materialism

Book review – Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order

8-minute read
keywords: history of science, taxonomy

As a bonus to conclude my (now) four-part review series on the history of taxonomy, I am looking back to Susannah Gibson’s 2015 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? After dealing with biographies of Linnaeus and Buffon, and then Ragan’s Kingdoms, Empires, & Domains, her book was just crying out to be read next. Given that those three were all published in 2023 and 2024, I will leave a comparison for the end of this review and first judge this book on its merits. As it turns out, this is an easy and intriguing read that I ignored for far too long.

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Book review – Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness

9-minute read
keywords: anthropology, history

In Being a Human, Charles Foster attempts to inhabit three past eras to find out first-hand how humans came to be who they are. He lives like an Upper Palaeolithic hunter–gatherer, an early farmer in the Neolithic, and he briefly visits the Enlightenment—or so we are promised. When I received this book, I was, admittedly, slightly unsure. Any attempt to live like past humans, especially hunter–gatherers, is fraught with difficulties as so many things have irrevocably changed: the flora and fauna, the landscape, the knowledge most of us have gained (you cannot really unsee germ theory) but also lost (who here can kill and prepare an animal or make a fire without modern tools?), or the fact that we lived in large communal groups. When the flap text also mentions shamanic journeys I was fearing the worst: am I about to witness yet another affluent man’s mid-life crisis?

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Book review – Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment

9-minute read

The best way to introduce this book is to quote the first sentence of the blurb: “Techno-Fix challenges the pervasive belief that technological innovation will save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fuelled binge known as modern industrial civilization“. Stinging, provocative, and radical, Techno-Fix puts its fingers on many a sore spot with its searing critique.

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