A little light reading.

This intimate study of animal senses combines scientific detail with a talent for description that will turn your understanding of the world inside out. It shows how little we comprehend about the environment around us, what drives the differences between species, and takes you deep inside all kinds of perception and intelligence. I'll never think the same way about taking my dog for a walk.

 

 

There are plenty of bad jobs out there, and maybe you've even had a few. But Graeber argues with conviction that there are, perhaps, an even larger number of "bullshit jobs"—the meaningless employment that everybody knows contribute nothing and yet nobody can get rid of. Graeber tears a new one into the system that forges this depressing reality and encourages people to push paper from one place to another merely to satisfy some boss's desire for power, or undertake tasks that are so purposely, pointlessly Sisyphean that you will gasp in disbelief.

 

 

 

I don't think there's been a book that surgically slices through the American myth of meritocracy as sharply as this. Wilkerson argues that America's racial divide is a fully-fledged but thoroughly disguised caste system, much like exists in India or Nazi Germany. In fact, the parallels to the Reich aren't just chilling—Wilkerson makes it clear that, in many cases, the Nazis were inspired by what they saw in the United States.

 

 

It's possible that the green movement would have grown during the 1960s and 1970s without this book, but it seems unlikely that it would have gained the same momentum or taken the same shape. Carson's astonishing and clear-eyed expose of the perils of excessive pesticide use—and examined the terrifying environmental consequences of the liberal application of DDT—led pretty directly to the banning of various substances, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

 

The Undocumented Americans - Karla Cornejo Villavicencio 

 

There are lots of stories about migrants and their families, but they rarely get told with such sensitivity and dedication. Villavicencio, a young undocumented writer herself, really goes inside the system to show how it grinds away at the people stuck inside it. She doesn't shy away from her anger, or the heaviness of the subject. But somehow her eye and her ability to capture the real people she's meeting propel you through and on to the other side.

 

 

A breezily-written guide to the reasons that some people are seen as great communicators while others struggle. It walks a fine line between pop science book and self-help, but I thought it was very approachable and immediately came away with ideas and suggestions of how to be a more effective conversationalist.