Book Review: ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben

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Updated 03 July 2025
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Book Review: ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben

“The Hidden Life of Trees” is a controversial 2015 book by German author Peter Wohlleben, who argues that trees communicate with each other as well as feel.

Wohlleben presents the idea that forests are a living social network — claiming that trees have ties akin to families, which they care for and help grow in their own way.

According to the author, trees use underground fungal networks to share nutrients with other trees to help them recover from disease and thrive.

It is a contentious claim, supported in part by academics including from the University of Portsmouth, which has published research showing that mature plants help smaller plants thrive in harsh environmental conditions.

Another article from BBC Earth supports some of Wohlleben’s claims, describing how some trees can use their senses to “hear” predators through vibrations in the ground or “smell” other plants by detecting chemical indicators.

An additionally curious aspect of the book is its ideas about complex tree communication methods. It also talks about different factors that play a role in their growth, like fungi, insects and birds.

The author goes to great lengths, moreover, to push the idea that securing healthy forests through sustainable practices helps the wider environment flourish.

However, the book has come in for significant criticism, with Sharon Kingsland, writing in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, suggesting it is aimed at “lay” readers rather than forestry scientists, many of whom Wohlleben has “infuriated” by “eliciting an emotional response from readers through (the book’s) powers of suggestion.”

Kingsland says the author tends to anthropomorphize trees, whilst noting a 2017 petition launched by two German scientists calling on colleagues to criticize the book received over 4,500 signatures, calling it a “conglomeration of half-truths, biased judgements, and wishful thinking.”

Despite this, “The Hidden Life of Trees” is a great read for people who want to see nature in a new light, as it sets out a path to view trees not as inanimate commodities, but as ecosystems with needs which, if met, will have wider benefits for the planet.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Have Willpower’

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Updated 18 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Have Willpower’

  • In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment

Authors: Prudentius and Plutarch 
Edited and translated by Michael Fontaine

“How to Have Willpower” brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests—Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius’s poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons. 
Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works—introduced and presented in vivid, accessible new prose translations by Michael Fontaine, with the original Latin and Greek texts on facing pages—emphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.

In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment. And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.

 

 


Book Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’

Updated 17 July 2025
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Book Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’

  • Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon, talks about his own journey from being a physician to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality

Published a year after the author’s death aged 37 in 2015, “When Breath Becomes Air” is an autobiography about the life and struggle with terminal lung cancer of Dr. Paul Kalanithi.

In the book, Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon at Stanford University, talks about his own journey from being a physician providing treatment to his patients to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality.

The narrative moves from talking about how Kalanithi saved lives to confronting the end of his own, reflecting on what makes life worth living in the face of death.

Despite his diagnosis, Kalanithi continued working as a physician and even became a father, explaining to his readers how he embraced life fully until the very end.

Unfortunately, the book had to be completed by his wife after his passing, and serves as a moving meditation on legacy, purpose, and the human experience.

Among the book’s strengths are its authenticity and depth of emotions, touching on everything from the day-to-day experiences of physicians to Kalanithi’s own love of literature — originally, he had studied English at university. A fitting tribute, then, that his own work would go on to become a New York Times’ bestseller.

Neurosurgery, though, was in his words an “unforgiving call to perfection” which not even his diagnosis could check. “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when,” he wrote. “After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.”

The book garnered praise upon publication, winning the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir and Autobiography in 2016. Its run on the NYT’s bestseller list lasted an impressive 68 weeks.

Writing in the Guardian, Alice O’Keefe suggested: “The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live — and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook.”
 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’

Updated 17 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’

Author: Steven A. Balbus

General relativity has entered a new phase of its development as technical advances have led to the direct detection of gravitational radiation from the merging of single pairs of stellar-sized black holes. The exquisite sensitivity of pulsar signal timing measurements has also been exploited to reveal the presence of a background of gravitational waves, most likely arising from the mergers of supermassive black holes thought to be present at the center of most galaxies. This book demonstrates how general relativity is central to understanding these and other observations. 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Change a Memory’ by Steve Ramirez

Updated 16 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Change a Memory’ by Steve Ramirez

As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones.

In “How to Change a Memory,” Ramirez draws on his own memories—of friendship, family, loss, and recovery—to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory’

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Updated 16 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory’

  • Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan

Author: ROMAIN BRETTE 

“In The Brain, In Theory,” Romain Brette argues that the brain is not a “biological computer” because living organisms are not engineered.

Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan. Brette reviews the main theoretical frameworks for thinking about the brain, including computation, neural representations, information, and prediction, and finds them poorly suited to the study of biological cognition.

He proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components.