Author: Andres Kabel

A boisterous retelling of a fragment of Australia’s indigenous history, woven into the present time, Edenglassie radiates theatre. The story connects mid 1850s Brisbane, involving a young indigenous stalwart and his new bride, with a centenarian at the time of a bicentennial celebration in 2024. Replete with local dialect, never afraid to describe the racism and authoritarianism then and (regrettably now), Lucashenko’s prose never rests for a moment, bursting with a realism that will delight many (but which wearied this reader). The characters are rawly and humorously portrayed, the worlds centuries apart are well depicted, and the politics is heartfelt. Well worth a read for many, I found Edenglassie to be excessively overpowering, blunting its impact, but I suspect I would be in a minority in this regard. By all means buy and read over the Christmas season.

American poet/critic Adam Kirsch is a man of the moment, seizing an insight in his slim book of commentary and philosophy, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us. Once presented, his idea is obvious: many writers and thinkers are imagining a future world without corporeal humans, within two camps at first remote from each other. Anthropocene antihumanists can picture a world where climate change sends humanity extinct (or near enough to). Transhumanists see us transcending our bodies and either “uploading” our brains into digital networks or evolving into artificial intelligences ruling the world. Both strands are, of course, pessimists in one sense, yet both portray futures full of hope (but not human hope). Kirsch steps through six ideas-packed chapters with verve and cool style, offering a heady read. A particular pleasure of this book is the author’s synthesis of recent authors on these subject, ranging from David Wallace-Wells and Vernor Vinge to Toby Ord. For this reader, additional insights arrived from less lauded authors such as Leon Katz, Timothy Morton, David J. Chalmers, Michio Kaku, and Claire Colbrook (her idea of “preliminary mourning” struck me as apt). Another insight was that both of these adversarial streams of thought see the present as “the hinge of history.” Not for everyone, The Revolt Against Humanity will delight those tossing up between doomism and ultra techno-optimism.

Veteran British statistician and author of numerous books ranging across his field of expertise, David Spiegelhalter has now penned his magnum opus. The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck sums up a lifetime’s thinking on uncertainty, lack of knowledge, basic probability theory, randomness, fortune/luck, risk, prediction, and much more. With impeccable clarity he teaches even as he illuminates with fascinating examples, major and minor, real world and theoretical, many of them drawn from his own experience. His cool, deft prose is a delight to read. As an ex-actuary, I thought I was an expert on risk and analytics, but it turns out I had only a shallow grasp on the philosophical and intellectual underpinnings of my field. Anyone enjoying the first thirteen chapters will emerge with a clear handle on the myriad aspects of this intoxicating field, often picking up numerical fluency, and even then the adventure is incomplete. After teaching, Spiegelhalter spends two chapters on the best practices (according to him but it seems so sensible) of communication of uncertainty, risk, and advice and also the job of rational decision-making. The Art of Uncertainty will form, I am certain, part of the core library of any student of statistics or analytics.

Canadian poet Anne Michaels has written three novels over two decades. Her latest, Held, is a slim lyrical set of twelve mini tales spanning 1902 to 2025 and four countries. Each story is a wisp of a tale, an impressionistic collection of fragments evoking love, suffering, longing and impermanence. The tales jump all over the timeline and their interconnections are sometimes clear and sometimes indeterminable. Michaels is a sweet, sweet stylist and reading any one page is a pleasure but some of the narratives left this reader cold. Highlights include the opening story about a soldier wounded amidst mud on a French World War I battlefield, a piece centering around a war zone combat nurse, and the harrowing story of an Estonian musician sent to exile. There is much to swoon about in Held but your reading experience will hinge around your capacity for indeterminacy and gossamer thin connections.

If you think with numbers and sense how crucial our food systems are to solving the climate crisis, Vaclav Smil is the man for you. On any of the many topics he covers, especially energy, he seems to have the ultimate comprehensive data set, historical and current, and his relentless mathematical mind churns until the numbers make sense to him. He writes in remorseless informal but precise prose that probably best suits readers willing to dig in; I doubt if many of his books could serve as primers. In 2024, he returns to another favorite topic of his, food, especially food energetics, and How to Feed the World: A Factful Guide is the outcome for us to devour. The book is a remorseless catalog of different foods’ energy requirements/efficiencies, land and water imposts, delivery systems, waste dimensions, and environmental costs (including carbon footprints). He pours scorn on mass veganism and the paleo diet. Perhaps one flaw, if it can be called that, is his insistence, based on history, that all change takes place gradually and incrementally, so he debunks miracle solutions such as organics, lab meat, and perennial grains. Overall, How to Feed the World will delight analysts and analytical readers, but any reader needs to bring their own brain to bear on these important issues, for Vaclav Smil is not afraid to prognosticate boldly.