Authors Christmas Recommendations 2022 - Part II
Welcome to Part II of a special series of posts in the run up to the holiday season! (Read Part I here) I asked some of the lovely authors that have previously appeared on the site about their Christmas book recommendations for this year. They graciously replied with some fantastic book picks! Hopefully these book recommendations might help you with your own Christmas shopping gift ideas too! :-)
Q. Is there a smart thinking book that you are looking forward to reading this Christmas, or one you would like to give or receive as a gift?
Sally Coulthard
BY far the best book I’ve read this year has to be Helen Lewis's Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. What a feisty, funny and, at times, furious rattle through the history of women’s fight for equality. From equal pay and abortion to women’s sport and marriage, it made me realise just how much our current freedoms are down to the courage of a few, remarkable women (and some men too) - those who refused to do what they were told. It’s an absolute cracker.
Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
Review from Book Depository:
Well-behaved women don't make history: difficult women do.
Strikers in saris. Bomb-throwing suffragettes. The pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men's rights activist.
Forget feel-good heroines: meet the feminist trailblazers who have been airbrushed from history for being 'difficult' - and discover how they made a difference.
Here are their stories in all their shocking, funny and unvarnished glory.
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Easons €10.08 Book Depository €10.35 Waterstones £9.99 Wordery $11.26(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken from Dinosaur to Dinner Plate
Review from Book Depository:
From dinosaur to dinner plate, Sally Coulthard tells the fascinating - and sometimes shocking - story of the domestic chicken.
The chicken can fly only a few metres but - somehow - this unlikely evolutionary descendant of Tyrannosaurus Rex has conquered the world. Earth is now home to more than twenty billion chickens, at least ten times more than any other bird. For every human on the planet, there are three chickens.
In Fowl Play, Sally Coulthard charts the chicken's fascinating journey from dinosaur to domestication to exploitation, exploring every aspect of the history of Gallus gallus domesticus: its importance to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans as food source and fighting bird; its symbolic roles in religion and folklore and metaphorical function in the language we use; its homely place as egg-providing companion on farms, smallholdings and in suburban back gardens; and its darker modern-day fate as battery bird raised to satisfy society's unquenchable addiction to wings and nuggets.
Of all animals, chickens perhaps best represent the contradictory way we humans treat other species; both beloved pet and cheap commodity, symbol of a sustainable good life and brutalised object of factory farming. The chicken is also a bird we feel deeply familiar with and yet know very little about. As informative as it is entertaining, Fowl Play tells a remarkable tale of evolutionary change, epic global travel and ruthless exploitation - as well as of companionship, ingenuity and the folly of human nature.
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Book Depository €18.78 Waterstones £20.00 Wordery $17.37(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Rob Percival
I’d recommend Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness by Charles Foster – great book.
Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness
Review from Book Depository:
What kind of creature is a human? If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.
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Easons €23.79 Book Depository €16.69 Waterstones £16.99 Wordery $17.59(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat
Review from Book Depository:
Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies and the logic of globalisation, by geopolitical tensions and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo - pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises - and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.
'Should we eat animals?' was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.
In The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.
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Easons €26.59 Book Depository €14.59 Waterstones £18.99 Wordery $17.30(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Rebecca Nesbit
Yes there is - I have Endless Forms by Seirian Sumner and Rewilding the Sea by Charles Clover waiting for me this Christmas. I look forward to them, and hope others will enjoy them too.
Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
Review from Book Depository:
Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee's evolutionary ancestors - flying 100 million years earlier - and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt.
For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.
With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.
It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth's major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.
The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects - both custodians and bouncers of our planet - the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.
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Easons €28.00 Book Depository €19.66 Waterstones £20.00 Wordery $18.27(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans
Review from Book Depository:
In this indispensable follow up to his acclaimed The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World, Charles Clover chronicles how determined individuals are proving that the crisis in our oceans can be reversed, with benefits for both local communities and entire ecosystems. Rewilding the Sea celebrates what happens when we step aside and let nature repair the damage: whether it is the overfishing of bluefin tuna across the Atlantic, the destruction of coral gardens by dredgers in Lyme Bay or the restoration of oysters on the East Coast of America.
