ASM192 Let’s Talk About (Non-Fiction) Books!

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let's talk about nonfiction books on this week's episode of ask sciencemic [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mcarg and this week we're not going to answer questions at all but instead talk about six of my favorite recent non-fiction books after the response to last week's show on fiction books i thought this would be a good follow-up so what do you say let's get it started [Applause] [Music] as i mentioned last week uh you all seem to enjoy it when i talk about books and uh when i've done book review shows in the past they've been very popular because i understand many of your readers and like me you're always trying to figure out what book to read next um and i also understand that some of you would like me to go really deep in book reviews i don't know if i can do that so i haven't gone quite as you know shotgun pattern with this episode i've done previous book shows i've gone a little deeper but i don't know if i can do like you know a 20 minute segment on one book without basically summarizing and ruining the book so um i'm not a book reviewer that's not my specialty this is just a way to share things i'm reading that i've enjoyed in case you'd like to read some similar works that's it uh so we'll start off this episode with a book that i particularly enjoyed which is called the dao of bill murray real life stories of joy enlightenment and party crashing for a long time i've been a fan of a meme on the internet which is called no one will ever believe you and that meme is about bill murray showing up in random scenes and circumstances and doing something unbelievable uh like washing someone's dishes at a party or making someone a drink at a bar uh you know all kinds of stories and then bill murray completes that by saying you know no one will ever believe you meaning when you tell the story no one will believe i was here and no one ever believe you isn't real but the situations that no one will ever believe you comes from are based on real stories of bill murray showing up in completely strange bizarre and random circumstances um which is fascinating in and of itself this like incredibly well-known a-list comedian just showing up at parties and at people's houses and dinner parties really really strange stuff and wonderful but what's fascinating to me is the way that uh these stories come together to describe a world view and a way of living and a way of understanding life that frankly i really identify with and appreciate so if you're looking for something that's fun something that's encouraging while still offering some depth i think the dow of bill murray is an absolutely fantastic choice [Music] if you've been listening to me for some time then you know i'm friends with comedian pete holmes and actually that a huge reason why i'm a a known person at all why i have this career was very early in my arc i was a guest on pete holm's you made it weird podcast which i was a strange choice because up to that point he'd only had on uh professional actors and comedians and writers plus rob bell uh and so i think i was technically the first friends of rob bell uh guest on the show but oddly enough uh it wasn't labeled as such because pete hadn't turned that into a series yet so uh i am also friends with raphael but whatever that's not what this podcast is about all i'm saying is pete is a good friend what you probably know about pete is that he is hilarious and that he is thoughtful and then he is honest and that he is vulnerable in a way that few people are at least on stage being friends with pete i just want to tell you that's also true in person he is one of the most kind most thoughtful and most sincere people that i have ever met uh he's a truly extraordinary person and pete has just released a book and that book is called comedy sex god uh you know here's what i would tell you about comedy sex god uh one it is hilarious and there's books that'll make you chuckle occasionally this is not that book this book is laugh out loud funny constantly uh i don't recall the last time i read a book that made me laugh as much as this one and as someone who writes and someone who works on stage as well it is very hard to make people laugh in writing it's much easier to make people laugh on stage with timing and body language and your tone of voice and your inflection you have all these tools on stage to make people laugh when it's a book it's completely down to how clever the idea is and how funny the actual words are and comedy sex god is hilarious but it is also touching and it is also honest again in a way that few books are i don't really think of pete holmes as a comedian so much anymore i think of him as a philosopher and as a theologian and in those capacities he is my favorite philosopher and my favorite theologian um and for people who listen to science mike so many of us have backgrounds in religious fundamentalism or recovering from religious and spiritual trauma and pete writes about those experiences in a way that is honest and beautiful and true and frighteningly vulnerable i mean it's incredible plus when was the last time you read a book that had an endorsement from rom das and silver sarah silverman and conan o'brien and richard rohr uh and i think that like intersection of people uh honestly describes pete really well uh i absolutely loved this book it made me laugh yes it also made me cry and it made me think about my own life in different ways so if you are interested in those kind of things check it out also if you're wondering about my friend michael gunger's whole arc with rom das and you're excited by that or confused by it this is going to be a really helpful book because pete talks about his own experiences with ram das now i don't have any experiences with ron duss other than reading some of his books and listening to some of his lectures i think he's fascinating although i don't have the same um he's not as influential figure in my life as he is in michael or pete's lives but i think pete does a great job of explaining why romdos is so meaningful to so many people so uh if you've got time heck if you don't have time check out comedy sex god available both as a hardback and as an audiobook [Music] all right now let's talk about a couple of science books that i've enjoyed recently and i'm gonna go a little deeper into my uh bench here i'm not these aren't obvious science books uh they go a little deeper conceptually topically but not