Relaxation As a Productivity Hack: Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Ariana Huffington liked this book more than I did. She makes some good points, but she doesn't address the fact that Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less can make you feel like you need to go lie down. Then, she is a household name throughout the world. For those of us who don't yet have a Wikipedia entry at all, the idea that we should get a good night's sleep and take a walk and go down the Shore for a week, not because we like to, but because Einstein did, can be a bit, I don't know, exhausting.

However, it was gratifying to see how many of the chill habits of highly effective people I already practice. Long walks? Check. Weekly day off? Check. Stop while you're still ahead? Almost always. Actually, let's talk about that one a minute. The idea is that you start a project because it's your job; at some point you find the flow; and at some later point it's on the schedule to move on to something else. It's tempting to want to keep pushing until you "come to a good stopping point," but I learned when I was a calligrapher that it's better to stop in the middle of a word than at the end of a paragraph. When you come back, you'll be more able to re-enter the rhythm you had developed and will get a more consistent result. In the same way, whether I'm making a list or working on an art project, if I have to stop, I try to do so before I hate the whole thing. 

The practice I was most interested in was Recovery. That's when you just go off grid for an evening or a day or a weekend and engage in relaxation, exercise more control over your environment than you normally might, and choose "mastery experiences" (recreational activities that are challenging but that you do well), all so that you can mentally detach from work altogether. 

This is a practice I have been engaged in for years: it's the principle of the Sabbath Rest. "On six days shall you labor and do all your work, and on the seventh shall you rest." Scholars turned the Sabbath into its own sort of work, debating exactly how much you could carry, how far you could walk, and what kinds of emergencies you could respond to on this beautiful day, but it can also be practiced more simply. The goal is to take a day completely off from whatever you construe as work and choose activities that will facilitate physical, mental, emotional and spiritual restoration. 

For me, a perfect Sabbath rest may include an extended period of Bible study, time to work on an art project, reading a novel, and/or some time outside. It will not include a lot of conversation, heavy physical work, political angst or, of course, directly work-related activities like test prep or researching lesson plans. But I will often find that towards the beginning of this recovery period, in odd moments, ideas related to work will come bubbling up from my subconscious. It's worthwhile to quickly scribble these in my calendar. Not all of them hold up under the cold light of Monday morning, but some of them are pretty worthwhile, and I couldn't have seen any of them while I was in the thick of the moment-by-moment struggle.

It turns out, according to this book, that all these habits of doing things that don't look like work are actually productivity tools. Stuffing the day, week, month and year full of scheduled activity doesn't get the same results, in quantity or quality, as leaving margin. Margin enables us to mentally and physically putter around completing small tasks and solving intractable problems while maintaining energy reserves for our periods of deep concentration. Even naps and sleep give us the mental margin to be more accurate or effective when we come online again. So, although I don't particularly recommend the book, I do recommend the concept: Rest.

610-619: Medical Knowledge Book Haul

The theme of the 600s is applied science and "how-to." Applied biology is medicine, and medicine is a very broad category. I love brain science, so that's the common thread between the books I grabbed.

The Unspeakable Mind, by Shaili Jain, M.D., looks like a terrific book about PTSD.  The author tells stories to illustrate her points about PTSD as a humanitarian and public health issue. She seems solutions-oriented and hopeful, and her style certainly is inviting and readable. If I had the time and the wherewithal to read a book about PTSD, this would be the one. 

But here's how I know that this is not the time for me to read a book about PTSD: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. It was described to me as the go-to book about PTSD, but it has also been described as intense and disturbing. It is possible that it would be an extremely helpful book for someone such as myself undergoing trauma therapy; however, since the process of reading the detailed and extreme stories of other survivors is in itself so traumatizing, I wouldn't undertake it without support. I got to page 55 before the stories, illustrated with unattractive diagrams and photos, were just more than I could handle. However, I did take away one vital point: trauma is processed through story, and the journey of healing is, at least in part, the discarding of the "cover story" that makes your trauma understandable and palatable to the outside world, and the discovery of the true story, the story that may not be for public consumption but that explains you to yourself.

The Undoing Project just had a neat title, and the author wrote both Moneyball and The Big Short. I actually can't understand what it is about in terms of brain science, but it is clearly also or even mainly about the friendship between the two men who discovered whatever it is that they discovered. I'm sure it is an enjoyable read for fans of Freakonomics and Dan Ariely. 

