If you loved "The Clan of the Cave Bear"

 You should read The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron. I suspect this wonderful story owes a large debt to Jean Auel’s 1980s series Earth' Children, which began with Clan. The book’s structure is interesting, with the modern day archeologist narrator imagining the story behind her find of a Neanderthal skeleton and a modern day human buried side by side. The burial looks intentional, and would help her prove the interrelationship between our early ancestors and ourselves. The archeologist’s reputation is also at stake regarding her find, and pardon the horrible pun, but proving her thesis will help make her professional bones. 

Maya Angelou’s quote “You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you have been” is very applicable. From the prologue:

They were kind and clever. They had hands with opposable thumbs and a light dusting of hair on their backs.They had hearts that throbbed in their chests when they saw certain people, and this happened more than you might expect.  Their brains were larger than ours by about 10 percent. Many of us have inherited up to 4 percent of their DNA, and now that both genomes have been sequenced, we we know that theirs differs from ours by only about 0.12 percent.     

Claire Cameron very successfully interweaves the experiences of a modern day woman and that of a woman of forty thousand years ago. This tale isn’t as over the top as Clan, so in some ways it's more believable and credible. The modern day dialogue is so accurate that for an extended time one late night I forgot I was reading fiction.

Penguin Random House/Anchor Canada, 2017
275 pages

2017 Finalist Rogers Writers’ Trust 
A National Post Best Book of the Year
Canadian bestseller

Dogs, Wolves and Quirky People with Wild Hearts

 
 

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys

HarperCollins, 2004

I took a year long break from reading books while recovering from a colon cancer operation and then a vicious dog attack. Not reading was a new experience after a lifetime of being a bookworm/writer//poet/librarian. A newly retired friend and I binge watched over a dozen TV series, and there are some great programs out there (some memorable favourites listed below). But now I'm catching up on reading books again, and eager to share discoveries.

Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys is my recent one. It was a quick read, too quick and I binge read it in two nights. I told a close friend, also a retired librarian and dog lover, that she would enjoy it. I desperately wanted to tell her the roughest of outlines about the book, but she stopped me cold. She was right. This is a book by a poet, and it's too interwoven, too subtle and delicate to describe or paraphrase. Of course there is also a twist or two, and it would be a shame to do much more than recommend and leave it at that! As a book by an accomplished poet it's beautifully descriptive writing, but never once did I find it self-consciously "poetic", just addictive.

Now the list of binge watched series I remember most after several months of reflecting.

The Godfather of Harlem
Tegan and Sara's High School
Twisted Metal
1923
Poker Face  

The Last of Us 

largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter on planet Earth?

from Win Without War newsletter today:

(duper bowl dumbday)

 
Chris: Climate events like atmospheric rivers, hurricanes, and heatwaves are only becoming more dangerous and deadly — but so far, our plans to address the crisis have had a giant Pentagon-shaped hole.

Quick recap: The Pentagon is the single largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. According to recent estimates, the U.S. war machine pumps out more emissions than 140 other countries. Chris, ALL this pollution is exempt from our current climate goals.

Our trajectory is troubling, but a world on fire is not a foregone conclusion — and luckily, we have a crucial opportunity to change course today.

President Biden is putting the final touches on next year’s federal budget now. That means, he can reprioritize people and the planet, and decrease the worst effects of the Pentagon’s pollution with the stroke of a pen.

It’s a damning statement that instead of addressing this threat head-on, the U.S. government is helping to accelerate it. Sign now if you agree: President Biden’s budget needs to cut Pentagon emissions.

ACT NOW
The warnings are clear, Chris:

To avoid the worst of climate change’s catastrophic effects, the world’s average temperature shouldn’t exceed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of pre-industrial temps. Scientists reported this week that for the past 12 months, we’ve surpassed that crucial threshold.[1]

The problem? While outlets from Forbes to Fox News and more devote column inches to the environmental impact of the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift’s private jet emissions, there is one mega-polluter that rarely makes the headlines: the Pentagon.

It’s time to face the truth that it requires an INCREDIBLE amount of energy to wage war across the globe — and almost all of it is derived from fossil fuels.

Just one jet in the Pentagon’s fleet, the B-52 Stratofortress, consumes about as much fuel in one hour as the average car driver uses in seven years. 76 of those planes will remain in service until at least 2050.

Chris, our addiction to war is fueling the climate crisis, but here’s why we won’t give up: Every single fraction of a degree of planetary warming we avoid matters. If we can cut even a percentage of the Pentagon’s emissions, we can save lives and protect ecosystems.

That’s why we’re speaking out, and we need you to join us: Add your name to tell the president to make these reductions a reality.

Whether you’re rooting for San Francisco or Kansas City, today you can help ensure we all win a cleaner, healthier future. Please take 30 seconds to act now.

Thank you for working for peace,
Sam, Shayna, Faith, and the Win Without War team

---

[1] CNN, "The world just marked a year above a critical climate limit scientists have warned about"


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