necessarily that makes they're hard to read they're just fascinating takes on something so this book first is called other minds the octopus the c and the deep origins of consciousness uh when we study consciousness we tend to think about the branches of the evolutionary tree that led to us we compare our brains to other mammalian brains or even sometimes to bird brains and there's some really interesting differences in the architecture of human brains and bird brains for example there are some species of bird whose brains are more uh intricate more dense knurly than ours are they're just smaller uh but ultimately bird brains and human brains and monkey brains and elephant brains and dolphin brains they have a lot in common they're the same basic architecture of a large central nervous system that we call a brain that then branches out into the body where most intelligence is generated in the brain itself which is why the octopus is such a fascinating animal we're learning more and more that uh octopi are extraordinarily intelligent animals and that their intelligence or at least their manifestation of intelligence is primarily limited by their life span but in other minds we look at how the brains of octopi i actually think it might be octopuses if you're talking about multiple species of octopus i don't know i'm not going to uh die on that hill for sure but it has it shows how you know they they came on a separate path and evolution and then arrived at a completely different architecture for intelligence and indeed consciousness and what that means for how they experience the world and why you know octopi and other cephalopods can teach us about the world and about consciousness primarily because their experiences are so different and so alien to ours and it's a it's a touching book you know it goes it goes uh it talks on the evolutionary path it talks about some you know really good science on studying how their senses work and then what i found most touching was the parts where i talked about their shorter life spans and what that means for the way that their lives develop um it's a really really really insightful and touching book and it is again very uh accessible to lay people or people who don't have deep experience with science there's not a lot of jargon in here it's written in common language so other minds is one of the more fascinating books i've read this last year and i highly recommend it another science book i've read and enjoyed tremendously was are we smart enough to know how smart animals are by friends to wall uh and oh man what a great book we tend to think about intelligence as this ladder with us at the top like humans are the smartest because we can read and write and make tools and uh it's true in in our form of intelligence we are the smartest animal on the planet but there's not just one type of cognition so the whole premise of this book is what if instead of viewing intelligence as a ladder we view it as a bush where there are different peaks in a broad spectrum of abilities and that's all a better way of looking at intelligence understanding the animal kingdom because there are so many animals that are smarter than us in their form of thinking pigeons are better at spotting art for forgeries than human experts in art history for example um are we dumb because we can't remember where we bury nuts as well as squirrels do you see what i mean there are different forms of intelligence and so this book will look at a lot of different animals uh bats and sheep and wasps and whales dolphins bonobos of course crows even and reveal the incredible intelligence that exists within the animal kingdom so i think this is a great compliment to the last book we discussed other minds to help start knocking away some of the notions we have of the human mind as some singularly unique uh manifestation of intelligence in the animal kingdom it really shows us the brilliance of all living things i really enjoyed this book as well it's a little bit longer and heavier than other mines it is a little goes a little bit more in depth so it's it's both the wider book because it talks about more species uh but it's also probably written just ever so slightly uh a lot slightly harder to read not significantly harder but just a slightly harder read than other mods but a completely fascinating book in my next book i had a lot on animal intelligence in early drafts of the book but as the book developed i realized there just wasn't room to follow that digression but if you're interested in some of the thinking that led to my next book definitely check out are we smart enough to know how smart animals are as well as other minds i've been doing everything i can to read and to understand better the history of race and racism in the united states and across the world and i've been on that journey because i'm learning more each day how white supremacy impacts people's lives all over the world today and i know that as i've gone along that journey i've become much less popular with white men specifically and i know this because of data measurement and the letters and cards and tweets that i receive from people so although my audience has grown and grown considerably over the last few years that growth has happened with women and people of color and women of color and people of different ability and disability intersections and i've just become less popular with white men because i've spoken so often about white supremacy and patriarchy and i've done that in a way that centers and focuses on the voices of marginalized people and that brushes up against some of the framing that white men themselves go on as they uh become more aware of other contexts in other situations so when we acknowledge the different life experiences of different people that can brush up against the fundamental idea among well-meaning white men that everyone is equal and everyone's the same and everyone's voice uh deserves the same attention which is both true and doesn't happen right and uh so that's where some of the tension comes from so people have wondered especially white men are always asking me for resources where can i learn more where can i learn more there's no easy answer to this stuff not much less what to do about white supremacy but even where to learn about it there's no easy answer because so many of our resources are written in the frame of white supremacy which is why i'm really excited to tell you about this book it is called stamped from the beginning it's by ibram x kindy who is a historian and