A Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Oeger, Alder Keleman Saxena and FeiFei Zhou
Most likely you’ve noticed, but more than just the earth’s climate is changing. There is a tendency, in discussions about the epoch of human-induced environmental transmutation known as the Anthropocene, to emphasize the planetary: rising temperatures, volatile weather, melting ice caps, deforestation, mass extinction, and so forth. But the shift is occurring on a smaller scale as well, in localized “patches” of dramatic, complex, and startling alteration. It is to such “Anthropocene hotspots” that the environmental anthropologists behind A Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene turn their attentions, exploring sites where the earthly and biological have tangled together with the manmade and industrial, to unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic effect. Although the result of human actions — the introduction of invasive species, for example, or nuclear disasters – these changes rapidly fall outside human control. While the authors are not letting our species off the hook for the harms of industrialization and imperialism, the natural histories they trace reveal life’s wildly irrepressible adaptability even as they supply sobering evidence for the severity of ecological disruption. Based on the interactive digital humanities project Feral Atlas, Field Guide takes a poetic approach to reckoning with a world in flux.
For Anthropocene observers, connection-makers, and quirky environmentalists.
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott
Popular myth reveres whistleblowers as heroes, ideal protagonists for based-on-a-true-story thriller films. We’re infatuated with the idea of the nonconformist with a conscience going up against the dastardly corporation on a moral crusade against greed, exploitation, and duplicity. It’s a great story, to be sure, but unfortunately not a particularly true one. In The Occasional Human Sacrifice, bioethicist Carl Elliott looks at six whistleblowers to expose the harsh realities of challenging the powerful in the medical-industrial context. The cases of medical malfeasance covered make for disturbing reading: experimental irradiation, the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the deliberate infection of institutionalized children with hepatitis. Elliott also describes his own experiences as a whistleblower in a psychiatric drug study that resulted in one test subject’s suicide. Alas, none of these people of conscience – the author included – prospered for their good deeds on the public’s behalf. Instead, they were fired, blacklisted, harassed, and chased out of the industry. Consider the myth of the triumphant whistleblower busted. If this sounds like a terrible bummer, I won’t try to convince you otherwise—but be assured that Elliot’s point is not to sow pessimism. Instead, the book calls for a shift in focus from romanticized folkloric figures to real reform in the fight against big-business corruption.
For industry skeptics, medical nonfic fans, and readers of Tom Mueller’s Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (2019).
The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared by Randall Sullivan
Former Rolling Stone contributing editor Randall Sullivan’s new book rests on a controversial premise: that the devil is real. Perhaps not as a crimson-skinned mustachioed fiend with hooves and a trident, but an actual, concrete entity nonetheless. Now, you need not accept this premise to enjoy Sullivan’s study of the Prince of Darkness, although a healthy dose of suspended disbelief might come in handy. In the rooting out of his subject, Sullivan delves into cultural and religious understandings of evil from Biblical times to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. Stops along the way include the Bosnian War, the most famous exorcism in U.S. history, the three-century-long European Witch Craze, and an excursion to a contemporary witches’ ceremony in Mexico. No less intriguing is the memoiristic thread Sullivan weaves through these investigations, as he charts his own personal unease as a skeptic grappling with a growing conviction in the reality of evil. For readers with macabre inclinations, The Devil’s Best Trick is a satisfyingly spooky and extensively researched descent in pursuit of the fiendish.
For horror fans and other dark side tourists.
