The Eagle Time Book Club: Now reading Whatever

I want to recommend a book I just read! I will also offer to send said book to anyone who wants to read it, on the condition that either a) you send it back or b) you send it on to someone else who wants it.

While I was at the "American Book Centre" in Amsterdam I grabbed a bunch of natural history+nonfiction type books (all but one of them written by ladies!), and on the plane ride home powered through Naming Nature, by Carol K Yoon.

It's a crash course (the author's personal trajectory, tbh) through taxonomy's history, from Linnaeus through to molecular systematics and the dreaded cladists. A lot of the folks in the biology department at my university were molecular taxonomists, so actually getting some context behind what they do finally made a bunch of stuff click.

The author bemoans the modern world's ills and the wider public's detachment from the natural world too much, eye em oh, but I can kind of get behind her points about how the democratic nature was taken out of natural history/biology.

If you like anecdotes about dusty old scientists like Linnaeus that make them seem more like real human beings, though, this book is great for that! The story of taxonomy is cooler than you'd expect, because the Truth hurts in a weirdly existential way, and we get to see nerds getting passionate and rude over things like that.

For me with a biology background it immediately demystified what the various schools of taxonomy are about, so I'd definitely recommend it for the biologists on the forum. Even if you're not (especially if you're not, even) I would be very happy if you wanted to try this book! I'd be happy to talk through concepts if a keen reader wanted to.

I also picked up: A Sting in the Tale, about some british nerd and his beloved bumblebees,
The Soul of an Octopus, which is probably about the author being captivated by cephalopods and their weird alien intelligence, and (once I get it back off Plaid)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is easily my strongest recommend off this list for anyone to read, sciencetypes or no. I should rave about it once I get it back and finish reading it through myself, BUT I'm happy to send this one around if anyone wants to tackle it.