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Friends,
 
I hope your 2016 is off to a great start.  Below are my book recommendations for January and February.  As you’ll see, there is a wide range of subjects - from cavemen to Richard Nixon, arctic adventurers to a Kentucky farmer-poet.  But the common theme is that I thoroughly enjoyed them all, and I’m excited to recommend them to you:
 
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari - If you’ve ever wondered how we humans managed to transform ourselves from fancy monkeys who roamed the plains eating berries and raw meat into fancier monkeys who fly rocketships to the moon, then this is the book for you.  Harari crams an unbelievable amount of interesting information into 464 pages, covering all aspects of Homo Sapiens' rise to power - agriculture, religion, government, empires, corporations, and science, just to name a few.  In a sometimes funny and surprisingly easy-to-read style, he boils down the last 70,000 years into fascinating (and probably highly controversial to some) narrative of our species' relatively short existence on earth.
 
Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee - What happens when you take a passionate (some would say militant) environmentalist and send him on three separate close-quartered trips with a mining-obsessed geologist, a loudmouth resort developer, and a brash former Secretary of the Interior who loves to dam up rivers?  Read this book and you’ll find out.  In it, John McPhee follows David Brower (former head of the Sierra Club) on each of these trips, and McPhee gives unbiased, fully detailed accounts of the conversations and interactions between the men. The book is a great reminder that environmental and conservation issues are extremely complex, and no matter which side of the spectrum you are on, there is no “right” answer.  If the answers were that easy, the problems would’ve been fixed generations ago.  A thought-provoking read by one of our most talented living authors.
 
Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas - I think a better title would be “Being Nixon: A Weirdo.”  I knew almost nothing of substance about Nixon when I picked up this book, and now I can’t stop thinking about him.  What an oddball!  Nixon was a walking contradiction— he was an introverted, socially awkward man who devoted his life to politics, one of the most extroverted careers imaginable.  He fancied himself a tough guy, yet he was terrified of face-to-face confrontation (and cried a lot, too).  He claimed to hate Ivy Leaguers, yet he filled his cabinet with them and constantly sought their approval.  He positioned himself as a champion of the downtrodden “silent majority,” yet he was disgustingly racist.  The list goes on and on.  As weird as he was, I came away thinking that there’s something strangely admirable about a man who could push himself so hard to reach the pinnacle of a career in which he had no natural talent.  It’s like if I somehow willed my way into becoming the MVP of the NBA.  I learned about the book from Conan O’Brien, who periodically does serious, non-comedy interviews with authors and other intriguing people. Here’s the one for Being Nixon, but they are all great.  (Also worth reading by Evan Thomas - The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898)
 
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard - President James Garfield has one of the more impressive life stories of any U.S. President, yet few people know about him because he was assassinated just months into his presidency.  Alas, when people now hear the name Garfield, they just think of that fat lasagna-eating cat.  Anyway, Garfield was shot in 1881, just as medicine was rounding the corner from being one step above voodoo into becoming an actual science with a focus on sterilization and controlling infection.  Unfortunately for Garfield, his doctors had not yet accepted all the new-fangled inventions like, say, hand washing.  Within minutes of being shot, while lying on the filthy train station floor, Garfield’s doctors were jamming their nasty fingers into the wound, trying in vain to extract the bullet.  The doctors did, however, start a fatal infection that dragged out for almost three months until Garfield finally died.  Worst case, this book will make you appreciate just how far our medical technology has progressed in less than 150 years.  (Also by Millard is River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, one of my favorite books of all time.)
 
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing -  My good buddy and Denali tentmate recommended this book to me.  Since he and I get a peculiar enjoyment from freezing our faces off in ridiculously cold places, he thought I’d love the book... and I did.  It follows Ernest’s Shackleton’s ill-fated overland expedition across Antartica and consists of three brutal survival tales—shipwrecked on a floating ice flow for over a year, open boat sailing through the roughest seas on earth, and traversing an uncharted, glaciated, arctic island on foot with no climbing gear.  When taken as one massive adventure, it is hard to understand how not a single life was lost.  Endurance is the ultimate example of rock-solid leadership, the limits of human toughness, and the power of optimism.  I actually got chills on my neck when reading the last two pages, which I don’t recall ever happening before.  It’s one of the best true adventure stories of all time.
 
It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, Wendell Berry - In my circle of friends involved in land conservation and agriculture, Wendell Berry is a living legend.  A Stanford-educated writer and poet who studied under Wallace Stegner, Berry choose to return home to his family farm in rural Kentucky to live, farm, and write, all while deeply immersed in a place that he loves.  The first essay in this book is a reflection on the importance of truly knowing a place, having deep affection for it, and developing the obligation to protect and care for it.  I imagine that I’ll read this essay at least once a year, as it is one of those dense, meaningful, beautifully written works that will take on a different significance depending on my current stage of life.
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Thanks again for subscribing to my bi-monthly book recommendations.  I've discovered most of my all-time favorites books through suggestions from friends like you, so the whole point of this email is to encourage more discussions about good books.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions, and feel free to forward this email to any of your friends who may be interested.  
 
If you were forwarded this email and want to receive future editions, you can either sign up here or send me an email (edroberson@gmail.com) and let me know.  One email, every other month with a few books that I’ve recently read, enjoyed, and highly recommend.
 
Thanks,
 
Ed