Summer Reading

I read two books this summer - and they both had things in common that made them different from the type of book I usually read "for fun". 

A.  Both of them were non-fiction
B.  Both of them were written by living authors.

Other than that, they were pretty polar -the first book I read was A World Undone: The Story of the Great War by G.J. Meyer.  Before I read this book, I knew basically two things about World War I

1.  It was started by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
2.  It preceded World War II.

We're talking serious ignorance here.  The book was written chronologically, but each chapter was followed by a section highlighting some additional information - the specific history of some interesting person, details about a certain area of political thought, or more depth about tactics or weapons.  I can appreciate the nitty gritty details of a chronological report, but I really needed the break with the background information!  What a horrible war - and what horrible waste of human lives, natural resources, food, and money.  And all that horribleness was just deepened when I realized at the end that it was just paving a pathway into World War II.  I can recommend this book for it's readability - and because there is nothing good from being ignorant of the mistakes and miscommunication that caused this war. 

The other book I read was The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards.  This book was a hard read for me because so much of it was out of my league.  The basic argument of the book, I understand.  The details of the defense...I just have to take their word for it.  I don't know much about astronomy or physics.   To explain the basic argument, it's easiest to take a quote from the book (pg. 218):

...the rare conditions required for habitability also provide excellent overall conditions for discovering the universe around us.

I think that all of us have at one time or another marvelled at how the earth is not too close to and not too far from the sun.  All the kids' "why" questions make me do that!  But I never really thought about how our atmosphere makes us able to view distant space or would ever have considered that this is unusual.  The book gave huge amounts of information about Earth's uniqueness both in its' ability to sustain living beings and its' placement in the universe in general. 

It also spoke to an issue that has always fascinated me - size - why is the sky so big and an ant so small?  You can think of the earth as this tiny speck in the behemoth vastness of space and let that make you feel insignificantly small...but...and they broke this down on a table (pg. 216) - human beings are very near the middle size-wise if you look at the very largest things we can observe (the diameter of the observable universe) and the very smallest things we can measure (quarks).  To me that is amazing! 

While not as readable, this book did help me think about some things I wasn't really considering and you will probably like it a lot if you're interested in the earth, astronomy, or extra-terrestrials. 

So after all that, I am definitely going to read some fiction!