“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari

This book is a veritable powerhouse of history, sociology, psychology, science, and anthropology. There’s even basic economics included in here. And of course it’s all very accessible even if you’re like me and have had little experience with most of these subjects before. Many concepts are illustrated with a diagram, and Harari’s writing is simultaneously informative and a joy to read.

Harari takes us through the history of Earth starting with physics, and how the world began. Then there’s chemistry, the different atoms composing matter, and finally biology and the world of cells. From there he switches and starts to talk about how mankind evolved through the ages, and the different theories of how it happened. Each proposal is annotated with the various evidence for and against, so all sides are presented (the book was published in 2014 I believe, all information is up to date until then as far as I know). The results of changes are also expounded upon, the reader learns that agriculture is really an elaborate hoax that in the end harmed much more than it helped.

The history then continues through ancient times, all the way up to the present and beyond. What makes this history interesting is that Harari deconstructs several systems that we tend to take for granted. The power of myths is especially discussed, and the various forms that they can take. There’s money, for instance. He explains money as an elaborate trust system between peoples, and dives into how money originated and why it was practical. In this manner, many innovations are explained through why they were implemented, how they came into widespread use, and what the results were.

Probably the most fascinating part is the end though. Here Harari takes a look at violence and happiness throughout history, to see if they have increased or decreased. Unsurprisingly, we end up more uncertain than when we started. While it is likely that violence has declined, Harari also notes that looking at violence as a whole does not take into account individual experiences. The same is true for happiness, which as a biological has not changed much, but various social factors around that have changed.

This book was fascinating to read and the writing style made it entertaining, rather than dry like most textbooks that tackle history. There is so much information within the pages, and much of it seems surprising, but makes intuitive sense. It is as though we have been looking at the tapestry of humans this whole time, but Harari is plucking out individual threads that make us who we are. I’m excited to read other works by him.

Living in Bethesda

So it’s been over six months since I moved to Bethesda, MD after graduation. I think I’m qualified now to give my thoughts on what it’s like to live here.

First of all, the Washington DC metro area is not nearly as political as you would think. I thought that there would be tons of politicians and their crews everywhere, but that’s really not the case. There’s also a very vibrant arts scene, and because of the NIH there’s also a lot of scientists trying to stay out of politics and just get their work done.

In particular, all of the arts have me really impressed. Tons of bands come through here on tour, and there is a surplus of jazz clubs in the U St area and in downtown Bethesda as well. It makes it easier for a liberal arts college grad to find a creative outlet!

In general though, the area is very walkable (North Bethesda less so) especially in downtown DC. The metro is probably better than NYC’s, and cleaner as well. (It’d just be nice if it stopped catching on fire and ran later at night…) There is also certainly more breathing room and personal space than NYC or other packed cities.

To sum up: I’ve really liked living here! It’s beautiful here, and there’s always plenty going on. Come visit!

“Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman

This book is Gaiman’s retelling of several classic Norse myths. It’s not an original story of his, it’s how he interprets and elaborates on the myths that we know about the Norse gods.

Honestly this seemed kind of run-of-the-mill to me. It felt very similar to any book of Greek/Roman or Norse myths that you come across when you’re younger and your parents want you to be somewhat cultured so they get you a book of myths. The only real difference is that it has Gaiman’s writing style to it.

To the author’s credit, more Norse myth retellings are much more inaccessible than this, but there are some other good ones out there. But he doesn’t really elaborate on the personalities of the characters, and they seem fairly standard. Thor is still the powerful guy who isn’t that bright, and Loki is the charming trickster.

If you are into Norse myths, check it out, but it isn’t super special in and of itself. If you aren’t into Norse mythology, you should reconsider that and find a book on them, because they are super fascinating and deserve a little more recognition in today’s world. This book does help that cause, but honestly I think it could have done better.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

I’m a little late to the bandwagon here, this book spectacularly resurfaced when it was made into a tv show on Hulu and everyone suddenly decided to read the book again. I hadn’t read it before, so here we are.

In the introduction, Atwood says that she was writing this in the eighties and that what she wanted to do with this book was create a future that was shocking, but that didn’t have anything wholly original about it. She just borrowed what other totalitarian or theocracies did in the past and synthesize something new from them. Like it says towards the end, there isn’t anything new about this world, it’s just the specific synthesis of ideas.

Having pointed that out, yeah, I think it’s possible for America to become a world like this someday. Which is why the tv show is so relevant, since the election everyone has been terrified of something like this happening to us. And the parallels to Nazi Germany are quite clear; I’ve always maintained that if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. There is nothing fundamentally different about us now that makes contemporary America immune to hate and prejudice. Recent events have made that quite clear.

What I thought was very unique about this book though is its narrative structure. It’s entirely written in the first person, but as we learn, women aren’t allowed to read or write anymore. So throughout the story, the reader assumes that it’s simply the stream of consciousness of the narrator, a direct pipeline to her thoughts. However, at the end we learn through a fake historical gathering that this is actually a transcription of a set of tapes found. The narration is all dictated, and possibly out of order.

This throws an entirely new light on it, if the story could be out of order, then the flashbacks might not be flashbacks at all but errors in ordering the story. Which is an interesting idea, but changing around the story doesn’t really get us anywhere. But then there’s the fact that Offred (the narrator) spends plenty of time reflecting on her role as a storyteller. If this is dictated rather than a thought process, that gives her musings about who exactly this story is for a little more credibility. If we were reading her mind, there is no way that she intended that for anyone, what’s in your head tends to stay there. But it also makes her considerably more self-aware, it’s one thing to recognize that you are a flawed narrator, but it is another thing entirely to spend time on a tape talking about it. I think that it adds plenty of depth to her character, and the epilogue gives a nice ending and way to wrap up some loose ends in a satisfying way, even if most of our questions remain unanswered.

“Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” by Atul Gawande

When I opened this book, I realized that I had read it years ago, and that it had inspired the 12-year-old me to really resist becoming a doctor. No, I was into science, I wanted everything to be clear cut and not involve messy human beings. At its heart, this is a book about how messy and imperfect we can be. There’s stories about doctor screw-ups and how they deal with the fact that we never can be certain what is going on inside another human body.

As time went on though, I came back to medicine. Because the reality of the world is that science can be just as messy as human beings are. We never really know what it is that is driving a certain mechanism in biology, this is just what all the data points to. And when the data points to something else, we change our theory. Medicine is not the only uncertain science out there, ALL of science is uncertain.

But what makes medicine unique is the profoundly human nature of it. The errors in science are errors of interpretation, we look at the data and misread it. Errors in medicine arise from miscommunications between doctors and patients, or mistaking individual differences in patients for problems relating to their illness. The process of diagnosis involves more cooperation and instinct than we’d like to believe.

Which is why books like this (or anything Gawande has written really) are so important. He peels back the veneer from medicine and shows the messy insides. Which scares us, as it did me years ago, but also reveals it as one of the most personal and human ways of understanding the world around, and within, each of us.