Joshua FoerSomewhere out there is a goblet containing Galileo’s middle finger and a test tube holding Thomas Edison’s last breath. Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton tracked down both and much more for their “Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders” (Workman Press). You may remember Foer as the author of “Moonwalking with Einstein.” Does the 2006 USA Memory Championship winner ever forget his keys? “All the time,” he says. “Memory tricks only work when you remember to use them.” Foer, the brother of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, says that while the two read each other’s books, “I’m not sure a blurb from a sibling would pass any reader’s sniff test.”
Here’s what’s in this scientifically minded man’s library:
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the 21st century, people wouldn’t have to work more than 15 hours a week to satisfy their basic needs. He had it wrong, and this book is an extended essay speculating why. Why are we never satisfied? Why do we keep working harder and harder to buy things we don’t need and don’t make us happy?
This is one of several books I read as a judge for the PEN/E.O. Wilson science book prize, and it made a big impression on me. It’s about the youngest person to build a nuclear-fusion reactor, but the real subject is parenting. As a dad to a 3-year-old, it gave me a lot to think about.
As research for a book I’m working on, I’ve spent a good bit of time living in the Republic of Congo with some of the world’s last hunter-gatherers. There are so many aspects of their culture I find foreign, perhaps none more so than their radical egalitarianism. Boehm is an anthropologist, and this book is a terrific introduction to his ideas.
The sad truth is that most of my encounters with poetry take place on the toilet. Amichai has been my favorite poet since I was a teenager, and this new volume, edited by Robert Alter, has been my porcelain-side companion for many months now.
