2026 Book 1:  Charleston:  Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford

Some of the most expensive land in the United States is located in Charleston, South Carolina.  A complex history, the coastal community faces the reality of anthropogenic sea level rise due to heat trapping gases warming the planet.  The text overviews unmitigated development and frames the issue not only in the context of Charleston but also with attention to historical narratives of race, policy, and economics.  And Charleston is not alone - it is a bellwether.  What's the cost of climate inaction?  Here and there.  For us and them.  

2025

2025 Summary: 58 books

Favorites, in no order: American Nations, Prisoners of Geography, How To Be A Good Creature

1. The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson
2. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
3. 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist's Guide to a Happy Life by Dick Van Dyke
4. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
5. Baltimore Prohibition: Wet and Dry in the Free State by Michael Walsh
6. Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept
7. The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir by Sarah Kendzior
8. Thirty Three Cyclists: Daredevils, Visionaries & Adventurers by David Houghton
9. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
10. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
11. Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez
12. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
13. The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
14. Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success by Jeff Hiller
15. Making Sense of Wine by Matt Kramer
16. Bonnie and Clyde: The Making of a Legend by Karen Blumenthal
17. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry
18. Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali by Cassidy Randall
19. The Vegetarian by Kang Han
20. Mapping the Cold War: Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power by Timothy Barney
21. Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust – A Moving Account of Jewish Girls' Extraordinary Resilience and Courage by Clothes Historian by Lucy Adlington
22. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley
23. My Brief History by Stephen Hawking
24. The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Christopher Hayes
25. A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory by Jagadish Shukla
26. A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown
27. Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives by Gretchen Rubin
28. Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
29. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Foer
30. 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz by Heather Dune Macadam
31. America's Deadliest Election: The Cautionary Tale of the Most Violent Election in American History by Dana Bash
32. Ukraine: The History and Legacy of Ukraine from the Middle Ages to Today by Charles River Editors
33. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung
34. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
35. The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
36. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
37. Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children by Noliwe Rooks
38. The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson,
39. They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery
40. Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle
41. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
42. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
43. The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong by Judith Rodin
44. Faith: A Journey For All by Jimmy Carter
45. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
46. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
47. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall
48. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
49. Decolonizing Paradise: A Radical Ethnography of Environmental Stewardship in the Caribbean by Rosalina Díaz
50. The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War by John Donohue
51. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester,
52. Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester
53. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
54. How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery
55. Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton
56. Citizen: My Life After the White House by Bill Clinton
57. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
58. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

 

Value of Reading

Remember the Pizza Hut BOOK IT Program?  Summer programs incentivized reading goals.  My sister and I would compete; I am very goal driven and don't enjoy second-place.  But as most children, reading was not particularly fun. Regurgitating information in school frustrated me.  Why do we need to know this random ass fact (RAF)?  I'd rather be out exploring the world, learning from experience, and living the world.  Reality rather than fiction intrigued me.   Perhaps because my reality was filled with adventure and challenges.  After middle school, reading wasn't very cool.  Nor did I prioritize it.  During college (and my post-graduate years), I read out of necessity rather than desire.  Summarizing journal articles.  Reading stories about seasonal climate change.  Broadening my cognate knowledge in various disciplines including public health, computer science, and trying to understand words like epistemology in Jim Tyner's Environmental Geopolitics.  Life proceeded. 

During covid-19, I renewed my passion for reading.  In part, because I was alone.  Teaching online asynchronously provided very little human interaction.  I dove heavily into cycling, but I also was interested in learning for the sake of learning.  Bit by the travel bug, I wanted to further my knowledge of place, near and far.  I wanted to better understanding cultures and processes.  I wanted to learn more of the complex stories of peoples and communities.  Knowledge is power, and authoritarians often use knowledge as a tool, downplaying critical thinking and harvesting knowledge to minimize dissent.   Why is the most dangerous question.  Never stop asking why.  

This blog serves as a forum to highlight my readings.  Initially, the posts will aggregate recent years.  I more formally started tracking my reading successes in 2024.  While I preferring non-fiction, biographies, and historical accounts, I am always willing to explore new genres. Recommendations welcome.  Much to learn.  

Find me on GoodReads.  

2024 Summary

Total:  78 books

Favorites, in no order: Organ Thieves, 1493, Painted Screens, The Treeline

1.       Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
2.       The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
3.       Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership by Brea Baker
4.       Into the Uncut Grass by Trevor Noah
5.       Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
6.       The Art of Power: My Story as America's First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi
7.       The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein   
8.       Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire by Kevin Deutsch
9.       Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
10.  The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
11.  Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
12.  Lovely One: A Memoir by Ketanji Brown Jackson
13.  1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann
14.  The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg
15.  Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis by Michael Mann
16.  Charm City:  A Walk Through Baltimore by Madison Bell Smartt
17.  Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
18.  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson
19.  White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Thomas Schaller
20.  The Life of Richard Nixon by John Farrell
21.  The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
22.  Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63 by Taylor Branch
23.  The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
24.  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
25.  The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones
26.  Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson
27.  The Arctic: A Very Short Introduction by Klaus Dodds
28.  The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
29.  Bold Forecast: The Hurricane Agnes Deluge by Gary Letcher
30.  Playing Politics with Natural Disaster: Hurricane Agnes, the 1972 Election, and the Origins of FEMA by Timothy Kneeland
31.  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
32.  Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon
33.  Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
34.  Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddarth Kara
35.  Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin
36.  Spare Parts: The Story of Medicine Through the History of Transplant Surgery by Paul Craddock
37.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
38.  How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America by Priya Fielding-Singh
39.  Akkadian Empire: A History from Beginning to End by Hourly History
40.  Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William Ruddiman
41.  The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence
42.  A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
43.  Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time-the Building of the Panama Canal by Matthew Parker
44.  The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
45.  Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
46.  Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe by Mario Alejandro Ariza
47.  How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes
48.  Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proul
49.  Grant by Ron Chernow
50.  On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad by David Goodrich
51.  The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler
52.  Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning by Liz Cheney
53.  Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
54.  My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand
55.  President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear
56.  A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian Koot
57.  Murder on Maryland's Eastern Shore: Race, Politics and the Case of Orphan Jones by Joseph Moore
58.  What Was the Underground Railroad?  by Yona Zeldis McDonough
59.  The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester
60.  Alone on the Ice by David Roberts
61.  Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah
62.  The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
63.  Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer
64.  Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky
65.  The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
66.  Isaac Newton by James Gleick
67.  Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
68.  The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones
69.  The Painted Screens of Baltimore: An Urban Folk Art Revealed by Elaine Eff
70.  Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank Snowden III
71.  NEW-A Tree a Day by Amy-Jane Beer
72.  An Island Called Smith by Jon Gower
73.  Reservoir Hill by Kelly Dane Terrill
74.  Ellicott City by Marsha Wight Wise
75.  Catoctin Furnace:: Portrait of an Iron Making Village by Elizabeth Anderson
76.  Highlandtown by Gary Helton
77.  Guilford by Ann Giroux
78.  Maryland Geography: An Introduction by James DiLisio