Rest, by Ale Soojung-Kim Pang, is the book I read all the way through. It was relaxing, I'll give it that... I did get a few naps while working through chapters with titles like "Walk," "Stop," Sabbaticals," and, yes, "Naps." However. It was not exactly the ode to lounging that I was looking for. Pang's examples-- and there were a lot-- were all high achievers. From Anthony Trollope to Stephen King, from Churchill to Eisenhower, they may have only worked four hours a day (for some definition of work), walked 5 miles a day, and taken a month off every year, but they still were or are exceptional in their fields. It's just a little exhausting reading 5 pages on the science of naps, followed by three pages listing all the super-famous people who take naps, if you are in a job situation where neither a nap nor any degree of fame is remotely within your reach! 

Extra Credit: Four Views on Hell, Preston Sprinkle, Ed.

I am a person of faith. I love that I can have some kind of relationship with the mind that made the cosmos. When you say it that way, it really helps you realize why Paul said that "now we see through a glass, darkly"! I believe with all my heart in eternal life, but the few times in my life I actually thought I was facing death, I was surprised at how terrified I was. And when family members were facing death, I was even more surprised at the still, small voice that prompted me: "You should study Hell."

Wait, what now?! Who wants to think about Hell?

First, every single person I've ever talked to who has lost a loved one, no matter what beliefs they professed about life, the universe and everything, reported some sense of that person's continued presence in their lives after death. So there's that.

Second, I've never talked to a person of faith who believed in "eternal conscious torment" (aka "Hell" as commonly understood), who wasn't beset by a nagging sense that it wasn't actually a very great idea.

So, reluctantly, I actually started looking hard at what the Bible says about the afterlife. I read a couple of books, including the excellent Four Views on Hell (Dewey 236.25). This fine review beautifully summarizes the structure and purpose of the book in detail. 

I also read all four Gospels, marking everything Jesus said that might possibly refer to dire punishments waiting after death. I even watched some movies about preachers and teachers struggling with the same issue. I highly recommend Hell and Mr. Fudge, but you might also enjoy Come Sunday. 

Thanks to Four Views  and another, denser book called Hope Beyond Hell, which advocates in great detail for a Biblically rigorous form of Universalism, I went deep down rabbit holes involving Hebrew and Greek verb tense sequence, the cultural significance of the location called "Gehenna," and how long an eon is, exactly. (A great overview of some of these issues , to whet your appetite for a whole book on them, can be found in a 3-part series from Brazen Church blog.) 

My conclusion: faithful and reasonable people can differ about what exactly the Bible teaches about life after death, and we really won't know every exact detail until we get there! 

While I dived deep, though, I also pulled back to the big picture: Why did the idea of eternal conscious torment bother me, anyway? Why was it that even when I tried to imagine Hell as inhabited only by demons and Hitler, it seemed like an eternity of it was, for lack of a better word, overkill? 

I applied the reasoning Jesus taught us: "If you, being evil, give good things to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give?" If I, a deeply flawed human being, don't really need even Hitler to suffer eternally, why should God? Even though I grew up in a punitive culture that views justice in terms of making the perpetrator pay for suffering with his own suffering, could there be another kind of justice-- restitutional justice focused on returning to the victim what was lost, and reconciling the perpetrator to the community?

I came to believe that the Bible is NOT clear that after we die, God will send some of us to Heaven to sit on clouds and play harps and others to Hell to burn forever without ever being consumed. What the Bible IS clear about includes the following:

Actions have consequences. Sorting out those actions and consequences is the work of a lifetime. I think a relationship with God and the stories He told helps.

God made us out of love, so we could be with Him. Heaven and Earth were meant to be one, and we are all meant to be with God.

Humans make this world a Hell at times, and woe betide us when we contribute to that.

Meanwhile, God through His Spirit is constantly working to expand His Kingdom on earth -- His dwelling place and the one intended for us from the beginning. We are expected to work with God in this project.

When suffering and death entered the world, so did God, and, in the person of Jesus, volunteered to live in one of the most barbaric ages of history. He was born and raised in poverty and even refugee status, He was routinely harassed, and ultimately He was tortured to death. He didn't put us through anything He Himself didn't experience. 

This is what God does about evil: He gets right in the middle of it and lets it destroy Him.

And then He rises from the dead, and eternal life-- life after death with God-- becomes available to everybody.

