While I was terrified of dogs as a child, basically never had pets, didn’t grow up on a farm, and thus haven’t spent a lot of time directly interacting with animals, I’ve always enjoyed learning about them. That is part of why I loved a book that I read recently, Animals in Translation. If you aren’t familiar with Temple Grandin, the author of the book, this is a great way to start learning about her important work. Her accomplishments are staggering – it is safe to say that by restructuring the physical environments in which livestock animals live and die, she has done more to improve the safety and well-being of domesticated animals in America than any other individual.

Temple Grandin’s success is possible because of her autism, not in spite of it. As a person whose sensory experience of the world differs from most humans, she is able to see things from a perspective that she says is like that of non-human animals in many ways. By translating that perspective into action, she has earned her fame. And by translating her first-person experiences and expert knowledge into a highly engaging book, Temple Grandin gives all of us incredibly valuable insight into the inner lives of both people on the autism spectrum and non-human animals of various kinds.

The earth’s climate is changing, and humans are a significant cause of that change. The effects of climate change include, among other things: rising sea level and global average temperature, increasing severe weather events, ocean acidification, desertification, extinction of species, not to mention the illness, displacement, and other problems that will accrue directly to us humans. Those are the facts, the reality we have to face up to. But questions about how best to move forward are hard to answer, and it is hard to motivate people to productively address the situation. I think that is partly because it is hard to imagine how those big changes will impact identifiable humans who we care about.

Thankfully, we have Kim Stanley’s Robinson’s excellent novel, New York 2140, to help us with that. It is a real page turner full of interesting characters, dramatic events, and human ingenuity in the year 2140, after sea levels have risen 50 feet, turning much of the city into a new Venice of canals instead of streets and people living in the upper floors of skyscrapers with submerged bases. I liked the book’s attention to the economics involved in bringing about and adapting to the climate crisis – I don’t see a lot of that elsewhere, and it gave me some good food for thought.

You may also want to listen to a great interview with the author about his book on Science Friday.

We’ve entered summer reading season (hooray!!). What do you like in a book for summer?

(a) humor
(b) plenty of adventure
(c) a window into the cultures, politics, and economics of far off places
(d) science that doesn’t require expert background knowledge
(e) all of the above

If you choose (e), then allow me to recommend A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, by Robert Sapolsky. I loved this book!!