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Nonfiction

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

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Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker
Format: Book, eBook
Who it’s for: Adults

What do you get when you cross a stand-up comedian with a math enthusiast? You get Matt Parker, and his chuckle-inducing book Humble Pi. Math typically works quietly behind the scenes of life, ensuring that your internet works, your train runs smoothly on its tracks, and the calendar marches steadily onward…until, suddenly, it doesn’t.

Parker reveals the math mistakes behind some of the world’s most spectacular failures, from a bridge collapse to a stock market meltdown to an election debacle. For an entertaining tour through humanity’s mathematical stumbling blocks, find it in the catalog.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World

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The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann
Format: Book
Who it’s for: Adults

How should we feed and provide power to the growing world population? Many debates about this question come down to two conflicting beliefs. We all need to cut back or else everyone will suffer when we hit our ecological limits! says one side. No, we need MORE people doing MORE innovating, and technology will let us overcome all problems! counters the other.

People who espouse the former sentiment, Charles Mann argues, might be called “Prophets”, warning of doom unless we change our ways. The latter, techno-optimist point of view is held by “Wizards”, contending that the magic wand of technology will cause any apparent limits to evaporate.

In The Wizard and the Prophet, Mann examines the lives of two twentieth-century scientists whom you may never have heard of, but whose opposing views came to dominate our current discussions of pressing environmental and humanitarian problems. He uncovers the development of William Vogt’s prophetic beliefs and Norman Borlaug’s wizardly notions, then demonstrates how their philosophical descendants approach some of the conundrums facing humanity: sufficient food, adequate water, energy generation, and climate change.

Find it in the catalog, check it out, then supply yourself with both a dictionary and an open mind as you read this book. Mann will introduce you to both some new words (perfervid, anyone?) and some new thoughts about the key issues of our time.

Packs: Strength in Numbers

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Packs: Strength in Numbers by Hannah Salyer
Format: Book
Who Its For: Kids

Take a look at nature and you will find groups-herds, flocks, swarms of creatures big and small. In Packs: Strength in Numbers, Hannah Salyer celebrates this unity and diversity found in the animal world. With her illustrations of dusty bison on the march, or wolves streaking through snow-quiet forest, she gives us a close up view of just how animals, birds and insects work together to survive and thrive, in hunting, traveling, growing food, singing, protecting the young. This book contains loads of information about the habits of these creatures which will satisfy the curiosity of little naturalists, and big ones too (for example, did you know that a herd of wildebeests can have up to a million animals, and is called an implausibility? Me either!) The book ends with a gentle reminder that working together is always better for creatures and humans alike.

Find it in the catalog

 

Atomic Habits: An Easy Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

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Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones  by James Clear
Format:  Book, ebook, Digital Audiobook, Book on CD
Who it’s for:  Adults

In Atomic Habits, James Clear teaches his readers how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master a system of reaching your goals by changing the way you think about your progress.  If you focus each day on working just 1% toward reaching your goal, and you repeat that process each day, you are cumulatively closer to reaching your goal as opposed to being farther from it.

Clear encourages his readers to follow his four laws of creating a good habit.  They are: Make it Obvious, Make it Attractive, Make it Easy and Make it Satisfying.  Once good habits are formed, these come together to create a system for a person, that will allow him or her to obtain their goals successfully.

I listened to this book in digital audiobook form.  The book is narrated by the author and includes true stories of the accomplishments of athletes, artists, entertainers and businesspeople which emphasize the successes of Clear’s way of re-thinking habit changing behavior.  I thought that Clear’s “system” approach whereby a person aims to create good habits in order to stay motivated and on track, was a new way of thinking about attaining our goals. This is a very interesting book.

Find it in the catalog

 

 

Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland

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Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Who it’s for: Adults
Format: eBook, digital audiobook

Say Nothing begins with the abduction of widow and mother of 10, Jean McConville, in Belfast in 1972. From there, Radden Keefe traces several of the key players of the Troubles, the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland between nationalists (often Catholic) who wanted to see Northern Ireland united with Ireland, and loyalists (often Protestant) who supported continued British rule in Northern Ireland.

McConville was one of the “disappeared,” sixteen people who were determined to have been taken, killed, and buried in unmarked graves by the Provisional IRA (the IRA admitted to being involved in nine of the sixteen cases). But Radden Keefe’s account is not just of McConville and her children. We also meet Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and, most intriguing, the Price sisters, Delours and Marian, all members of the IRA (though Adams has denied his own membership in the organization). Radden Keefe describes hunger strikes, bombings, prison stays, and the gradual shift by some members of the IRA from violence to politics. This shift is an underlying theme of the story; some IRA members viewed the shift and the compromises made as removing the moral justification for the violent acts they had committed. This led to some of them speaking at length with interviewers for a Boston College oral history project. That project’s history, and its legal battles and their outcomes are entwined in the story of the more recent events in Radden Keefe’s account. 

Throughout the book, Radden Keefe returns to Jean McConville, and to her children and their lives after their mother’s abduction. Many of the others discussed in the book were leaders of or soldiers in the IRA, so McConville’s children provide a different view of the Troubles and the events discussed in the book.

Say Nothing often reads like fiction, but it’s not. Every so often, the realization hits that these people are real, many of them still living and dealing with the trauma of their experiences. Radden Keefe has thoroughly researched this story, taking four years to conduct research and interviews, leading to a fascinating true account of events that occurred not that long ago.

You can find Say Nothing in eBook and digital audiobook format on OverDrive/Libby, or in digital audiobook format on RBdigital.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

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So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Format: Book, eBook, Audiobook
Who it’s for: Adults

We’ve all fallen victim to it. That satisfying feeling when someone is wrong on the internet. You instigate or participate in a “pile on,” posting your criticism on your choice of platform. And you totally forget: There’s a person on the other end. A human being, like you, who makes mistakes, like you.

Jon Ronson investigates this phenomenon in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. He speaks to people whose reputations have been ruined by public shaming. People who innocently tweeted a joke, or had a secret uncovered, or posted a photo meant for just their friends to see, that spiraled completely out of control, turning their lives upside down. Even if they sincerely apologize, even if they genuinely change their minds/ways, they become known for that one mistake, and not for the multi-faceted individual they are.

Of course public shaming is not a new concept, but it’s gotten significantly easier, and potentially more dangerous, in our current era of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Anyone can be held accountable for satire they published years ago. Anyone can have a quote taken out of context that disrupts their career and endangers their livelihood. Anyone can devote their life to doing good works and be “cancelled” in the blink of an eye. The court of public opinion never seems to close, or overturn their rulings.

We generally extol virtues like “love your neighbor” and even “love your enemy” but when we engage in public shaming we ignore and even betray these ideals. Why are so quick to hold a grudge, and so slow to hold a conversation with people we presume to disagree with? If you take the opportunity to get to know that person, you are likely to find common ground. If you allow that person to learn from their transgressions and move on, instead of constantly reminding them of what they did wrong, they may grow and find redemption.

In this book, Ronson charges us to examine our impulse to “call out” people, and to think about the harm it causes by inhibiting civility and advancing cruelty. Find it in our catalog