I have a lot of theories about how all of this *might* work out, but the bottom line is that God loves ALL, ALL have sinned, and Christ died for ALL. That is why nowadays, when I talk about people who have died, I often say they are "with God." I don't know exactly what they may be experiencing, but I do feel confident that they are in God's hands, experiencing His love as best they are able. They are doing just fine. They are with God, and God is love, and everything is going to be all right in the end!

600-609: Introduction to applied science. Bunch of Amateurs, by Jack Hitt

Melvil Dewey dedicated the 500s to "natural science" and the 600s to "useful arts," encompassing everything from agriculture to engineering. As it happens, I have already read my share of medical books and home management advice, but I look forward to learning "how to" in some new areas, too. I gotta get inspired about all this applied knowledge and practical advice; thus, Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt.

Jack Hitt is interested in people who do things for the love. He’s hoping that he’ll meet someone who gets a genius grant or invents a time machine, and although, spoiler alert, that doesn’t happen, what does happen is he gets transported, not by the mechanics of inventions, but by the character of the inventors. By which I don't confirm or deny that the inventors are characters but attest that they have character: intelligence, curiosity, persistence and a certain humility, a comfort with being the smartest and yet the poorest or least known person in the room.

Hitt, like the walrus in Alice in Wonderland, talks of many things, among which:

• Dobsonian telescopes, so called because a guy named John Dobson Johnny Appleseeds his way around the country teaching people how to make them out of porthole glass, cardboard tubes, and an eyepiece cannibalized from a pair of cheap binoculars
• The process of figuring out how to make a slightly bigger telescope— with a lens about a meter wide— out of scavenged industrial waste and ready-made components for less than the price of a used car
• How Ben Franklin invented Americans when he went to France
• How a French “transcriber” discovered the shocking truth about Franklin's famous and numerous relationships with French women (they were platonic!) and became one of America's best-known Franklin scholars
• How a loose federation of people with kitchen labs are using recombinant DNA to attempt to create everything from new vaccines to glow-in-the-dark Jello
• That American robots look like they are made to do jobs like tighten lug nuts, vacuum floors, or detonate mines; Japanese robots look like people or animals; and European robots already have a bill of rights because they are that close to robot consciousness
• How various amateur experts have claimed to discover, aka invented:
• Irish settlements in Southeast Connecticut dating from the time of Brendan the Navigator
• “Caucasoid” settlements in the Southern US far predating the crossing of the Bering Strait
• The return of the believed-to-be-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker

Along the way, we learn many fun facts. For example, in one timely passage, Nina Jablonski, paleoanthropologist, theorizes that skin pigmentation is an evolutionary response not to the dangers of sunburn but to the need to regulate the amount of Vitamin D3 manufactured just under the skin in response to intense sunlight. Too little, you feel like crap. Too much…. Oh rats, you also feel like crap! So, assuming humans emerged in Africa with relatively dark skin to protect from excessive D3 manufacture and then began to travel,  evolutionary pressure would favor darker skin near the Equator, and lighter skin in areas that have less sunshine AND no dietary sources of D3, like Scandinavia. In areas like the Arctic, abounding in seal and whale meat, light skin would provide no evolutionary advantage, so the population remained dark. “When we look at the different races… All that we are seeing, the only thing we are seeing when we look at skin color, according to the science, is a meandering trail of Vitamin D3 adaptation rates.”

There’s also a highly relevant-to-our-moment discussion of cognitive biases in the chapter about “Kennewick man.” Apparently it is quite hard for us humans to gain accurate information about reality. We are constantly falling for the first analysis we hear, preferring a confident person who doesn’t know what they are talking about to a tentative person who is getting ready to find you all the facts. We then get caught up in avalanches of bad information that land us squarely on the wrong side of the mountain. Basically: it’s really easy to be wrong, and this book is full of people who are enthusiastically, persistently wrong about topics they really, really love! 

But no fear: it also includes many others who succeed in their quests-- whether for glow-in-the-dark Jello or a bigger, cheaper telescope. So: here's to "how to"!

590-599: Zoology. A Not-At-All Silent Spring

I've been enjoying being an amateur naturalist! I've learned fun facts about creatures ancient and modern, gigantic and tiny, sentient and... didn't I learn that plants may be sentient too? Zoology is a great way to finish up the Science century of the Dewey Decimal System. Still working under Covid-19 restrictions, I couldn't peruse library shelves. But birds are, contrary to popular opinion, animals (I mean, what else would they be? Vegetables? Minerals?), and a hot topic this spring. Mourning doves nested on the office windowsill. A cardinal family moved into the bush outside the downstairs bathroom window. There was a hawk in my oak tree earlier today. And this spring is anything but silent, as decreased traffic from the pandemic seemed to encourage the birds to appear out of nowhere in every tree in town, singing their heads off from 4 a.m. till after dark every day.

