immediately axe carbon emissions down to a tiny fraction of their current numbers, and trying to immediately mitigate the effects of global warming, could probably end up being a waste of effort, since it's a global problem that will take decades and decades to fix. However, I don't think that means we should focus on other issues like global health, to the exclusion of issues like climate change. Economics are all well and good for exclusively human problems, but it won't help the other species that die out because we ignore them.

Overall, a well researched, well written, easy to read little book. I don't happen to agree with most of it, but I am glad I read it because his arguments are not without merit. For anyone who likes to keep abreast of the different viewpoints in environmental policy, it's probably an important read.

Nature Noir, by Jordan Fisher Smith

Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra, by Jordan Fisher Smith. Mariner Books, 2005. 216 pp. 978-0-618-7119506.

... in which a park ranger describes what it's like in one of America's least appreciated, but hugely significant, jobs.

I bought this book several years ago in a national park gift shop on one of my numerous trips to the parks. Before I read it, it got buried away in a mountain of stuff in my closet and I forgot all about it until I was sifting through my pile of junk. I'm really glad I unearthed it.

The book follows the adventures of a park ranger who worked in a mountain valley near Sacramento. As the land was not federal land, he was employed by the state of California, and California didn't really care all that much about this particular chunk of land. Years before, the government had decided to build a dam at the base of the valley, so the land the rangers were guarding was essentially condemned land, as the understanding was that the land would one day be flooded.

One might think that ranger work might get kind of dull... leading interpretive nature walks for little kids, writing tickets for people who forgot to pay their campsite fee. Fisher does a nice job of exposing the darker aspects of the work: he opens with a story where a man (high on drugs) literally flings a baby into the open window of a moving car, then proceeds to go into cardiac arrest as a result of his drug use. The book could have very easily become very dark and depressing. The rangers, all passionate about preserving and protecting the land, have to fight against many foes, not the least of which is apathy. Why bother preserving the land when it's going to be underwater someday? However, Fisher does a very nice job of balancing out the dark parts of the work with his inherent love and respect for nature. Who cares if the land will be underwater someday? That campfire is illegal, and it's damaging to the landscape in the here and now. The book reads like an old-fashioned crime novel crossed with the writings of environmentalist Bill McKibben.

My main complaint is that I wish the little section on the history of rangering was a little longer. He wrote the section so well and captured my interest enough that I was disappointed that the topic didn't get more coverage.

I would definitely recommend this book to someone who has an interest in the public parks of America, or for someone looking for an interesting, informative, quick vacation read. It's a pretty short book, and Fisher's writing moves along at a nice pace.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Anchor Books, 2003. 389 pp. 978-0-385-72167-7.

... in which we read of a devastating biological apocalypse that ravages the world, and explore the events and philosophy leading up to it, as well as the consequences in the aftermath.

Anyone who has ever read anything by Margaret Atwood should know that her work is not exactly what you'd call cheerful, but it is always relevant. Atwood is most famous for The Handmaid's Tale, an Orwellian depiction of a bleak future where human reproduction is an imperative and society is ruled by totalitarian dictatorships. Oryx and Crake is also Orwellian, but in a different way.

The story jumps between two time-lines, both in the future. The first time-line, the "past", depicts events that occur before the biological catastrophe. The second time-line, the "present", depicts what the world is like after the catastrophe. The first time-line is set in a world that has become highly stratified; the wealthy and brilliant live in secure, walled communities known as "Compounds". Each Compound is operated by a major corporation, and all who live within its walls are employees of the corporation or families of employees. The Compounds have everything the rich and intelligent need: clean air, reliable food, first-rate medical care, modern amenities, etc. Surrounding these Compounds are the "pleeblands"... communities full of the not-so-fortunate. The pleeblands aren't exactly hellish places, but they're not exactly nice either. They're grimy, crime-ridden, seedy places. Children within the Compounds are educated to contribute to the upper echelon society, and rarely, a child with promise is brought in from the pleeblands to be educated at a Compound college.

