Chad Comello

Tag: Atlas of a Lost World

  • Favorite Books of the 2010s

    See also: my favorite films, TV shows, and albums of the 2010s.

    This list happens to coincide perfectly with the period of time I began (1) reading for fun once I graduated college, (2) tracking my reading, and (3) reading a lot more.

    This means I had tons of titles to consider. I forced myself to determine which books both expanded my mind and soul, and exhibited exceptional writing or creative vision. Not for nothing, almost all of the chosen ones got 5-star ratings on my Goodreads.

    (My yearly best-of lists have a lot more gems that just missed the cut. Consider them honorable mentions.)

    Here—listed alphabetically because I spent all my ordering energy on my movies list—are my favorite reads from the last 10 years.

    Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

    Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City by Sam Anderson

    Circe by Madeline Miller

    Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by S.C. Gwynne

    Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

    Here by Richard McGuire

    How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

    The Hunt for Vulcan: And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson

    Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

    The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks

    Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

    Station Eleven by Emily Mandel

    The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century by Richard Polt

    When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

    Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

    Just missed the cut:

    Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

    Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

    But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

    Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

    The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr

    The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

    The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

    Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon

    The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

    Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

    The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

    The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

    Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

    # , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  • Atlas of a Lost World

    We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to stand for the best view? The love for the panorama comes from memory, the earliest form of cartography, a sense of location. Little feels better than knowing where you are, and having a reason to be there.

    — from Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs, a meaty and winding travelogue around North America investigating notable Pleistocene spots, like the Bering land bridge in Alaska and the woolly mammoth remains in Clovis, New Mexico.

    I recently realized how fascinated I am with prehistoric people and their times: What was life like back then? How similar were Ice Age humans to us? Childs goes a long way in finding out, hiking through tundra and camping out in a polar vortex and trudging through Floridian swamps. Archaeology, anthropology, sociology, mythology, and philosophy all come into play.

    “Science is useful,” he writes. “It fills in the blanks with precision, but history is ultimately more about stories and the unfolding of human whims.”

    # , , , , , , ,