Everyone's been talking about two new bird books: What It's Like to Be a Bird, by David Sibley, and The Bird Way, by Jennifer Ackerman. We also have a beautiful reproduction of Audubon's Birds of America. The first thing I learned from all these books is that there are a lot of different kinds of birds! I think I can identify about 20 or 25 North American species, but there are hundreds, and then all the others around the world! And each one has its own song and its own behavior patterns.

Let's compare and contrast our two new neighbors. First, the cardinals. In March there was much hopping around in the half-dead hemlock trees out back, with multiple males and one female sitting on the evergreen branches singing like they were in a Christmas movie.  Finally, Ms. Cardinal made a selection amongst her suitors-- I have no idea how! Scientists think the crest that the male can raise and lower, and the richness of his bright coloration, may have something to do with it. The new pair built a pile of twigs in the heart of a bush, inaccessible and almost invisible even once we knew where to look. In fact, we did not even realize it was there until after the babies were hatched and sticking their little beaks up in the air like cartoon birdies chirping "feed me, feed me!" They kept Mama busy flying back and forth to provide for them, while Daddy continued to hop around the hemlocks, standing guard. And then they were gone-- Mama, Daddy, and the babies had vacated the premises when we weren't even looking.

The mourning doves were different from first to last. We became aware of their activites when one of them starting sitting next to the open window of my husband Mark's upstairs office, uttering the beautiful "hoo-hoo-hoo" that is so instantly recognizable... for hours at a time. Apparently, that was Mr. Dove's way of saying, "I've got a home for you-hoo-hoo." Mrs. Dove (they typically mate for life) found it agreeable, probably because someone else-- someone much smaller-- had already built a tidy little mud-lined picture-book nest right at the corner, so they just needed to build an addition to accommodate their size. Their "improvements" were-- well-- not much of an improvement. Certainly when they were done the nest was bigger, but it was, as the Audubon society says, "flimsy" in appearance, and it seemed certain that Mr., Mrs., and any little bundles of joy to follow would surely fall right off the window ledge at the first storm. But Mrs. Dove boldly took up her post.

Mrs. Dove liked nothing better than to look askance at Mark all day long, glaring at him out of one beady eye, just daring him to come any closer to her little darlings. She did not leave her post for a solid three weeks-- two weeks to hatch, and another week just to keep the newborns warm. I thought I heard some fluttering outside the window one evening which might have been Mr. Dove coming to relieve her, as I have heard they do. But during the day, it was Mrs. Dove's shift, and she spent at least 12 hours sitting squarely on top of her lean-to nest.

Around the beginning of week four, we noticed that Mrs. Dove had edged off the nest a bit-- always keeping her back between us and the babies, and always giving us the evil eye if we approached to try to peek in. Despite her best efforts, we got a glimpse of the little ones sticking their beaks in her throat to drink the "crop milk" she secreted. Pretty soon they were big enough that their heads stuck over the top of the nest and she couldn't completely hide them. Now they are fledged and don't drink "milk" any more, and she and the Mr. will sometimes leave them unattended for a minute or two, presumably because it takes both of the adults to rustle up enough seeds for a family of four.

Around the same we began to hear a new sound in our neighborhood, almost like a gull's cry. I finally learned what it was one day when a hawk was mobbed right to the oak tree in the front yard. He sat on a branch for a minute and unmistakeably was the source of the repeated caw. Since then, I've realized that he works a territory about three blocks square. Imagine my surprise when I heard him calling 100 yards in front of me, and then heard the distinctive crashing and rustling of another hawk coming in low through the trees right over me and to the right. With all the trees in full leaf, I hear more bird activity than I see.

David Sibley

That's why I was particularly grateful for what I could learn about bird sounds from Ackerman's book. I learned that species usually make more than one call or song, that each member of a species has a slightly different song, and each individual's songs can be varied to suit the purpose. Even a simple, maybe not-so-bright bird like the mourning dove has one sound it makes at rest and another when landing or taking off, and the trademark coo can be of varying lengths. Birds vocalize to identify themselves, to find their flocks, to warn not only their flock but other birds and even other species of danger, to claim and identify territory, and to communicate during migration. The decrease in traffic noise due to Covid-19 may be one reason for our not-so-silent spring-- when birds can learn from each other and take turns standing guard, they are safer and can eat more and reproduce more!

