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Book Reviews
Please check back periodically
as we'll be adding reviews to this section of our website!
About our Book Reviews
"The individual scientist can survive for a long time by lying low in the valley of specialized intellectual interest.... We in science must get up and face the wind." --William Bevan "The Sound of the Wind That's Blowing" American Psychologist July 1976.
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers (CMCR) has worked at the crossroads of environmental and human rights since 1990. To promote the cause of human and environmental justice in the 21st Century, CMCR has set up a partnership with Powell's Books. The books we describe below cover a turf encompassing city, country, and wilderness, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Put them all together, and they transcend the narrow specialties that
can distort our view of ourselves and the world around us. We include
books that can be bought new or used. Because our list is based on importance
of the books instead of whether they are hot off the press, some are
out of print, and some of those may be hard to find. But Powell's Books
can let you know when any such book becomes available.
In addition to its direct help to our friends and supporters, any book
bought from Powell's Books via CMCR's website will also earn CMCR 7.5
percent of the sale price.
Yesterday
One of the non-fiction books reviewed in this section makes an intriguing and credible case that the human mind evolved in the process of watching and thinking about the wild animals that were then so immediately prominent in our everyday lives. Another makes an equally interesting argument that human intelligence and consciousness evolved under the influence of a changing global climate. A third non-fiction book reveals that people of the Stone Age had an average work week of only 20 hours — a far cry from the more-hectic pace of today’s supposedly more advanced civilization. A fourth book documents the ancient and continuing saga of humanity’s self-endangering ways in a chronicle of that most down-to-earth natural asset, soil.
The two novels in this section are hidden treasures. Written by scientists, these novels use fiction to breathe life into some ancient human truths.