What We Are Reading Today: The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood

Updated 08 June 2018
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What We Are Reading Today: The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood has long been the doyenne of post-apocalyptic fiction. But as society becomes ever more mired in global concerns such as the march of AI, data theft and hyper-capitalism, Atwood’s ideas, which were once viewed as fanciful dystopian notions of the future, now appear as uncomfortable harbingers of a more-than-plausible reality.

In the first 10 pages of The Heart Goes Last, married couple Stan and Charmaine are living in their car in what has become a lost rustbelt America. A whole generation is trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. So when they see an advertisement for The Positron Project in the town of Consilience — a social experiment offering stable jobs and a home of their own — they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell. What could possibly go wrong?

Atwood artfully navigates the reader through an exhilarating journey into a world where the values of autonomy and self-identity have been blithely swapped for home comforts. Atwood asks: “Sustenance, but at what cost?” Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust and guilt take over and Positron looks less like a dream and more like a chilling prophecy.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Updated 21 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Brain research has been accelerating rapidly in recent decades, but the translation of our many discoveries into treatments and cures for brain disorders has not happened as many expected. 

We do not have cures for the vast majority of brain illnesses, from Alzheimer’s to depression, and many medications we do have to treat the brain are derived from drugs produced in the 1950s—before we knew much about the brain at all. 

Tackling brain disorders is clearly one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. What will it take to overcome it? Nicole Rust takes readers along on her personal journey to answer this question.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

Updated 20 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

“The Atlas of Birds” captures the breathtaking diversity of birds, and illuminates their conservation status around the world.

Full-color maps show where birds are found, both by country and terrain, and reveal how an astounding variety of behavioral adaptations—from flight and feeding to nest building and song—have enabled them to thrive in virtually every habitat on Earth.

Maps of individual journeys and global flyways chart the amazing phenomenon of bird migration, while bird classification is explained using maps for each order and many key families.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

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Updated 18 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

  • Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land

Author: ERIN LIN

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

Updated 17 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions.

Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In “The Spike,” Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Updated 16 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

When World War II ended, about 1 million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria.

These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands.

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In “Lost Souls,” Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.