this book is let me flip through here it is uh oh right at 500 pages a little over 500 pages before you get to its copious notes section it so it's a well documented book uh the subtitle here is the definitive history of racist ideas in america so this book i i at this point if you're going to read one book on race and racism this is the one i'd recommend uh it is dense it is academically credible thoroughly researched thoroughly referenced incredibly clear uh it is going to be a tough read for white christians because it's going to lay out definitively the connection between american christianity and racism and the role american christianity has played in the exploitation persecution and marginalization of black and brown people in american history again now this is only going to be this is a very american america-focused book this is not going to contain as much you know world issues so for those of you living in the uk or canada or australia or europe this might not be as helpful unless you want to understand better american racism but there's i've never read a book like this i've read some really fascinating memoirs and biopics that helped me understand racism and race in america and across the world i've read some more narrowly focused historical books um but this reminds me of karen armstrong's a history of god which is this incredibly comprehensive view of how humanity has understood god over the millennia this book has that much weightiness only it's concentrated only on american history and on race and racism i learned so much in reading this book it reframed so much of things i thought i already knew as i read this book it's gonna talk about the great awakening and the enlightenment and every major movement in american history here's why i recommend this book well there's many reasons i recommend this book but if you have grown frustrated with me talking about race and racism and issues of identity in america you need to read this i'm not saying you have to agree with me or you have to agree with anyone but perhaps a deeper and more nuanced understanding of american history would help you understand at where we are in culture and on twitter today why i talk about you know the the necessity of economic reparations for black people and indigenous people in the united states why i talk about centering and focusing on voices of marginalized people why i think it's important to name white supremacy specifically is something happening now and not something that happened in the past that we've conquered this book will open your eyes in an incredible way and it will do so with profound academic credibility it is called stamped from the beginning the definitive history of racist ideas in america by ibram x kindy and you can find it in the show notes on ask sciencemike.com for episode 192 [Music] a history of god by karen armstrong is one of my favorite books of all time um because it does such a good job of helping us place our own faith tradition in the context of different religions all over the world as a storyteller i think of that book as a lot of different subplots that occasionally merge together into a larger arc well reza aslan who is one of my favorite authors he wrote a book called zealot about jesus of nazareth that is an incredible book has written a book called god a human history and instead of weaving you know this tapestry of occasionally connecting religious stories as we see in a history of god reza is taking human religion and turning it into like a single cohesive narrative and flips the script into us seeing how all religions are an attempt for us to understand the divine all religions and uh what i particularly appreciated and you'll understand i appreciate this is the way res aslan talks about the features in the human brain that cause us to seek religion and why that's a great thing but also why that's a troubling thing why our projection of god onto the world has created such comfort and such chaos in human civilization uh reza is a is a very gifted writer so this book reads very well it's just it's well written enough that it brings out my imposter syndrome as a writer um it doesn't read like an academic text but it does contain really thoughtful scholarship because unlike me who's just a guy that like reads things and writes res aslan is an actual scholar uh with original research and so this book weaves those things together very skillfully so he can present academic scholarly ideas in a way that it is accessible as a story it reminds me a lot of why i started to get into history in the first place you know i dropped out of college very early in but there's one class i did finish and only one class that i finished in college and that was world history because there was a professor who wrote a book about world history and that class consisted of him telling world history as a story every day for an hour and i was enthralled with his storytelling capacity and reza aslan is that kind of scholar a storytelling scholar and so what you'll find is as you read this book your retention is going to be really really high because everybody can follow along and understand a good story the only tip off you'll see that this is definitely a book written by an academic is the bibliography and notes are just about as long as the book itself uh which is really astounding you know when i do notes for a book if they're five pages that's a lot and the the bibliography notes for this book are hundreds of pages so uh that's your tip off but that also means that you know if you if you skip the notes it's a pretty quick read so it's it's terrific like highest possible recommendation is god a human history by reza aslan it's terrific and you don't want to miss it [Music] next week we'll get back to a normal ass science mic but i hope you've enjoyed two weeks of books i'd love to know what you thought about this you can uh hit me up on social media or let me know on patreon which by the way uh if you want to join our patreon community uh it helps make the show possible there's a link on sciencemike.com for you to be able to do so uh it lets you take control of this program by submitting questions and also choosing what questions make it on the show every week i'd like to thank caitlin hermstad for producing ass science mike i'd like to thank greg nordeen for his work in sound design and production andrew golucki and pre-production and jeb boniford for writing the theme song everybody thank you so much for listening and i can't wait to speak with you next [Applause] week