* 4.5 * Excellent- but depressing. Coronavirus, climate change, the decline of Monarch butterflies and a bucketload of DTT dumped in the ocean … :(

I read this compendium of essays annually. The last two years (2019 & 2020) have been very much to my liking. However, I am not as impressed with this year's (2021) offering. I think it is simply because the guest compiler has chosen to emphasize (understandably) covid 19 and climate change in his choice of articles. I am experiencing reader's fatigue in these two areas and unless the article provides a unique look, I am not as impressed. I saw many intriguing titles in the appendix that I would...

This is a collection of really well written articles about the last year. I didn’t finish it though, as I honestly just fatigued of reading about COVID and climate change. Not after these past two weeks. Give me salacious mysteries and books about murder; they’re more uplifting.

Lots of interesting articles, even if many were COVID related and from earlier in the pandemic. It was still interesting to read about what we were thinking and looking into back then. Plenty of other great non-COVID reads.

“Science is not a procession of facts and breakthroughs but an erratic stumble toward gradually diminished uncertainty; peer-reviewed publications are not gospel…and scientific endeavor is plagued by all-too-human failings like hubris.” - Ed Yong, excerpt from the Introduction of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021.I’ve had this book sitting on my bedside table for the better part of 4 months. It’s one of those books that is a brilliant read, but is also VERY heavy, which meant I c...

You don't have to be a scientist to read these annual anthologies, written for a broad but educated readership. This iteration of Best American Science and Nature Writing might be the best ever. Naturally, many of the essays concern the coronavirus and Covid-19, but from many different angles beyond epidemiology. As always, there are some weaknesses, but the overwhelming number of very good essays make this collection worth the read. My favorites: I'm an ER Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ev...

A dark mirror reflecting the times. An incident in Wuhan led to the spread of a virus that until today has failed to be contained because of a combination of factors: people interacting in confined or poorly ventilated spaces, where a virus is more likely to get airborne or be spread through physical contact; people not wearing medically-approved masks that would prevent the spread; travel in highly-trafficked places; climates more conducive to spread; plus plain old bad luck. We learn in this v...

I've read BASNW for years and always find the collection worthwhile, even if not every entry interests me. This year was different in character than its predecessors, due to the ongoing evolution of what we know about COVID-19. While I understand that it's out of character for the series, I felt like several entries would have benefited from a short note at the beginning of the chapter, giving an update to the article's claims and/or explaining why it merited inclusion even if its claims haven't...

What a strange year to try to summarize in a collection. There are some real jewels in here - Bathsheba Demuth, Sarah Zhang, Brooke Jarvis and Sabrina Imbler's stick out to me - and Ed Yong's intro is one of the best I've read for this kind of book. Obviously a lot of it is and had to be about the pandemic, and the format choice of loading the pure pandemic pieces into the early part of the book probably makes good sense - it just didn't work for me. Also, because of how quickly things move, the...

Having to edit the 2021 edition of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," which selects the best articles/essays from 2020, must have been a difficult task. Ed Yong, who has done and continues to do some fantastic writing about the COVID-19 pandemic, did a great job with a thankless task; he acknowledges the pandemic (the first section, "Contagion" is entirely about the pandemic) and many of the articles/writing in the other two sections ("Connections", "Consequences") also mention the

As you can imagine, an anthology of science and nature writing, the majority of which was published in 2020, is to a large degree, about covid-19. I had a bit of trepidation after reading Jaime Green's Forward and Ed Yong's Introduction that this would not be something I would want to read right now.I was wrong.Much of what I took in about the virus in 2020, as we all went through it, was not very in-depth and, while I tried to pay attention to the science and the recommendations of public healt...

I really loved the medical and soft environmentalist essays here, topice like butterflies, earthworms, and whatnot all fascinated me. I was less interested in a few other essays, but this was broadly w food collection.

Really more 3.5. Like all anthologies, this is a mixed bag. The highs -- I'm looking at you, Brooke Jarvis and Susan Orlean and Latria Graham and Sarah Zhang -- are very, very high. Graham's essay, about being a Black woman in the outdoors, perhaps sticks with me the most. Of course there's a lot of Covid. There has to be, for a science-focused anthology that's a snapshot of 2020. But I wish there were better signaling on the pieces themselves about publication date. There's a Wired piece early

"My body has been alight for months now period from within this illness, I have come to think that Siberia and I endure more than a coincidence in temperature. Our fevers are stoked by related patterns of economic production, patterns both relatively new and seemingly inevitable. And my corporeal fire says something about how a continental fire can go unseen, offering a lesson in the implications of duration: how as a condition lingers, its origins or significance grow harder to see. Long Covid

This was a good one. I was simultaneously trying to read Best American Essays 2021 and Best American Short Stories 2021, neither of which impressed me. This one is smart, well-researched, well-written, and not particularly optimistic. I suggest reading the next to last one last. It concerns elder and hospice care of the dying in modern China. Decades ago when I might still have qualified as "young," I took The Sociology of Aging at the local community college where I would later teach. We are a

I have only read the introduction excerpt Yong published in the Atlantic, but that piece and Yong's reputation is enough for me to credibly recommend this book. Yong's defining of COVID as an "omnicrisis" was mentally groundbreaking for me (a word he seems to have invented. It exists on the internet, but the highest result is an urban dictionary definition from 2013 with a single upvote). This is, of course, something we all felt and knew from 2020 on, but Yong's encapsulation of this into a sin...

I had to read this in chunks, because to be frank, it literally felt emotionally taxing to read so many essays about the pandemic. The vantage point from which many of these essays were written from was from a time when we didn't yet know how things were going to play out over the next year. It felt a little bit like reading reports about a car wreck, but before knowing its true aftermath, such as the number of fatalities, the effects on survivors, etc. I can't say that I loved all of these; man...

These are always pretty interesting. I think a lot of the covid articles would have done well to have some type of preface or postscript detailing what we actually know now; and it was also notable to me that 1/6 of the articles included were from The Atlantic…and the guest editor is an editor at The Atlantic…not that they aren’t publishing many good articles, but I would have liked it to see a more diverse group of publications. Much like my feeling when I open up BASS and find that fully half

I read this collection every year, and this one was especially prescient given 2020 was the year of the pandemic that we’re still all living through. This book very much relives the early days of the pandemic — what felt like years ago but was in reality only 18 months — through its section called “contagion.”“Contagion” featured stories that brought us back to the airborne virus debate, and the problems that stem from labeling a virus one way contradicts how it is actually spread, one woman’s e...

Interesting, enlightening, scary, funny, ironic, informative, infuriating. A few of the adjectives to describe this collection of essays. Seeing as we're entering the 2nd full year of pandemic it was an interesting walk back through our earliest observations and thoughts, scientifically, about Covid-19 and what it was/would do to society. Overall some of the essays issue a ringing indictment of the Trump administration and its attitudes toward the pandemic as well as science and the environment