580-589: Botany. The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

Early this year, I read The Overstory, by Richard Powers, a work of such stunning beauty that I had to keep putting it down to absorb its images. It was a novel about trees, really, although human characters slipped in and out of the lyrical descriptions of growth, life and decay on a grand scale. I read it with my phone handy so I could look up some of the unfamiliar species mentioned, and felt my heart rate slow as it aligned with the pace of life in the forest. I also learned some very interesting facts-- or at least I hoped they were facts. Powers alluded to a number of books in the novel and endnotes. On further research, The Hidden Life of Trees seemed like the one that might have inspired him most directly.

For one thing, The Hidden Life of Trees is itself almost a fictionalized account of forest biology. The tone is breezy in the extreme, and Wohlleben makes free with anthropomorphic references to trees' thoughts, emotions and plans. Trees are pictured as having etiquette, going to school and screaming. There are mother trees, street kids, and, most importantly, tree communities. The tone of the book has caused a lot of controversy and frustration, especially in Germany and France, and certainly made me question whether the author really was doing science.

But, as it turns out, the "controversy" around The Hidden Life of Trees could really just be better described as "irritation." No botanist is accusing Wohlleben of getting his facts wrong, just of presenting the information in a more informal way than is usual for science writing.

And there is a lot of information! Just about every tree behavior and aspect of the life of the forest that The Overstory depicts can be found in this book. All the astounding tales of tree symbiosis, cooperation, adaptation and interaction with other species are factually accurate. Trees do make sounds and emit electrical impulses. They do sense the passage of time and, of course, the vital changes in available light that will affect their ability to photosynthesize. They do form complex ecosystems with other beings, from mammals to microorganisms, and exhibit coordinated behaviors. And, most impressively, they really do live for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. 

On a walk the other day, I saw this interesting example of a tree that Wohlleben would call a "street kid," a tree that has been planted in the narrow space between sidewalk and street and is having trouble finding any place to send its roots.  Roots need oxygen just like branches do, which is why most houseplants don't like to sit in water-- they need to breathe! Apparently the ground under streets and sidewalks is compacted by machinery before paving. Of course that makes it difficult to grow through and also eliminates air pockets. That's why roots end up in water and sewer line-- they are just trying to get some air!
This same tree also may be a good example of one that can reproduce from its root system. The root is covered with bright green sprouts with tiny leaves. Are they hoping to become trees, or do they think they are branches coming from the trunk? Maybe that is a distinction without a difference. It will be interesting to keep an eye on these little sprouts over the summer and see how big they get.

This delightful and easy read explained many other things I have observed in the garden and neighborhood. For example, some trees- oaks notoriously-- produce tannin in their leaves. That's the same thing that is in tea, that makes it bitter if you let it steep too long. It's also the reason that wine is often aged in oak-- the tannins are considered a flavor enhancer. It turns out that the tannin is a defense mechanism against fungus and enables oaks to survive wounds such as lightning strikes that would weaken and expose other kinds of trees. Unfortunately, it also is disagreeable to grasses and other herbaceous plants, which is why gardening under an oak tree is a constant argument with nature. Wohlleben is all about not arguing with nature, and would, I'm sure, advocate for cooperating instead, by choosing plants that love shade and don't mind tannin, like ferns and hostas.

Gardening also helped me relate to this book because trees are like smaller plants in many ways. Some of them can reproduce vegetatively, from their roots, as do dandelions or mint. All of them can reproduce from seed and have all kinds of different schemes for getting their seeds fertilized and distributed. Seeds might have wings to fly out from under the source tree's shadow (as dandelion seeds do), or they might come encased in delicious fruit (as berries are) so that some helpful animal will come along and carry them off to a new location-- perhaps digesting them first! Some trees just drop their seeds right under their own shade and let a battle for sunlight ensue, as do many flowers.

But one thing is true of every tree (and every flower): trees produce seeds in reckless excess. The quantity of maple keys or sharp little acorns or pinecones that one tree can drop on a lawn is truly astonishing and seems completely unnecessary for the survival of the species! Personally, I sweep maple keys off the porch, pull out maple tree sprouts from the flower beds, fill bags with pinecones for mulching, and hurt my feet on acorns that blanket the ground, wondering why trees have to be so messy. But the consistent observer of nature can learn that squirrels and other little animals appreciate this abundance, even if we don't. They are busy all year, snatching up the free lunch that falls at their feet.