Jimmy, the son of two biologists working for a biotech company, lives a lonely childhood. He isn't brilliant like his parents, and he is constantly aware of his failures. His father puts work first: his work is on "pigoons", pig hybrids that have been genetically engineered to grow organs for human transplants. A single pigoon might grow five human livers, or several kidneys. Companies all around the world have made it their business to select desirable traits from animals and mix them all together into human-designed hybrids, for example, the rakunk, which is a docile pet that's a cross between a skunk and a raccoon. Jimmy's mother is disenfranchised with her work. She soon turns against biotech entirely and flees the Compound. As a teenager, Jimmy meets a brilliant boy named Glenn. The two of them become fast friends, bonding over a game called Extinctathon, where the person with the best knowledge of extinct species wins. Through this game, Glenn earns himself the nickname Crake, after a small extinct bird (it's still alive now, but in Atwood's future, it's long gone, like the vast majority of species). Eventually Jimmy and Crake go off to separate colleges; Crake goes to the Watson and Crick Institute, for the very very brilliant and promising scientific minds. Jimmy, a much less impressive student, gets sent to the Martha Graham Academy, a school that seems to focus on arts and literature. Crake's classmates invent creatures like the ChickieNob, a chicken body that grows only the parts you need... for example, a "chicken" with ten drumsticks on a torso, and nothing else. These students go on to the most prestigious jobs. Jimmy's classmates plagiarize their way through school, and Jimmy graduates with a degree in something like advertising.

In their adult life, Crake goes on to work for the top biotech company, and Jimmy goes along to manage the rhetoric and public image side of the work. Along the way, they meet a girl who goes by the name Oryx (an antelope, presumably extinct by that point). She was born and grew up in southeast Asia as a sex worker, and eventually makes her way to the US. Inevitably, Jimmy, Oryx and Crake find themselves in a love triangle.

The second time-line follows Jimmy, a survivor of the apocalypse, and a breed of "humans" known as the Crakers, engineered by Crake to be "perfect". Slowly, piece by piece, we learn what the apocalypse was, what led to it, the cause, and the aftermath.

This is not at all a cheerful story. Even the first time-line, before the catastrophe, gives me the creeps. The setting after the catastrophe is bleaker. Having said that, I couldn't put it down. Jimmy, the main character, is deeply flawed but also by far and away the most sympathetic character in the novel. His life was never easy, and it got worse as he grew older.

One of Atwood's strengths is the way she weaves her social commentary into her stories. In this instance, it comes across a little strong occasionally, but her points need to be made. When we've bred all of the undesirable traits out of humanity, do we cease to be human? Just because we can splice together genes from totally different biological kingdoms, should we? Are science and "progress" for the sake of science and "progress" laudable goals? What is the role of spirituality, religion, and morality in the destruction of an old society and the shaping of a new society? The novel closes on a note that the reader can take as hopeful or not. This book is the first of a trilogy, called the MaddAddam trilogy. The second book was released in 2009.

In an interesting juxtaposition from the norm for novels such as this, the role of humans-as-gods with no higher power than their own science and hubris are not "the good guys". Futuristic fiction tends to portray the shining civilizations of tomorrow as bastions of science, logic, and rationalism; gleaming pillars of progress. Atwood dares to suggest that maybe science and progress, without being tempered by an understanding of humanity's place in the universe, could ultimately be our downfall.

A highly recommended read for people who enjoyed other Atwood novels; George Orwell's 1984; anyone who enjoys reading about the interplay between science, progress, and society; and anyone who ever ponders what it is to be human, and what that implies about our responsibility to the world as a whole.

Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan

Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan. Orbit Books, 2008. 379 pp. 978-0-316-02029-9.

...in which we see how England under the Virgin Queen Elizabeth was also ruled by a secret faerie queen Invidiana.

This book is a nice addition to a small subcategory of fantasy that I've recently started searching out: historical fantasy. This category consists of books set in a real historical context, in this case, Elizabethan England. We see real historical events taking place, but this time, these events are often happening with some influence from a hidden, unseen immortal faerie court. This secret faerie court exists alongside the human court, but is hidden from the eyes of most humans. The faerie queen, Invidiana, rules her court cruelly, leaving most of her subjects afraid of her. She also holds Elizabeth in her debt, as Elizabeth's rise from prisoner in the Tower of London to Queen of England was partially engineered by Invidiana. One member of the faerie court, Lady Lune, had once been in favor with Invidiana but has quickly fallen from grace. She ends up being sent from the underground catacombs of Invidiana's court, to masquerade as a human in Elizabeth's court. Along the way, she meets and falls in love with a human man in Elizabeth's court. Together, the two of them seek to find a way to break Invidiana's hold over Queen Elizabeth.

