This evening, as I sat at my desk with piles of new and forthcoming books stacked up around me, I just kept thinking “What’s it matter?” Who should really give a fat rat’s rump about anything I have to say about anything with so many hurting so badly.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even octopi down in the seas do it… And if you listen to the most recent episode of the Mongbay Newscast in which the first guest is Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness and many other interesting books […]
When I first learned about the publication of Brooke Borel’s The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking back in late 2016, I thought “This is THE book for our time.” However now, having learned about the forthcoming publication of a second edition of Scott L. Montgomery’s The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science, I’m in a bit of a quandary.
The 2015 National Book Award Nonfiction Longlist contains two books classifiable as natural history: Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett and The Soul of an Octopus; A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery.
Curiously, neither of these books was on my radar as no review copies ever arrived. Thus I am uncertain as to which I would prefer to see ultimately chosen as the winner.