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David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

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Review:   David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth:  A Story of the Future (Penguin Random Hours, 2019) Wallace-Wells provides another in a list of books warning of ecological disaster. He offers little new information, that is part of the problem.  We have a nagging feeling that we’ve heard the information before.  What Wallace-Wells does is to pull it together and provide an overview.  In a nutshell, the situation is dire, but not hopeless. He starts with the dire.  Things are worse—much worse—than we imagine.  We are in the middle of the sixth extinction, as we have already learned in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2015 work by that name.  And in each extinction event over the past 800 million years a minimum of 75% of all species die off.  The problem is industrialization.  The rate of extinction has increased 100 times faster than in the pre-industrialization period.  And the pace of carbon release is increasing.  85% of the carbon in the air today was put there after WW II.  The th
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Proof of Life/J.A. Jance

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Review:  Proof of Life/J.A. Jance New York:  Harper Collins, 2017 Jance is what I would call a local author, originally from Bisbee, Arizona, and she sets the J.P. Beaumont series in Seattle.  Both these locations are places I’ve been, so I wanted to add to my reading of detective fiction based in place.  Unfortunately this one fell flat.  I didn’t find the characters believable.  Only Beaumont was fleshed out.  And this was done through slow-motion shots of his mundane thoughts:  “Amerlia Rourke (man or woman?  I wasn’t sure)….” (186).  “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”  (60). “I was slightly cranky as I pulled out of the garage…” (274). Here’s a character in need of a strong dose of show, don’t tell.  The sad thing is there were plenty of potentially interesting characters who could have been developed, in particular Beaumont’s wife Mel.  Instead we got to know the dog Lucy in detail.  I’m sorry, but this was a detective novel in need of a crash diet.   The plots were mundane. 
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Shamanism in Southwest Native American Cultures

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    Shamanism:  Archaic?  Modern?  Accurate?   In this essay I will explore key questions about the nature of the shaman, as reflected in class readings and external sources.    What Is a Shaman? This question continues to be debated in anthropology and religious studies.  In some ways this reflects the usefulness of the term.  It is now a mainstay concept in anthropology.  At the same time there has been a consistent criticism of the label “shaman,” as described by Mircea Eliade, as being simply an idealized type rarely encountered in the field.  Scholars of religion are similarly finding shamanic elements in religious practices, if not actual individuals labelled as shamans.  On top of all this shamanism has seen a minor resurgence in the west, testing the assumption that shamanism is limited to tribal or primitive societies. Beck et al see the shaman as the holder of “secret,” traditional knowledge.  “These individuals,” they write, “help pass on knowledge and sacred practices from
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