This period of England's history is already full of courtly intrigue, political strife, and social change. The Tudor dynasty has been covered in great length by authors of historical fiction, most notably by Philippa Gregory. Brennan does a very nice job of fleshing out the human side of England, without rehashing ground already covered by other authors. Her depiction of England's faerie court is very richly developed, conveying a real sense of what the mood of the court was, and how faerie culture differed from human culture. The main character, Lune, is nicely portrayed as an appropriately three dimensional character, when it could have been easy for Brennan to portray Lune as simply another courtier vying for her queen's favor. The main human character, Michael Deven, is slightly less developed than Lune, but not to the detriment of the story.

The plot is nicely developed, and for the most part it moves forward at a good pace. It lags a little in the middle, but picks back up in the last third. My major complaint with the pacing of the novel would be in the conclusion, where events accelerate enough that it gets a little muddled. It's not clear to me exactly how one of the final results came about, but I was generally satisfied with the positions in which the characters ended the novel.

I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in both English historical fiction and fantasy. It's not really for people with a strong preference for swords-and-sorcery type fantasy fiction, but if you like your fantasy to be a little subtler and more rooted in traditional folklore, with a dash of political intrigue, this is a book for you. Brennan also followed up with a sequel, In Ashes Lie, which is also a good read, and could probably be read without having read this one.

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Night Shade Books, 2010. 359 pp. 978-1-59780-158-4.

...(a book I cannot summarize in a single sentence).

This is quite possibly one of the more hauntingly written and disturbingly REAL science-fiction novels I have ever read. This book is set in the future, though how far in the future, we do not know. I would guess perhaps a century or two. The story is set in Thailand: a gritty, dirty Thailand that feels more like a thing of the past, rather than a thing of the future. At this point in the world's future, humans have tampered with genetics so much that there are no longer naturally-occurring species of edible plants, and most animals are hybrids between natural species and human-engineered species. The hybridization of the world's agricultural plants has led to a massive amount of instability in the plants: particular strains of a plant will be fruitful for a season or two, before they fall victim to a disease called blister-rust, which renders them toxic. Human tampering with genetics has also led to the evolution of viruses and diseases that wipe out hundreds of millions of people. These diseases are constantly evolving, staying just ahead of human medical technology. In this grim new world, humanity has exhausted the planet's coal and oil resources, so almost everything is powered on mechanical energy... that is, a human or an animal has to crank the needed power into the device in question. Because of the dire need for edible foodstuffs, the world is dominated by "calorie companies"... the corporations who are constantly trying to engineer new fruits, vegetables and grains, to stay one step ahead of the blister-rust.

The story follows several different plotlines, all of which eventually merge in the final chapters. One plotline follows a man named Anderson Lake, an American calorie-man living in Thailand, searching for viable genetic material for his company to use in their engineering. The Thai people have a hidden seedbank of unadulterated samples; that is Anderson's goal. The second plotline follows Emiko, an engineered girl ("windup") from Japan. Her makers engineered her to be beautiful and obedient, but she has been abandoned in Thailand and finds herself working in a brothel. The third major plotline follows some employees of the Thai government. Their division is tasked with trying to control disease outbreaks, and to control the introduction of new genetic material into the country. They find themselves constantly at war with other factions in their own government, factions that would like to see more foreign enterprises in Thailand.

This book is very well written, and the plot moves along at a nice pace. Bacigalupi does an extremely nice job of setting the tone and showing us the story's context, without making it seem like he's just telling it to us. The characters, though perhaps not very lovable, are characterized well enough that you feel sympathetic to each of them, even though many of them are working towards opposing goals.