In the wild, tree seeds face just as many obstacles to growth as they do when humans such as myself are actively trying to fight back the forest. Most are eaten by those little animals. Those that survive to sprout will usually be eaten by rabbits and other medium-sized animals. The deer will probably take care of the rest; they can eat a new tree up to three feet high. Even if a baby tree manages to survive long enough to come off the lunch menu for the animals of the forest, it will probably be getting very little light on the forest floor and will therefore be weak and susceptible to insects and fungus. It may very well die and return to the earth in the form of humus. Given all these obstacles, although a tree will produce more than a million seeds in its lifetime, often only ONE of them will live to maturity!

The abundance of seeds should not be a source of dismay to me, even when it's inconvenient. After all, like the squirrels, I owe my dinner to the fact that plants of all kinds are designed to produce far over and above the number of seeds needed to perpetuate their species. I eat corn, rice, wheat and oats-- those are all seeds. I eat meat and dairy products from animals that ate those seeds, too. I eat peaches and strawberries and grapes that contain seeds. Really, the whole animal kingdom is dependent on the fact that one plant can make many seeds, many more than it needs for its own purposes!

A wild forest supports a tremendous amount of life, both visible and invisible, and it also supports our souls. A deciduous forest is full of birdsong and the rustle of creatures great (deer) and small (chipmunks, frogs) moving through the brush and leaf litter on the forest floor. We enter and feel that we have found a place outside time and all that's merely human. Life of a completely foreign kind is busy all around us, as our breathing slows to match the scale of business that is conducted 100 feet in the air and unfolds over centuries. In a healthy, natural forest, the trees are at peace, because they are well-watered and their balanced ecology protects them from insect, fungus and animal attack. Leaves are eating sunlight, and mosses are eating dust, and the tree is breathing in my unwanted carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. The light in a forest is actually green under the canopy, since the leaves have absorbed every other color.

A pine forest has a deeper hush to it. The needles underfoot absorb footfalls and make the soil too acidic to support wild undergrowth. There is less food for birds and small mammals, and so, less rustling and less birdsong. The forest seems to soak up sound as it presides over a silence that has existed for longer than any human life. Furthermore, pine needles dispense phytoncides that disinfect the atmosphere and discourage mosquitos, while the breath of the trees and the shelter of their branches creates a microclimate that provides welcome respite from extreme weather. In any kind of well-balanced forest, our hearts find shalom.

All these processes are revealed in The Hidden Life of Trees. The knowledge and wisdom of this book will enrich your next walk in the woods and your relationship to our largest and oldest neighbors on this planet. Highly recommended!

570-579: Biology. River out of Eden, by Richard Dawkins, and The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Muherjee

When I had to pick a book on biology in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 nationwide shutdown, without access to a public library, I was hard-pressed to even know where to begin. E-book libraries are not organized by Dewey Decimal number, sadly, and the entire topic of "Science" yielded only about 150 titles-- less than I would expect my local library to carry on biology alone!

Fortunately, my husband is a science buff, and as he perused the limited offerings, he got very excited about The Gene. After all, it's just been released as a Ken Burns documentary. All the usual suspects are raving about it. Just two problems: it was waitlisted at the library (yes, e-books have waitlists; licensing issues, don't ask), AND it's a jillion pages long.

Both problems were easily solved by a certain mega-retailer's policy of providing samples of e-books free of charge. In this case, the entire first section, focused on history, was available. I think that was a solid 150 e-book pages and got me all the way from Aristotle to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded. That was plenty to be going on with.

My husband's other suggestion was that I read a book by Richard Dawkins. "Why in the world would I want to do that?" I asked, mindful of Dawkins' reputation as a militant evangelist for atheism. My husband answered that the book in question had been given to him by a medical doctor we went to church with, following a conversation about creation and evolution. "Oh, if Dr. Palmer recommended it, that's all right," I thought, observing also the book's blessed brevity, and took the plunge.

Muherjee and Dawkins make surprisingly good companions. Both have highly readable styles and clear agendas. Muherjee wants you to understand what DNA is, how genes were discovered, and no doubt many other fascinating facts about the mechanics of heredity... featured in the five sections that I was too cheap to pay for and too impatient to read (I'm still in the 500's, people, and I'm not getting any younger!).

