Summer reading list update

May 20th I lined out my summer reading, a modest list, with simian focus.
1) The Spirit Level, Richard G. Wilkinson
2) Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes
3) The Rise And Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamod
4) Ape House, Sarah Gruen


1) One of the best reads in a long time.  The focus is on inequality, specifically disparity in income, and the disaster hidden within it.  When wealth and high pay is concentrated in the hands of a few many things suffer or shorten; education, life span shortens, mental health, happiness, even the opportunity of upward mobility.  The US is currently, with Portugal and Singapore the most lop sided nation in these respects, and within many of our lifetimes we have fallen from #1 to last among developed nations in many rankings, currently we are the least likely nation where a poor person can raise to middle class, or middle class to rich, if you want to change class, the US is not the best place for it.  An excellent book. It's not all depressing stuff.
2) Have not found it yet, it may be next.
3) Finished it last night.  Excellent, not for those who believe the world is 6k old.  My favorite class at university was anthropology, this is ever so slightly text bookish, but an easy read about humans, why we have big dicks and small balls compared to most other animals, why and how we do many things, mass murders, wars, language, but the most interesting was the last 3 chapters about how we are using up our resources, with history on the classical civilizations Persian, Greek, Roman, Spanish empires and how they took a forested land and stripped it bare of trees to make charcoal, plaster, cement, war ships, and altered the area to arid nude hot climes.  The Anasasi of the American Southwest did the same.  Chaco Canyon's apartment has 200,000 trees used in it's roofing and flooring, the area had been forested but within 300 years they were bringing firewood 50 miles, the water table fell and the desert moved in.  Maybe there are lessons for us. 
4) I read it, lumbered through it.  I never could find the there there.  Wish I had'nt stuck with it, should have walked off.


So, I am going to add another, Jarod Diamonds Collapse.  It is a further digging into the subject of governments making decisions good for now but bad for the long run, such as the destruction of massive forests in Spain, Middle East etc.  If you look at ancient art from the middle east, and north Africa, it was a forested landscape, not all of it desert.