The latest scientific research shows that trawling and dredging create more CO2 than the aviation industry and damage vast areas of our continental shelves, stopping them soaking up carbon. We need to fish in different ways, where we fish at all. We can store carbon and have more fish by stepping aside more often and trusting nature.
Essential and revelatory, Rewilding the Sea propels us to rethink our relationship with nature and reveals that saving our oceans is easier than we think.
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Easons €30.80 Book Depository €20.23 Waterstones £18.99 Wordery $20.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Tickets for the Ark: What we should conserve and why in this age of extinctions
Review from Book Depository:
Our planet hasn't seen the current rate of extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and global conservation efforts are failing to halt this. As a society, we face choices which will determine the fate of Earth's estimated 8.7 million species, including humans. As wildlife declines, conservation needs to make trade-offs. But what should we conserve and why?
Are we wrong to love bees and hate wasps? Are native species more valuable than newcomers (aka invasives)? Should some animals be culled to protect others, and what do we want the 'natural world' to look like? There are many surprising answers in Rebecca Nesbit's lively, stimulating book, which sows the seeds of a debate we urgently need to have.
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Easons €20.99 Book Depository €12.80 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $15.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Ryan North
Ooh, what a fun idea!
I'd recommend What If? 2 (and its prequel, What If?) by Randall Munroe - two books just full of taking random hypothetical questions completely seriously. What IF the whole world was soup? What IF you could pitch a baseball at relativistic speeds? Randy does the math (and draws the comics to go with) and the result is spectacular.
I'm also recommending Kate Beaton's Ducks, a profoundly humane look at life in the tar sands in Canada. It's funny, it's bleak, it's empathic, and it's just a wonderful graphic memoir. And learning more about how humans are with each other - especially in extreme positions - is something we could all probably do with a bit more of. I loved both these books!
What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Review From Book Depository:
WHAT IF... one man decided to answer all the unanswerable questions, using science.
The Sunday Times-bestselling author and xkcd creator, Randall Munroe is here to provide the best answers yet to the important questions you probably never thought to ask.
The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger.
Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing.
Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer doors at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics.
Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-storey building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist.
Welcome (back) to the mind-blowing world of What If?
Unfazed by absurdity, Randall consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airplane-catapult design to clearly and concisely answer his readers' questions. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances.
Filled with bonkers science, boundless curiosity, and Randall's signature stick-figure comics, What If? 2 is sure to be another instant classic adored by inquisitive readers of all ages.
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Easons €17.99 Book Depository €18.41 Waterstones £16.99 Wordery $19.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Review From Book Depository:
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beatons, a tight-knit seaside community. After university, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta's oil rush, part of the long tradition of East Coast Canadians who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can't find it in the homeland they love so much. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, what the journey will actually cost Katie will be far more than she anticipates.
Arriving in Fort McMurray, Katie finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world's largest oil companies. As one of the few women among thousands of men, the culture shock is palpable. It does not hit home until she moves to a spartan, isolated worksite for higher pay. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For young Katie, her wounds may never heal.
Beaton's natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, Northern Lights, and Rocky Mountains. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
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Book Depository €23.03 Waterstones £25.00 Wordery $23.22(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain
Review from Book Depository:
A book this informative should be a crime!
Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What’s the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?
Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today’s most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.
You don’t have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain’s interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn’t just reveal how to take over the world—it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.
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Book Depository €16.64(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Karla Starr
I'm looking forward to reading The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté. I've loved his other books, and it seems like the perfect topic for these days!
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Review From Book Depository:
We tend to believe that normality equals health. Yet what is the norm in the Western world?
Mental illness is on an unstoppable rise. Some 45% of Europeans suffer high blood pressure, and nearly 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug. Illness and trauma are defining how we live.