Dawkins, who I'm going to focus on from here on out, just wants to prove one thing: that God is unnecessary. Why does he use a Bible word in the title of his book and pepper the whole thing with references to Eve and perfection and "God's utility function"? Maybe to get the attention of people like Dr. Palmer and then me... or maybe because the world just intuitively appears to be... designed. Just saying.

He writes, "Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation." This quote makes it very clear what Dawkins wants to do: not prove that gradual evolution was and is, in fact, the only mechanism of speciation, but to prove that it is a sufficient explanation for all the complexity of the life we see around us.

However. I didn't read the book to argue with it. I don't have the background. I read it because I had to read something, and it seemed like a book of general knowledge that general people ought to have. Looked at as an introduction to the concept of the origin of species via evolution, I would say it was pretty helpful. It cleared up some misunderstandings for me, even as it raised other questions.

One thing it didn't do was challenge my faith. In fact, I enjoyed knowing more details about how evolution could produce such detailed organisms as the eye. I loved the analogy of DNA as digital  information that works like a computer program, because it enabled me to see God not only as a great artist and a great engineer, but also as a great information technologist.

I even appreciated learning about the difference between analog and digital information. Turns out analog is like waves or spectrum colors or anything else that seems clear until it's not. So we all know what blue is and what green is. But what happens in between? Shades of grey indeed! Well, even though life is analog, it seems the DNA that programs cells is digital! I guess it's just like this photo, which uses binary code to depict an analog gradient. Maybe I'm just easily amused, but I think that's cool!

As I'm writing this, I sit in my yard listening to birds and watching bees visit flowers. Thinking of evolution as an ongoing process, I consider whether the wildflowers that I allow to grow in my lawn may evolve in response to the pressure not only of pollinator and animal activity, but also to my actions with the lawnmower. Will only the showiest flowers, the ones in sheltered places, or those that grow lower than the mower blade survive to reproduce? If the same lawn is tended in the same way for generations, will the violets be shorter and the buttercups even taller and brighter?

I also consider the evolution of viruses and of insects that are making headlines today-- "superbugs" in two senses. I remember the mass extinction events I read about when I was in the Dinosaurium-- sort of the opposite side of the same coin. And I wonder: what makes us think that we are living at the end point of the processes God put in place "in the beginning"? Both the direct actions of humans and the pressures that all species put on each other... couldn't they result in further changes in species that we think of as having "arrived" at their final form?

I have a few questions that remain unanswered. I particularly don't understand the course of human evolution so far. Presumably other books address this question: if evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, why are humans so ill-fitted for survival in the wild? Why wasn't astigmatism eliminated from our gene pool millenia ago? What in the world made the absence of fur a survival trait for our ancestors? Why are we so poorly armed, with nails instead of claws and weak teeth instead of nice pointy fangs? What's so great about being bipedal? I'm not saying a theory of special creation particularly answers this question, I'm just saying it's a question!

Dawkins does not address this question, but he does speak to the issue of how the handicaps of aging have survived the pressures of survival. "Everybody is descended from an unbroken line of ancestors all of whom were at some time in their lives young but many of whom were never old. So we inherit whatever it takes to be young, but not necessarily whatever it takes to be old." I have sometimes thought that survival of the fittest was not all it is cracked up to be, leaving intact arthritis, heart disease, and all kinds of other useless and maladaptive conditions. But now I understand that since these things don't typically impact survival until AFTER we have passed on our DNA, they wouldn't be selected against even in the most hostile environments. That still doesn't explain why four-year-olds need glasses, though!

Taken together, both these books taught me more about the mechanics of the origins of species without turning me into a mechanist. They really exemplify the whole reason I undertook this project in the first place: I wanted to learn a little bit about a lot of things, things I might not expect to be interested in. After all, it's the Bible that tells us that "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." (Proverbs 25:2, NASB)

560-569: Fossils and Dinosaurs. Dinosaurium, by Chris Wormell and Lily Murray

I have been longing to own the whole Welcome to the Museum series ever since I saw Botanicum in a museum gift shop. So closed libraries plus 560 in the Dewey system equals actually buying Dinosaurium with actual dollars, to have and to hold. It's a beautiful book and deserves to be owned and savored.

The first thing I learned upon opening the book  is that it's currently believed that the continents were in a totally different configuration in the whole Mesozoic Era, which includes the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. So, that's weird. I mean, it's one thing to see a news item that says that tropical fossils were found in Antarctica; it's another to look at maps that are allegedly Earth but are pretty much unrecognizable.

