Books and a Building

I thought these were worth a short book report.   But stop here if you are not interested!  More words than normal.  Got carried away.    The Story of More was the book club book we discussed yesterday.   Hope Jahren is a geochemist and geobiologist from Minnesota with lots of scientific education, posts and awards, who now works at the University of Oslo in Norway and is known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene.   One might surmise any book she might write could be dry reading but she makes the presentation of the climate crises with a well researched information chapter on each of the major environmental topics without scaring one to the point of paralysis like so many of these books seem to do.  She does it through using history, art and humor. She has also taught courses on climate change.   She decided to write about the last 50 years upon turning 50 so the time period is from 1969 and how far we’ve come, with lots of funny antidotes from her growing up in Minnesota.   Her previous book was a memoir Lab Girl.   She advocates we access what we value and hopes we aim for more equity, more knowledge and more habitable years here on this planet.      

While reading this I had to look for a seemingly related Factfulness book that I had started reading maybe a year before but it had gotten buried.  Like some do.   Inspired by a book review I read of one of voracious reader Bill Gates’ favorite books,  and also intrigued by the rest of the title “Ten Reasons We’re wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think”, I had some “doom and gloom” friends I wanted to share something positive with.  Hans Rosling is a Swedish MD, researcher and professor of international health with 10 entertaining TED talks, who along with his son and daughter in law devised 13 questions about the world that different groups all over the world have not gotten anywhere near right.  (like, How many people in the world have some access to electricity?  In the last 20 years the world population living in extreme powerty has .. ?  3 choices for answers.) And ten reasons why the poor answers   (different biases) and what makes us so ignorant about the facts.      He has been accused of being and optimist but he insists he’s merely a possibilist.

And the Building?  I was chatting about this Rosling book with a friend who said to me “have you seen the new building on the UW campus?”    “ Well, no.”  (Sometimes I do think I live under a rock.. it's only a mile+ away.)  Just opened last year during the pandemic, it’s the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health, !!   of course with funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation….Hans was a dear mentor of Melinda’s...  He died in 2017 after just finishing this book which his son and daughter in law published and she wanted to honor him with the name of the building which houses  World Health Organizations,  see HERE
Hans did list his 5 global risks we should worry about and the first on the list was global pandemic…wouldn’t he have been devastated at how it came to be?


2 fascinating  books with many facts,  figures and references, but pleasantly NOT all doom and gloom.