From time to time I like to let you in on some of my favorite books that I have read recently.
Having just finished Sapiens this evening, I wanted to alert you to a few books that I felt were especially worthy of your attention.
This was probably the best book that I have read in quite some time.
It is a short history of how humans became what we are today. It is dubbed a short history of humankind.
By the subject, you might consider it something incredibly wonky or verbose, but it isn’t. You will need to pay attention to the book, but it reads very quickly and almost like a thriller in the way that we were able to develop from a bunch of different species to become the dominant animal on the planet.
There is also a really interesting hypothesis of what really might be the most successful species ever. Which I will leave as a surprise.
The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore:
I started following Jared Yates Sexton at some point in 2016 when he was following the Trump campaign around the country.
He seemed to have a pretty good pulse on what was happening in the world and he took a much different point of view than the conventional press point of view that was dominating.
This book is a good cover of the campaign and why the circumstances were right for a Trump candidacy to be successful.
You don’t have to even be into politics to gain something from the book.
It is as much a study of sociology and psychology.
This book is about the opioid epidemic and it takes a real, complete look at how the crisis came to be.
So much of the coverage of the crisis is focused on one part of the problem.
Maybe we talk about the cheap drugs.
Maybe we cover the influx of Mexican drugs into the country.
Maybe we cover how it ruins lives.
Whatever it is, not much is holistic.
This book solves that problem.
Sam Quinones follows the path of drugs from Mexico to the United States but also looks at the cultural, economic, and societal drivers of this issue.