One critical element, Gates writes, is to alleviate the gap between high- and low-income countries, the latter of which suffer disproportionately from outbreaks. Therefore, there are political as well as medical solutions that can enlist governments as well as scientists to contain outbreaks and make sure they don’t explode into global disasters.
“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.” Thus states the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, a Gates adviser, who hits on a critically important point: Disease is a fact of nature, but a pandemic is a political creation of a kind. The tech mogul recounts the health care–related dimensions of his foundation in what amounts to a long policy paper. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category-fish-does not exist. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish.
ADVENTURES OF HUMAN BEING FULL
A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. Throughout, the author makes connections between minds past and present with the “more-than-human world.” It’s a book that fits neatly into the growing library of modern British natural history writing, alongside the best of Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin.Ī splendid assessment of the many ways there are to be a person, for good and ill.Ī Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence. On one page, Foster notes that a circular house “is an intrinsically democratic space,” and on another, that the Romans were more interested in nature than were the Greeks. The author offers a provocative, pleasing meditation on the different ways in which the two stages of human evolution made use of fire-one to create, one to destroy-and he cleverly links the Neolithic world of overcrowding, forced labor, taxation, epidemic disease, and other woes to our time: “Continue synergistically for 12,000 years or so, and you have us.” This is a magpie book full of intriguing anthropological sketches. Instead of moving through the land, knowing what to hunt and what to gather and paying close attention to our surroundings, we became machines of labor.
“In the Neolithic,” Foster laments, “we started to get boring and miserable,” controlled in all sorts of ways. That age of metaphor and creation, of “self-creation and self-knowing,” came crashing down in the Neolithic, which brought us agriculture and urbanization.
As he writes, “God is good and favours the Upper Palaeolithic,” and its inhabitants responded to that goodness by painting glorious works of art in hard-to-get-to places, placing their dead in carefully constructed graves, and building cultures. British scholar and writer Foster delivers a spirited romp through human history and finds our time wanting in many ways.īuilding on Being a Beast (2016), in which he looked at the world through the viewpoints of badgers, a fox, and other critters, Foster imagines a humdrum deep past in which not much happened until around the Stone Age, when some mysterious spark fired our imaginations.
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