Disclosure

It has been a lovely Sunday, capped by a a fair NBA game, lengthy walk, and my wife baking some excellent bread. That said, my reading hasn't really shifted forward until now. It was an interesting coincidence that my reading of Cloud Atlas was punctuated with the front page review of Collapse by Jared Diamond in the NYTBR. The review was somewhat hostile, finding fault with Diamond's pessimism about ongoing soil erosion, overpopulation and the serial extinction of species. At the time of Cloud Atlas' publication, Mitchell was interviewed in the Guardian and cited the effect that Guns, Germs, and Steel had upon him. The recurring themes in the text appear draped, not only with a measure of environmental determinism but with harrowing needs of self which plague us all.