WANTED: May - July 2023 NON-FICTION suggestions!

[Chris OConnor]

WANTED: May - July 2023 NON-FICTION suggestions!

Please tell us what non-fiction book, or books, you think we should read and discuss as a community in May, June & July 2023.

Ideally, provide a link to where we can learn more about your book suggestion. To really sell it, add a few words about why you're suggesting the book.

Please feel free to comment on other people's suggestions; if you like a suggestion please say so, and if you find a suggestion not to be enticing it is also OK to say so. Feedback makes this process work.

Once we have a nice selection of non-fiction book suggestions, we'll either pick the one with the most positive feedback or conduct a poll to select a winner.

So, what non-fiction book do you suggest?

[Chris OConnor]

Here are 3 non-fiction suggestions that I think would be a good for BookTalk.org...

Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational
Michael Shermer

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
Frans de Waal

Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious
Antonio Damasio

[LanDroid]

I’m walking in the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, through cathedral-like groves of oak and beech, and there’s a strange unmoored feeling of entering a fairy tale. The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks.

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- ... 180968084/

Might be interesting to read about something new, an area of biology most people don't know about. Peter Wohlleben, the expert in the above article published The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature Book 1 of 3) in 2016. There might be books with newer information available now, will check...

[Chris OConnor]

LanDroid, that looks like an awesome book suggestion. Let's try to get Harry and Robert and a few others to chime in here. I'd be quite happy reading it.

[LevV]

LanDroid, that looks like an awesome book suggestion. Let's try to get Harry and Robert and a few others to chime in here. I'd be quite happy reading it.

I was ready to support the Damasio book (I've read three of his other books), but after reading the introduction to "The Hidden Life of Trees" I will definitely be ordering it and hope that the group chooses it.

[Chris OConnor]

So far that's three of us for the tree book.

[LanDroid]

Here is a similar book published in 2021. The author includes some autobiographical aspects which may or may not appeal.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard.

Article about the author

Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too
Trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans, too, ecologist Suzanne Simard says.
Simard grew up in Canadian forests as a descendant of loggers before becoming a forestry ecologist. She's now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.

Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain, she explains. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect.

"This was a breakthrough," Simard says. The trees were sharing "information that actually is important to the health of the whole forest."

In addition to warning each other of danger, Simard says that trees have been known to share nutrients at critical times to keep each other healthy. She says the trees in a forest are often linked to each other via an older tree she calls a "mother" or "hub" tree.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... people-too

[Robert Tulip]

The Hidden Life of Trees is about how trees in a natural forest communicate with each other with fungal root pathways, and how this shows their life is much more complex than we imagine. A great interview on this book is at https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pr ... ss/7835220

I will buy and read it.

[Robert Tulip]

I found that I had already bought The Hidden Life of Trees from a second hand book sale.

Once I started reading it I could not put it down. It is a totally amazing book full of remarkable facts and wisdom about trees and forests.

As I mentioned already, the sharing of information and nutrients through underground networks of roots and fungi, known as the Wood Wide Web, explains why intact old growth forests are so much healthier than plantations. The chaos of a real forest that is allowed to grow without regimentation produces more wood per acre than a forestry plantation. Mother trees look after their babies, and forest trees will even keep an old stump alive by giving it nutrients when it can no longer have leaves of its own.

The age of trees is another interesting point, They operate on a time horizon much slower than ours. When trees are harvested for lumber at age of about 100 years they are just adolescents. I really liked the explanation of how in a natural forest a tree grows in stages, waiting for opportunities to get their time in the sun, with many small trees already quite old.

The green light on the floor of a deciduous forest in summer reflects the inability of trees to absorb green, which is why leaves are green, So almost none of that light that we can see in a thick forest is visible to the small trees.

Understanding our symbiosis with trees is important for the health of humans and the planet. I strongly recommend The Hidden Life of Trees.

[Chris OConnor]

Should we go with The Hidden Life of Trees guys?