Carl Sagan took the idea that you leave this world better than you found it to an extreme. Few people have left a legacy so important to our world, and part of that legacy is this brilliant piece of sci-fi fiction, Contact. Contact follows a woman, Ellie, as she embarks on the education and career of a brilliant astronomer. The first portion of the book is eye opening, even for those who understand the history of women’s rights well, in how women were viewed in the academic a
Confessions Of An Innocent Man is written by the late William Sampson, a Canadian engineer who, while working abroad in Riyadh, found himself incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. This book is his harrowing story of torture, rape and abuse in a Saudi prison, and illuminates the complete lack of value in the truth in a country run by God. Sampson was arrested in Riyadh for a series of car bombings. At first, he was adamant that he had not committed these bombings, but th
Hadfield, my fellow Canadian, single-handedly revived our fascination with space as we waited every day for his next photo of Earth from the cupola of the Space Station. We watched for our city or town and were blown away by how small everything looked in every single shot. He tried to explain to us, what it was like to see everyone all at once, and to see our Earth so far below him. We watched him in awe of his obvious passion and his ceaseless positivity. Some of us may hav
The two books I’m talking about are The Wrong Men by Stanley Cohen and Twisted Confessions: The True Story Behind The Kitty Genovese And Barbara Kralik Murder Trials. In light of reading Sam Harris’ new book, Waking Up, I was reminded of these two books because they were so brutally unsettling to me. Sam’s book talks about how little we know about human consciousness and asks the question, is what we know, really what we know? If you supplement Sam’s book with these two books