4-minute read
2024 was a year in which I managed to read and review 38 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.
death
Book review – Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
7-minute read
keywords: ethology, philosophy, psychology
The Virginia opossum is one of nature’s glorious weirdos. This North American marsupial will play dead when feeling threatened: she will fall over paralysed, eyes and mouth wide open, turn her tongue blue, drop her body temperature and heart rate, and, for good measure, drool, pee, poop, and excrete a foul-smelling green goo from her anal glands, all at the same time. “Playing” dead rather undersells it. Having just reviewed How Animals Grieve, this is the second of a two-part review exploring how animals experience and understand death, a topic studied by comparative thanatology. This young discipline sits somewhere at the intersection of ethology and comparative psychology, though associate professor Susana Monsó is instead a philosopher. With Playing Possum, she has written an exceedingly interesting book that is as accessible to a general audience as it is relevant to specialists. In the process, she convincingly argues that an understanding of death is likely very widespread in nature, but also that comparative thanatology has a whole lot of growing up to do.
Book review – How Animals Grieve
8-minute read
keywords: ethology
Death, and its attendant grief, is on that infamous shortlist of two things that are sure in life. But are humans alone in understanding death? To prepare for reviewing Susana Monsó’s new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, I reach back in time to 2013 to a highly relevant book that has been sitting on my shelf unread for too long. In How Animals Grieve, anthropologist Barbara J. King mines a compelling vein of anecdotes that strongly suggest this emotion is not uniquely human. This, then, is the first of a two-part review exploring how our evolutionary next of kin experience and understand death.
Book review – The Evolutionary Origins of Life and Death
9-minute read
keywords: abiogenesis, cell biology, evolutionary biology
In this second foray into the biology of death, I will examine programmed cell death or PCD. You might have heard of the process of apoptosis, but, as the previously reviewed The Biology of Death mentioned, this is just one of many ways in which cells can actively kill themselves. It is a vital part of life in multicellular organisms, for instance sculpting our hands so that we are not born with webs of skin between our fingers, or allowing leaves to fall from the trees in autumn by triggering cell death in so-called abscission zones. These are small sacrifices to serve the larger organism. Surprisingly, single-celled (unicellular) organisms also show PCD. But wait, is that not tantamount to suicide? How did that evolve?
Book review – The Biology of Death: How Dying Shapes Cells, Organisms, & Populations
7-minute read
keywords: biomedicine, molecular biology
Though humans have shrouded it in ritual, cultural, and religious meaning, death is fundamentally a biological phenomenon. As both a biologist and someone with an abiding interest in the gothic subculture, death has thus never been a topic I shy away from. Two recent books, The Biology of Death (2022), and The Evolutionary Origins of Life and Death (first published in 2020), provided the perfect excuse to indulge my morbid curiosity.
Book review – Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
7-minute read
keywords: genetics, history of science, molecular biology
The word biology derives from the Greek words bíos (βίος in Greek), meaning “life”, and -logía (-λογία in Greek), meaning “branch of study”, and is usually defined as “the study of life”. But what is life? Remarkably, biologists cannot agree on a definition. Everyone can name clear examples of living and non-living things. However, as so often in biology, there is no sharp demarcation between the two. There is a grey area where things are, well, somewhat alive? Lifelike? It is these borderlands between life and non-life that famous science writer and journalist Carl Zimmer explores in Life’s Edge. Instead of providing an answer, this intellectually stimulating and rewarding book will help you understand why it is such a hard question to begin with.
Book review – Vampirology: The Science of Horror’s Most Famous Fiend
6-minute read
You would think that science and monsters are strange bedfellows. And yet, there are plenty of science geeks, myself included, who get a good giggle out of pondering the science behind mythical beings and worlds. Clearly, somebody at the Royal Society of Chemistry has a similar sense of humour, for they have just published Vampirology. Here, chemist and science communicator Kathryn Harkup trains a scientific lens on the fanged fiend—not so much to ask whether vampires do or do not exist, but whether they could exist given our scientific understanding today.
Book review – Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
7-minute read
So far, most of the books I have read on the COVID-19 pandemic have either been of the backwards-looking, how-did-we-get-here type, or have dealt with practical virological, epidemiological, or immunological details. I picked up Apollo’s Arrow as it promised a forward-looking perspective while drawing parallels with past pandemics. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist directing the Human Nature Lab in Yale, got drafted into working on the pandemic from the start, tracking the spread of the virus, and sat at the bedside of many dying patients while working as a hospice doctor in New York. I believe we need to hear these frontline stories.
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.
Book review – Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life
6-minute read
Peter Godfrey-Smith is popularly known as the scuba-diving philosopher and has just published his new book Metazoa, in which he plumbs the evolutionary origins of minds. In preparation for reviewing that book, I am (finally) turning my attention to his initial 2016 bestseller Other Minds. Here he beholds the octopus, only to find that, behind those eight tentacles, an intelligence quite unlike ours beholds him in turn.
The Inquisitive Biologist