In his new masterpiece, renowned physician, addiction expert and author Gabor Mate dissects the underlying causes of this malaise - physical and emotional, and connects the dots between our personal suffering and the pressures of modern-day living. Over four decades of clinical experience, Dr Mate has found that the common definition of 'normal' is false: virtually all disease is actually a natural reflection of life in an abnormal culture, as we grow further and further apart from our true selves. But he also shows us the pathway to reconnection and healing.
Filled with stories of people in the grip of illness or in the triumphant wake of recovery, this life-affirming book shows how true health is possible - if we are willing to embrace authenticity above social expectations. The Myth of Normal is Gabor Mate's most ambitious, compassionate and urgent book yet.
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Easons €17.99 Book Depository €11.33 Waterstones £10.99 Wordery $23.22(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Review from Book Depository:
Making Numbers Count is a lively, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to turning cold, clinical data into a memorable story.
How many hours' worth of songs are on your Spotify Wrapped this year?
How much is your commute time really worth?
How do you work out how likely you are to get Covid based on the official statistics?
How do your viewing hours track against the most popular shows on Netflix?
Whether you're interested in global problems like climate change, and understanding that the Australian wildfires destroyed an area twice the size of Portugal, or just grasping how few people have washed their hands between visiting the bathroom and touching your hands, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world.
Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five - anything from six to infinity was known as 'lots'. While the numbers in our world have become increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. Yet the ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more. How can we more effectively translate numbers and stats - so fundamental to the next big idea - to make data come to life?
Drawing on years of research into making ideas stick, Chip Heath and Karla Starr outline six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. Using concepts such as simplicity, concreteness and familiarity, they reveal what's compelling about a number and show how to transform it into its most engaging form.
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Book Depository €12.73 Waterstones £14.99 Wordery $14.99(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Erez Yoeli
I recommend Nichola Raihani's The Social Instinct, I like the idea of recommending a book about cooperation in the holiday season.
The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
Review From Book Depository:
Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face.
The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat.
Nichola Raihani also introduces us to other species who, like us, live and work together. From the pied babblers of the Kalahari to the cleaner fish of the Great Barrier Reef, they happen to be some of the most fascinating and extraordinarily successful species on this planet. What do we have in common with these other species, and what is it that sets us apart?
Written at a time of global pandemic, when the challenges and importance of cooperation have never been greater, The Social Instinct is an exhilarating, far-reaching and thought-provoking journey through all life on Earth, with profound insights into what makes us human and how our societies work.
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Easons €28.00 Book Depository €18.68 Waterstones £20.00 Wordery $19.46(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Hidden Games: The Surprising Power of Game Theory to Explain Irrational Human Behavior
Review from Book Depository:
How game theory - the ultimate theory of rationality - explains irrational behaviour.
In Hidden Games, MIT economists Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli find a surprising middle ground between the hyperrationality of classical economics and the hyper-irrationality of behavioural economics. They call it hidden games. Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behaviour, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalised misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness.
Fun and powerfully insightful, Hidden Games is an eye-opening argument for using game theory to explain all the irrational things we think, feel, and do and will change how you think forever.
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Book Depository €19.57 Waterstones £25.00 Wordery $20.59(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Huge thanks & míle buíochas to Sally, Rob, Rebecca, Ryan, Karla, & Erez for their great Christmas book picks!
Watch out next week for Part III of the series (Read Part I here) with more author recommendations :-)
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Little, Brown Book Group (The Meat Paradox), HarperCollins Publishers (Endless Forms), Profile Books Ltd (Being a Human, Tickets For The Ark), Head of Zeus (Fowl Play), John Murray Press (What If? 2), Transworld Publishers Ltd (Making Numbers Count), Penguin Putnam Inc (How To Take Over The World), Vintage Publishing (Difficult Women, Ducks, The Social Instinct), Ebury Publishing (Rewilding The Sea, The Myth of Normal)
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