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"What are We Doing Here?" by Marilynne Robinson is a collection of essays written by one of America's foremost authors and public intellectuals. Her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila are beautiful, carefully crafted classics and this collection shows the depth of her quiet erudition. The collection has all of her typical interests: University education, the Puritans, John Calvin, American Literature, American Politics and Society. Robinson is a careful thinker and, if I am honest, her prose is not the easiest thing to read. You want to go carefully through such a collection. But it is worth your time. Personally, I find her commentaries on American life moderately more interesting than her theological work but when you read such a collection, you can come to see that all of her thought is part of a seamless garment and you cannot have one aspect without all the others. Her careful theological exploration is essential to her commentary about American life and visa-versa. In this collection, I found the following chapters the strongest: "What Are We Doing Here?" "Theology for this Moment," "The American Scholar Now," "Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself," and "Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition." But I want to especially highlight "A Proof, A Test, An Instruction" as one of the single best retrospectives on Barack Obama and responses to the election of Donald Trump that has been written. I might have given this book a full five stars but I feel that it can get slightly repetitive and could have done with one or two fewer pieces.

Pico Iyer's "Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells" is a nice meditation on the idea of death and dying as we grow older and how Japanese culture thinks of these transitions. Mediation is the best word to describe the book, as many other reviews have done. It meanders quietly, its ideas and thoughts interweaving together. I feel that very few authors could have pulled off this type of book. It is clear that the idea for the book came up spontaneously and I do feel at times that the various strands of the book fit together but not as well as they could. I can see that all the ideas are of a theme but it lacks deeper narrative coherence. But perhaps that was not the point of the book in the first place.

Since I read [b:The Lady and the Monk|344026|The Lady and the Monk|Pico Iyer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1431017086l/344026.SX50.jpg|2954374], I have wondered about what happened next? I think most people who read that book wondered about his relationship with the Lady but also about how Iyer changed through his encounter with Kyoto. Glancing over his biography, once can see that he never really left Japan and he ended up together with the woman in "The Lady and the Monk." Autumn Light helps fill in the details of his life and I appreciate getting to meet him and his family again. One doesn't need to have read the first book in order to appreciate this one. However, it is interesting to see how the author has changed and how he has grown into his life in Japan. Recommended.

Note - I read this book a number of months ago and do not have a copy in front of me to refer to. I will update this review when I can review the text more closely.

"The Room on the Roof" by Ruskin Bond is a pretty coming of age novel that grapples with questions of identity, home, and longing. Though clearly the author's first novel, I found myself really enjoying its characters and the raw, personal voice of the novelist. The book is semi-autobiographical and captures Bond's desire to find a place for himself in the world that he had grew up in but was not meant to be a part. What makes it a strong coming-of-age novel is how it can tell that very universal story of finding the self and telling it with very specific details. And like all good children's literature, it does not shy away from violence and darker corners of life. Written when he was seventeen and living away from India for the first time, you can see the author attempting to recapture snippets and moments of his childhood. The book tells the story of Rusty, an Anglo-India boy living in Dehradun just after Indian independence. He lives a stifling existence among the dying Anglo community and longs for adventure. He makes friends in the bazaar, runs away from home, falls in love, and comes to accept that India is truly his home. I don't know if I was fully invested in the story and there were some narrative leaps that I did not find plausible. I also don't like the third person limited narrator - he goes into the mind of characters when convenient but not consistently. But the beauty of the images, especially in his descriptions of nature and the world around, more than make up for the flaws in style.

I cannot emphasis how much I loved this book. The book opened my mind to some of the deepest issues and problems in modern society and completely changed the way that I think about identity and the self. Crawford, known for his first book "Shopclass as Soulcraft" uses the modern inability to give attention as the jumping off point to explore identity formation. Very briefly, Crawford argues that one of the inheritances we have from the Enlightenment (largely thanks to Kant) is that we think of our identities as formed entirely by mental processes. This fallacy leads us down many dark roads. The main philosophical argument can be summed up as the following (only articulated in the middle of the book):

- We are encouraged to free ourselves from all authorities, including the authority of others;
- This leads us to emphasize radical self-responsibility (as a matter of politics and epistemology);
- We can only do this by locating the source of truth from our external world to our inner world - by constructing representations of life;
- To accomplish this, we must demote attention as a value as it takes us outside of the mental realm which is the center of all authority.

Once you understand it, you begin to see the web that binds us to these means of identity formation. The way out is to conceive of identity formation as a relationship between us, our environments, and the people around us. And it involves a dynamic relationship between our own creative powers and the tradition we receive.

I've been making my way through the Ring of Fire series. In general, I like the short story collections better than the novels with a few exceptions. The short stories show the promise of the series and the creativity of the larger community of authors constructing a complex, messy world. But "Grantville Gazette IV" was the first short story collection I was really disappointed in. I just didn't really like most of the short stories in this collection. This volume more than any of them felt like set up for the next round of novels and stories. None of the stories really stuck with me at all. The only one's I really liked were "The Anatomy Lesson" by Eric Flint and "Heavy Metal Music" by David Carrisco. I liked the technical essays but they were quite long in this volume. Maybe I will re-read this collection at a different point as I get further along in the series or perhaps I will be surprised that the hidden seeds planted in this volume that blossom in later works. My advice is to get through it and move onto the next ones.

"Lost in the Valley of Death" is on one level a mystery about the disappearance of Justin Alexander, a travel blogger and Instagram star who disappeared in the Paravati Valley in 2016. The book was originally a longer journalist piece and I think that this showed. To be honest, I did not find the main story of this book as interesting as broader narrative the books presents about spiritual seeking in contemporary society. The book stands out for me is the larger narrative it presents about Westerners coming to India to seek spirituality and getting lost in the experience. I read this book immediately after reading [b:Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville|55710556|Better to Have Gone Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville|Akash Kapur|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1624806484l/55710556.SY75.jpg|86883125] and while I think that "Better to Have Gone" is a better book, "Lost in the Valley of Death" is excellent, well-written, and carefully researched. Rustad carefully unpacks Justin's history and shows how little threads of his life came together in his untimely disappearance. Stick with the book - I felt like all of its threads came together in the last part and made it a satisfying read.

"The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells is a necessary book. It comprehensively lays out the possible consequences for humans and the earth as a result of climate change. It is immensely sobering stuff. It really hits you hard. I hate to fault such an important book but I found that the parts of the book did not feel like they cohered together that well. The book is essentially divided into three parts - an introductory essay about his growing fears about climate change and fears about the cascading effects of changes that will compound each other. The second looks at twelve different areas that will most likely be affected by climate change. The final part looks at the possible sources of our lack of engagement with the topic or our lack of action. I found the later part the most interested while the introductory essay was something I really had to push myself through. What Wallace-Wells repeatedly reminds the reader is that human actions got us into this mess and human actions will be what will help us get it out. This is a book that I plan on purchasing and will return to. Perhaps I will like it more on a second read.

I remember hearing about the book "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson in my fifth grade science class. The story of a women scientist who sounded the warning about the danger of pesticides and chemicals in the environment was told almost like a legend. Indeed, the book itself has had an impact far beyond its content. It ranks as one of the most influential books of the 20th century and one of the few works in human history that can be said to have a direct impact on how we live and understand our world. The books reputation is well-deserved. It is a damning critique of modern society and our over-reliance on technology, chemicals, and poisons to attempt to dominate and control nature. Carson concludes that, like the threat of nuclear war, humanity's use of increasingly deadly forms of toxic chemicals in agriculture put into the power of our own destruction in our hands.

The book works for a variety of reasons. First, the book is lucid in the best tradition of popular science writing, making its points clearly, concisely, and with deep erudition. Second, the book is in the best tradition of ecology, which emphasizes the fundamental interconnected of all life on earth. Third, Carson is a very good writer who writes brilliantly and poetically. The fundamental strength of the book is that Carson balances strong scientific understanding with the ethical and moral component of the subject. She is genuinely angry at the damage wrought to the environment. I would argue that without this balance, the work either becomes a dry academic text or an angry polemical screed.

Finally, Carson always keeps the effect of chemical pollution on human bodies and human activities firmly in her narrative at all points. You can mention the damage done to bird populations and that will make people sad. But mention that these birds are the birds that people like to listen to in the Spring and people will begin to take notice of the direct on their own lives. "Silent Spring" lives up to the adage coined by Upton Sinclair about his novel "The Jungle," which took place among immigrants in Chicago who worked for the meat-packing industry. While his novel was supposed to be focused on the exploitation of workers in the factories, people were more disgusted with reports of rats in sausages and rotten meat. The led Sinclair to remark "I aimed for [readers'] hearts but I hit their stomach's instead." Carson was able to make people understand viscerally the effect that these chemicals have on the world around us, in the food we eat and the water we drink, and residing in our very bodies.

Many things have changed since "Silent Spring" was written. It led to the banning of DDT worldwide. In many ways it kick-started the second environmental movement. But Carson's fundamental charges against man's obsessions with technology, government inaction in the face of industries, and the hubris that we can control our environment, are still just as potent as ever.