The main thing I learned was that it is now believed that many famous dinos, notably Tyrannosaurs, had some kind of covering on their skin more or less like feathers. It's interesting to speculate how something as complex as a feather could be a product of time and natural selection and to learn that feather-like structures could have other benefits even if they don't provide flight. After all, flightless birds do still exist and seem to find their lovely skin coverings useful!

I will also throw in a fun fact that I did not learn from this book but from one of my adult sons: Coelacanths, once associated only with the late Cretaceous period, are still around. They are not dinosaurs but ugly, inedible, rare fish.

Nothing could be finer on a quarantine afternoon than sitting on your porch with an enormous book full of dinosaur pictures on your lap. Well worth the investment!

To See the World in a Grain of: Salt, by Mark Kurlansky

"To see the world in a grain of sand" is the opening line of William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", which is both irrelevant and impossible not to think of when you read a history of the world through a lens of salt. The author has written two other books, one about cod and the other about Basques, and the topics showcase his unique ability to turn narrow focus on one detail --a mineral, a fish, a small and mysterious people group living in isolation and speaking a language unrelated to any other in the vicinity-- into the long view of world history.

The topics intersect: salt is apparently a strategically important natural resource partly because it can be used to preserve cod. The Basques were great whalers who followed the Vikings to the Faroe Islands to fish cod so they could salt it and build their fortunes on the resulting preserved food. They may have even passed Iceland and reached Newfoundland in search of cod lands. And Mark Kurlansky is right there, letting salt (and Basques, and cod) lead you across the Atlantic Ocean, in his very accurately titled Salt: A World History.

He also takes us to ancient China, where impact drills were used to find both salt brine and (accidentally) the natural gas that could be lit to boil it down-- this around 250 B.C. He's where the Celts invented salt pork-- ham-- only to be defeated by the Romans, who claimed all the salt mines and invented salad and salaries. He's where the Anglo-Saxons peppered, as it were, their lands with saltworks, with names ending in -wich like Norwich and Nantwich. He's also where William the Conqueror destroyed these wiches to, as it were, crush rebellion and seal the conquest. The salt-destroying strategy was later used by the Northern forces to weaken the Confederacy during the Civil War-- without salt, the South could not preserve food long enough to get it to the troops. Salt was a weapon of war as late as the Indian independence from Britain, when Ghandi, instead of leading a tea party, led an illegal salt-harvesting expedition (for the same reason-- to protest unreasonable taxes and restrictions on production).

Which brings us to the geology of salt-making. It appears you can get salt two main ways: you can evaporate salty water until it precipitates out, or you can dig it out of rocky deposits that are usually found in veins, like coal. Occasionally, these salt deposits are the size of mountains, either exposed above ground or hidden by layers of other rock. Where they are exposed, of course they are highly subject to erosion; where they are hidden, the capacity to extract the mineral is limited by the weight above the deposit.

Salt mines have even become tourist attractions. They can be adventurous, beautiful, and healthful-- not only is salt a preservative, it's also a disinfectant, and people who spend time in the mines report relief from viruses and bacterial infections. For the same reason, my dentist recommends a salt rinse for irritated gums.

Salt has also motivated the construction of roads and canals, since money could only be made if large quantities of it could be gotten from where it is to where it isn't. Camels were attempted in Nevada, to the dismay of the salt miners, their other animals, and the camels themselves.

There are many kinds of salt. The color is caused by the presence of other minerals and impurities: the clay from the earth the salt evaporates on, iron oxide in Himalayan salt, minerals and even heavy metals not refined out of "natural" sea salt. There are also many different textures that people come to appreciate: the fine, even cubes of commercial table salt are great for baking, while chunkier, uneven "kosher salt" or flaky sea salt may provide a bigger "punch" of flavor. One thing's for sure-- reading this book really makes you want to eat some pretzels or popcorn. Iodine, of course, is an impurity added to salt on purpose as a public health measure, and has greatly reduced the incidence of goiter worldwide.

Salt is a recurring metaphor in the teachings of Jesus. What does salt do? It preserves and disinfects-- it prevents decay and disease. It provokes thirst and is, along with many other minerals, essential to health. It tastes good and enhances the flavor of everything it's added to. And one other thing: it cannot, in fact, lose its saltiness. It can become diluted, it can become adulterated, but sodium chloride will always retain the properties of salt. Those are the facts about salt-- make of them what you will.