I’ve read thousands of mainly non-fiction books over the past 40 years.

Why I write Book Reviews

I write book reviews for a number of reasons — to give my brain a “workout”, as a source of information for my own book about the decline and fall of our fossil-fuel-based civilization, and to perhaps delay dementia.

Why Books?  Why not newspapers or science journals?

I read newspapers and subscribe to many magazines and newspapers: NewScientist, Science, Scientific American, Time, the New Yorker, the New York Times, National Geographic, Skeptic, etc. to keep up-to-date, but I find most media seldom covers the issues and topics that really matter.

Even when overpopulation, carrying capacity, peak energy, peak rare earth & platinum minerals, peak phosphorous, biodiversity loss, invasive species, decaying infrastructure, natural resources, cyber attacks & war, nuclear war and waste, superfund projects, chemical wastes, topsoil mining, monocropping and agricultural diseases, ecology, climate change, and other issues that do matter are covered, they’re approached and written about through the false filters of economics and politics.

If an important issue such as long-term disposal of radioactive waste makes the news, it’s short and about a specific power plant.  Complex and important topics can’t be covered in newspapers or magazines due to limited space, a time frame in the here and now, not enough space to give the greater context, or the history of what led up to this news item, and certainly not an in-depth analysis of why it matters.

How I find books to read

• Science magazine’s “books received” list online (not in the print version)
• Nature magazine’s book reviews
• New York Times book review podcast
• NPR book review podcast
• Magazines & newspapers (listed above)
• Other podcasts: Science Friday (NPR), Science Times (New York Times), WNYC Radio lab,  BBC Discovery, National Geographic Weekend, Nature magazine, Fresh Air (NPR), To the Best of Our Knowledge (NPR), This American Life, Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Stuff you should know, Stuff you missed in history class, Scientific American 60-second earth & science, Big Picture Science, Point of Inquiry

Then I look at the reviews on amazon, and then see which library has the book at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) library system and add it to my giant book list.  Then I thumb through the book to see if I actually want to read it.

If I’m interested in a topic such as cyber war, nutrition, jellyfish, or semiconductor manufactoring, I see what books the UCB library has and look at all the books in that section. UCB also has many online-only sources that are free to the public.

Lastly, there’s the New York Times book review and going to the few bookstores still surviving and randomly pulling books of the shelf to look through them.  In the past, but less so now, I discovered books in yahoo groups energyresources and runningonempty, private emails from scientists I’m in touch with, and these websites:

• peakoil.com
• resilience.org
• theautomaticearth
• Tad Patzek (professor): Life Itself
• Ugo Bardi (professor): Cassandra’s Legacy
• Charles Huge Smith: Of Two Minds
• Chris Martenson: Peak Prosperity
• Bloomberg energy news

Peak Resources and the Preservation of Knowledge

Because there are no alternative resources of energy that can replace fossil fuels, our leaders ought to be looking at how to transition to a lower energy society — back to the past in as orderly a way as possible to prevent sudden discontinuities that throw us into world war, civil war, and to limit the number of deaths as we descend the net energy cliff and carrying capacity relentlessly declines.  PostCarbon’s website, www.resilience.org, is dedicated to how to go about doing this from the bottom up, since for many reasons, our political and economic leaders can’t discuss peak oil and climate change.

Once society descends into chaos, a lot of libraries and books will be destroyed by fascistic or rigid fanatic religious leaders, or burned to provide energy to cook with or heat homes, by natural disasters, by insects, by aging (at most books last 500 years) — so the more books people buy (and of course, I’d like to see people buy the ones on my booklist), the greater the chance some books will make it through to the next Renaissance, where scholars can transcribe what they find the most useful to save and preserve knowledge.  Computers will be one of the first fossil-fuel produced products to go away, so all of the information being stored electronically will only last as long as the last computer and computer chip.

What books might I be reviewing in the future?

Obviously I only have the time to review a few of the ones below that I find the time to read.

To give you an idea of the books I have on my U.C. Berkeley library list right now (September 2013), here’s my “A” list, the most wanted (I have an even larger “B” list, as well as lists of books I’ve read, or that I didn’t want after I’d thumbed through them):

And if I get through the above list and new books that I’m adding, these are my “B” list, second most wanted: