Category: Pop History

The word “Krakatoa ” has become synonymous with almost unthinkable natural disaster, an extinction level event locally, if not globally. Simon Winchester, an increasingly successful British pop historian, delivers a lively, albeit highly discursive account of the great eruption in “Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883” (2003). Krakatoa, a small volcanic island…

George Orwell’s debut novel, “Burmese Days” (1934), is one of my all-time favorites. Orwell brilliantly captures the class obsessed and condescending superiority of late Imperial Britain. The vain and dashing cavalry officer, Lieutenant Verrall, is surely one of the more execrable characters in twentieth century fiction. He is also a spot-on caricature of the type…

There is no bigger topic on the global stage today than climate change. The primary culprit causing today’s climate crisis is hydrocarbon emissions, a process that kicked off a century and a half ago with the Second Industrial Revolution. But there was something about this widely accepted narrative that has always troubled me and it…

What if Adam Smith (invisible hand) and Charles Darwin (evolution) had a baby? The offspring might be pretty amazing: intelligent, dynamic, innovative, problem-solving. At least that’s what British science writer Matt Ridley argues in “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” (2011). First, Ridley wants you to know that being an optimist is long been lonely,…