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Category Archives: Book review
It’s all in your head: a review of The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering
I’ve been a voracious reader lately—a cookie monster of the written word. It started with Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and continued with The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (which I reviewed here) alongside The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (yes, I am still a young adult, thank you very much). The latest to be devoured was The Belief Instinct by Dr. Jesse Bering.
I first found Dr. Bering’s work reading his often hilarious, always insightful blog Bering in Mind, and it was sci-love at first read. In The Belief Instinct, Bering investigates the genesis of humankind’s seeming instinct to believe in a higher power and tackles difficult questions: “Why do people often believe that natural disasters have meaning?” and “Why are humans, religious or not, so engrossed by the thought of an afterlife?”
A Wilder World: a review of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
The rain has come and gone; you close your eyes and listen for birds. You hear one, maybe two, no—three distinct songs. And if it weren’t for those gas-guzzling metal canisters rumbling so indiscreetly by, you could be in The World Without Us, as Alan Weisman imagined it in his 2007 book. Weisman visits some of the most urbanized (New York City) and pristine (the forests of South America) sites on earth, as he explores our planet’s origins and imagines its future free of our domineering presence.
In thoughtful and intricate prose, Weisman takes us on a journey around the globe to show how our planet might react (or really, recover) if we were all to suddenly depart this pale blue dot. From the already progressing wild takeover at Chernobyl to the erasure of the Panama Canal, Weisman introduces us to our monumental, but fleeting legacies that barely manage to resist the oncoming wilderness. Such a detailed study of our planet could read like an encyclopedia, but in Weisman’s deft hands and diction, the story comes alive both tragically (“Eventually, coming full circle, we returned, so estranged from our origins that we enslaved blood cousins who stayed behind to maintain our birthright.”) and comically (“It was at least 10,000 years old, but unmistakably a turd.”).
