Tag: global warming

Acknowledging a transition

the bar mitzvah and the beast

 

What’s it about?
The Bar Mitzvah and the Beast is about an SF Bay Area family that bikes across the country. Why? Well, the father is Jewish and his turning-13-year-old son is an atheist. The father (Matt, also the author) wants to mark his son’s passage into his teenage years; the son tries to go to Hebrew school and have a Bar Mitzvah, but just can’t. So a cross-country bike ride is their compromise. They spend a summer riding from San Francisco to Washington DC. The whole family goes – Matt, his wife, Yonah (the son), and his little brother. (The Beast is an old tandem bike that they buy for Matt & the little brother to ride across the country.)

Why should you read it?
I am not religious (to my mind, you can’t prove either the existence or non-existence of god and I don’t worry about it that much), so I sympathized with Yonah. But I did like the idea of commemorating your child’s passage into their teenage years. My daughter is eleven and as she moves from her childhood to being a teenager, she is changing. Acknowledging that somehow, formally or informally, seems worthwhile. I’d never really thought about that before reading The Bar Mitzvah and the Beast.

The book was strongest when it was talking about Yonah’s rite of passage. It also wanted to be about overcoming your prejudices and drawing awareness to global warming. The marriage of the three themes wasn’t successful to my mind. But it’s still worthwhile.

We’re doomed.

The Sixth Extinction

 

What’s it about?
The Sixth Extinction is about evolution and extinction. It has a good overview of the history of both evolution and extinction – people didn’t believe that animals could go extinct before the French Revolution. There’s a history of the other five major extinction events in the earth’s past, even though we don’t know much about them – other than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. She then looks at the current rates of extinction, which are much closer to the rates during the other major extinction events rather than the typical background rate. There’s also a small, amusing bit about how rats are going to take over the world if humans die.

Why should you read it?
The world is getting warmer because there are higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So what? Well, The Sixth Extinction answers that question. The oceans acidify. Many – possibly most – animals won’t be able to live. Animals and plants will need to shift where they live and grow, but because people have taken up so much of the land, it’s hard for them to find new places to be. She does a great job of both showing how awesome the world is and making you despair over its future.