book-review

I had a hard time with this book; it showed up in the TED book club mailing months ago, and I went into my reading primed to love the message, which is concise and persuasive… but maybe so persuasive on its own that the book feels like 300 pages of filler. David Brooks’s “The Second Mountain” is about the sense he’s developed, later in his life, that our lives play out on a landscape populated by peaks whose summits, we’re told, offer peace, happiness, alleviation from the anxiety of modern life. If you get to the top, earn the PhD, become CEO, you can stop. ...

What a strange, fantastic little book! I recently read Douglas Harding’s “On Having No Head” after hearing Sam Harris mention the book in one of “Waking Up” meditations, and then many times on subsequent podcasts. The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding’s mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you’re seeing, and just describe exactly what’s in front of you, not only is there no head on display… but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed. ...

I spent a while this summer reading math books and popular science, trying to figure out what a life in “research” might look like; in late Spring I began to sense that it was time to wake up my brain and start thinking again, and the best way forward seemed to be to find examples of lives-well-lived in science and study the cases. I’m so glad I found “The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter” by Paul Steinhardt. The book is a trip report of Paul’s decades-long relationship with a peculiar type of matter called a “quasicrystal”. I’ll give a short summary, then discuss what struck me as so wonderful about the book, and finish out by including my more detailed notes in case you want to dig deeper. ...

Last Spring, while preparing for my attempt on the Rainier Infinity Loop, I bought two books on Mt Rainier… and failed to read either of them. My invite to that adventure had come out of nowhere; I knew nothing about the park, the area, the mountain or its history, and it felt important to develop some sense of the mountain I planned on running over and around. So I bought The Challenge of Rainier, a collection of trip reports by Dee Molenaar, and The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, by Bruce Barcott, an environmental journalist from Washington. They lived on my desk for months, untouched. I contemplated bailing on the trip - I wasn’t prepared! I was only running a few times a week! Actually reading the books represented a commitment I wasn’t sure I wanted to make. ...