A warning: This is not an easy read, for several reasons. The first reason is that the writing is so effective that the grimness of the story can be a bit of a hindrance. With the exception of one or two brief scenes of only one or two paragraphs, it's not particularly an excessively violent or brutal read, just a grim read. The second reason is that there are so many plot lines that it's a pretty complex read, and it's very important to read slowly and carefully, for detail. Seemingly unrelated plotlines will all come together, eventually. The third reason is that the narrative is peppered with phrases in Thai. The words are never defined, and it's left to the reader to suss out the meaning of the Thai phrases based on context. The fourth reason is that the book is written in the present tense, which threw me off a bit. Having finished the book, I kind of like that he chose to write it in the present tense. Despite the grimness of the story line, the novel does end with a note of hope. Putting the book into the present tense means the events are happening now, not in the past, and that leaves the future open and unwritten.

Although it is not at all necessary, it might be helpful for the reader to have a general understanding of how current-day biotech and agriculture operates; for a good layperson read on this topic, I recommend Lords of the Harvest. A solid understanding of this topic will let the reader see that this futuristic science-fiction is perhaps not as futuristic or fictional as it might seem. Bacigalupi is clearly interested in this topic, probably one of the most significant hot topics in the world (in my opinion). A careful comparison between his novel and current trends in biotechnology today makes the book much more chillingly relevant. The very best science-fiction (film, television, novels, short stories...) sets itself in a world that is still relevant to present cultural and political climates; Bacigalupi succeeds beautifully in this. Highly recommended reading.

Angelology, by Danielle Trussoni

Angelology, by Danielle Trussoni. Viking, 2010. 452 pp. 978-0-670-02147-5.

...in which a secret society battles against a group of fallen angels.

I think you'd have to be pretty much blind to have not seen this book if you've been to a bookstore anytime this year. It's been getting a lot of (mostly positive) press, and Borders, at least, has been keeping it displayed in prominent parts of the store.

The plot of the book is a little reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code, or other similar works. A group of scholars, the angelologists, have been fighting a secret war against the Nephilim. This war has been going on for thousands of years. The Nephilim, hybrids between fallen angels and humans, are beautiful, tall creatures with large, retractable wings. They have been behind many of the great dynasties, empires, corporations, etc in human history, while the angelologists have been endeavoring to stop them. The story is set in two time periods: Christmas, 1999, and WWII during the Nazi occupation of France. The modern half of the story revolves around a young nun named Evangeline, the daughter of two prominent angelologists. Unaware of her family's past, she is drawn into the world of angelology when both the angelologists and the Nephilim come to her convent, searching for an ancient artifact of unimaginable power, a lyre. The WWII plot line is set mostly in France, and follows two teenage girls who are students at a school of angelology. As the Nazis close in on Paris, the angelologists plan a dangerous mission to find the powerful lyre.

This book should appeal to people who wanted to like The Da Vinci Code, but perhaps had higher standards in writing quality. When I tried to read The Da Vinci Code, I was interested in the plot but couldn't get past the fact that Dan Brown's writing sounds like something a junior high schooler could have written. Trussoni's writing is much better, and she gives her story an appropriately grand feel, particularly in the historical documents that appear in the novel. A book about humans hunting angels could easily seem silly and ridiculous, but Trussoni gives it a feeling of historical significance and gravity.

My main complaint is that this book should have been longer. I don't mean that I wanted to see more things happening; I wanted more description, characterization, and explanations of the setting. With a couple of exceptions, I know basically nothing about the main characters. One character, an art historian by the name of Verlaine, plays an extremely important role in the book, but we know little about his personality, how he thinks, what his past is like. Also, it isn't clear how one really gets into the field of angelology, if the whole family isn't already a part of it. This novel could have easily been 100 pages longer, without adding unnecessary bulk or irrelevant side plots.

I would recommend this book to people who enjoy conspiracy thrillers with a hint of religious intrigue. I hope that the sequel, whenever it will appear, will answer a lot of the holes left in the first book.

Hack the Planet, by Eli Kintisch

Hack the Planet, by Eli Kintisch. John Wiley and Sons, 2010. 279 pp. 978-0-470-52426-8.

...in which we learn about some of the outrageous solutions scientists and engineers are proposing to counteract global climate change.

