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Sy Montgomery’s “Of Time and Turtles” tells of her curiosity to the wonder and wisdom of our long-lived cohabitants, turtles‚ and through their stories of hope and rescue.
Elegantly blending science, memoir, philosophy, and drawing on cultures from across the globe, this compassionate portrait of injured turtles and their determined rescuers invites us all to slow down and slip into turtle time.
Author: Laura Poppick
Laura Poppick’s “Strata” decodes the epic stories of our planet’s 4.54-billion-year history that are written in strata — ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes, and riverbeds striping landscapes around the world.
Strata allows us to observe how the planet has responded to past periods of environmental upheaval, and shows how Earth’s ancient narratives could hold lessons for our present and future.
Author: Richard Powers
Published in 2018, “The Overstory” by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019.
The novel explores the lives of a group of people and trees, and how they are interconnected, emphasizing the relationship between humans and nature.
In the book, nine characters whose lives were influenced by encounters with trees — either through family history, personal tragedy, science or activism — find their paths crossing.
Their connection to trees and their shared goals lead them to join efforts to advocate for environmental health.
Throughout the story, Powers threads the narrative with themes and concepts such as ecological interdependence, sacrifice and the necessity for conservation, creating a mixture of science, storytelling and environmental ethics.
While the book is a great option for people interested in the environment and natural science, the pacing suffers a bit, despite being well-written. Some readers may struggle to stay captivated by the story.
Richard Powers is an American novelist known for his fiction as well as science fiction works.
Powers has published several works including “Bewilderment,” “Playground” and “The Time of Our Singing.”
What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself.
Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.
Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is.
Author: Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami’s “Men Without Women” is a poignant and masterfully crafted collection of short stories that delve into the loneliness and disorientation experienced by men after the women central to their lives have departed.
It was published in English in 2017, translated from Japanese by Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goossen.
As the title suggests, each narrative explores a man grappling with absence. We meet Kafuku, an actor dissecting decades of grief and his wife’s infidelity during introspective taxi rides; Kitaru, who inexplicably asks his friend to date his girlfriend; and Dr. Tokai, a commitment-phobic surgeon shattered by unrequited love for a married woman.
Elsewhere, Habara, confined indoors, finds enigmatic connection with his housekeeper; Kino flees his collapsed marriage only to face uncanny visitations in his bar; and a man undergoes a surreal reversal — transformed from insect to human — in a direct homage to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Each protagonist carries a palpable void, that missing jigsaw piece in their heart.
Murakami’s genius lies in his acute observation of fragility in the human spirit and the unpredictability of emotions. Themes resonate powerfully: paralyzing grief, the sting of unreciprocated love, and the suffocating safety of chosen isolation.
His prose seamlessly blends the mundane with the surreal, creating a hypnotic atmosphere that immerses readers in these internal landscapes. The collection flows with remarkable cohesion.
While undeniably melancholic, “Men Without Women” is a moving exploration of love, loss, and the haunting silence that remains.
Murakami compels readers to undertake the difficult task upon which Kafuku reflects: to look inside their own heart as perceptively and seriously as possible, and to make peace with what they find there. A must-read for insights into solitude’s weight.
In 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world.
In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected voices for democracy have turned on the minorities at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
