MUST READS
Out now in paperback
THE UTOPIA EXPERIMENT
by Dylan Evans
(Picador £8.99)
MANY people have a fleeting thought as to what the world might be like after a possible apocalypse.
In most cases, the thought ends there. Evans, on the other hand, came up with an idea to simulate life in a postapocalyptic community.
In 2006, he set up a camp — Utopia — in the Scottish Highlands, where he and a group of volunteers grew their own food, made their own clothes and survived without the resources of the modern high-tech world.
It was supposed to be an ‘exercise in collaborative fiction’ of what life might be like if civilisation collapsed. The reality became dystopia.
The book starts with Evans’s first night in a psychiatric hospital, after he had been detained under the Mental Health Act, malnourished and unkempt.
This excellent book provides not only a compelling recollection of a wacky adventure with some eccentric characters, but also an honestly told personal journey, as — in trying to piece his life back together after its fallout — Evans seeks to understand the less admirable motives that led him to set up the experiment in the first place.
THE MAKING OF HOME by Judith Flanders
(Atlantic £9.99)
WHEN Dorothy was ready to leave Oz, she clicked her heels and said: ‘There’s no place like home.’ As Dorothy knows, home doesn’t have to be glamorous, but simply the place she wants to be.
In this wonderful social history, Flanders explains that house and home are related, but two distinct things, and the separation between the two can be traced as far back as a poem from 1275, which distinguishes between a man’s ‘lond & his hus & his hom’.
Home is both a state of being and a place one resides.
It is a riveting, whistlestop tour through history, looking not so much at how houses are decorated, but more what the decoration can tell us about the behaviour, beliefs and values of those who lived there.
THE HUMAN AGE by Diane Ackerman (Headline £8.99)
IN THE 4½ billionyear history of the natural world, no individual species has radically altered the planet as much as the human.
It has created chaos, but also hope as our new age is laced with invention.
As ‘hopped-up, restless busybodies’, we have tripled our lifespan, reduced child mortality and improved our quality of life to astonishing levels.
In this new book from the author of The Zookeeper’s Wife, Ackerman outlines some of the new-fangled ways in which scientists are shaping the future for our children and grandchildren.
One of the most startling examples is the work at the Frozen Ark in Nottingham University, which stores DNA of 48,000 individuals from 5,438 endangered animal species, with the hope of reconstructing the organisms after they’ve died out.
In theory, it means humans are able to repopulate extinct or nearly extinct animals, such as the snow leopard, Mississippi alligator and the giant squid, with its dinner-plate sized eyes.
Full of scientific nuggets and bundles of research, this is written in an accessible and entertaining style.