I picked up this book because I'd heard a little about the topic of geoengineering, but I didn't know enough about the topic to have more than a vague feeling of unease about it. Geoengineering, or the field where scientists and engineers essentially "hack" the planet's atmospheric, oceanic, environmental, etc processes in order to achieve the desired result, is still a highly controversial field. There's a lot of infighting among the environmentalist groups over the topic, and scientists can't agree whether geoengineering would work, or if it'd be a good idea. Because geoengineering doesn't call for a reduction in carbon emissions, it's a popular solution with politicians who tend to side with big business. But because it involves massive amounts of tampering with very significant global processes, it's pretty unpopular with many factions within the environmental movement.

The book is written at a level that makes it very accessible to the general public, but it does assume a fairly basic understanding of atmospheric cycling, ocean currents, and climate science. Kintisch does an admirable job of researching his topics thoroughly, and he has quotes and input from people on both sides of the issue. For the most part, the he is pretty impartial when discussing the different proposed experiments, and until the last chapter he lets the reader decide whether these experiments are or aren't a good idea.

Some of the geoengineering solutions in the book include solutions that involve particles in the atmosphere, ocean fertilizing, and improved methods for carbon sequestration that are also beneficial to industry. Kintisch describes several variations on atmospheric particles; all of these proposed solutions involve the dispersion of particles (usually a mist of some kind) to reflect sunlight away from the earth and provide shade. The ocean fertilization experiment involved dumping large amounts of tiny iron particles into the ocean. These iron particles would encourage the growth of large algal blooms. Presumably these algal blooms would remove carbon from the atmosphere, and then when the algae die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking their sequestered carbon with them. Another possible solution involves sequestering carbon in cement used for construction projects.

In addition to the chapter-length discussions on each solution, each chapter is prefaces with a one or two page anecdote about previous attempts to engineer the earth to fix humanity's mistakes. For example: introducing invasive species B to control invasive species A, resulting in a massive derailment of the local ecosystem. Or, the introduction of a new species of fish to Lake Victoria to make it more productive for local fisheries, resulting in 2/3 of the native species going extinct. With the exception of the anecdote that precedes the concluding chapter, all of these stories are stories of disastrous failure.

After discussing the various proposed solutions fairly impartially, Kintisch concludes with what is probably the most important chapter of the book. The final paragraph was, to me, the most powerful in the book:

Control may be comforting, but it's also an illusory burden we should not fall into the trap of seeking. We have no choice but to understand it. Maybe we'll succeed. But hacking our planet is not yet our fate. We might be able to avoid it. Perhaps David Brower, a modern-day romantic if there ever was one, was right: technology does make the world into a cage. Maybe geoenginerring makes it more like a terrarium, an enclosed, controlled garden. Even if geoengineering helps us one day to stave off the worst of the climate crisis, we'll still be inside its walls. (page 243)

Kintisch does a great job of presenting all the wonderful potential that geoengineering has, but anyone with any understanding of humanity's ability to ruin basically everything in the natural world should walk away with at least a shred of doubt about the field. Also, relying exclusively on geoengineering isn't a full solution, it's a band-aid. We'd be treating the symptoms of a problem that we are causing, instead of just, you know, trying not to cause the problem in the first place. God forbid we change our behavior! So much easier to just mitigate the problem later, right?

I should note that Emma did a review of Superfreakonomics. Superfreakonomics has one chapter devoted to the topic of geoengineering, and ultimately supported it. They went so far as to describe one of the geoengineering solutions (adding massive amounts of aerosols to the atmosphere to produce a global cooling effect, never mind its potential effects on ocean currents, agricultural output, etc...) a "fiendishly simple plan" (page 195 of Superfreakonomics). Maybe in terms of economics, it is fiendishly simple, but I completely, whole-heartedly reject the premise that these decisions should be made by people who can only look at it from an economic or political point of view, rather than look at it from a whole-earth perspective.

I strongly recommend Hack the Planet for anyone who has an interest in global climate change, environmental politics, or environmental philosophy. Actually, I recommend it for anyone who has an interest in being alive and the long-term survival of the human race. As much as I am skeptical of relying heavily on geoengineering as a solution, the topic is not going away anytime soon, and if you aren't well-informed on the pros and cons of it, you can't really effectively participate in the discussion surrounding geoengineering.