Looking for something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!
- Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination by Webb Keane. We have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes? Acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers – even macho cowboys. We meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him; a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox; a computer that gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist’s couch. With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond. To learn more, you can check out this review in the Times Literary Supplement.
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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” You can find reviews in many publications, including the Chicago Review of Books and Undark.
Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives & Culture edited by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller. This was Gaza. A place of humanity and creativity, rich in culture and industry. A place now pulverised and devastated, its entire population displaced by a seemingly endless onslaught.Today, as its heritage is being destroyed, Gaza’s survivors preserve their culture through literature, music, stories and memories. Daybreak in Gaza is a record of that heritage, revealing an extraordinary place and people. Vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers across the generations offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza’s cultural landscape and the breadth of its history. This remarkable book humanizes the people dismissed as mere statistics and portrays lives full of joy and meaning. To learn more you can read this review in The New Arab or watch this conversation with the authors.
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kōhei Saitō. Why, in our affluent society, do so many people live in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and are nevertheless unable to make ends meet, with no future prospects, while the planet is burning? In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, subsequent calls for “sustainable growth” and a “Green New Deal” are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist society–more: the system that caused the problem in the first place cannot be an integral part of the solution. Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. You can find reviews in the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff. Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate? In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened. To learn more check out this interview in the Washington Post , or this review in Foreword.