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According to Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, every one of us, each with our unique experiences, values, and perspectives on the world, has the capacity to tap into a rich spring of creativity in service to our own art. Creative inspiration can come from anywhere, and it can strike at any time. Our job as artists is to be receptive to it when it happens. It requires living in the moment and nurturing an awareness brought about by a child-like curiosity for everything we encounter. Inspiration is transformed into art through an ongoing process of playful experimentation, hard work, and courage to release it into the world once it's complete.

This book is less a prescriptive guide to becoming an artist and more of a philosophy of how to live like one. Although the author is an artist in his own right, this book is not focused on any single art. It is a collection of short vignettes, each focused on one aspect related to creativity, how it's inspired, and what to do with it. There are nearly eighty of them. Some can be read independently of others, while others cannot.

Some books deliver on their first read, and some mature with the reader as they experience new loves, losses, celebrations, and sorrows. This book does both.

If the hallmarks of good political leadership were uniting people across the political spectrum, drafting sound legislation to benefit those people, and responsible fiscal management, then surely Alberta's United Conservative Party (UCP) is one of the worst political parties in Canadian history. Founded in 2017 by Jason Kenney, a prominent cabinet minister and rising star in Stephen Harper's federal government, the UCP brought together Alberta's conservatives under a single roof—from centre-right moderates to far-right, conspiratorial crackpots who would find common cause with American MAGA Republicans. This ideological blend, like bitumen and water, would later prove to be Kenney's ultimate downfall.

Anger and Angst: Jason Kenney's Legacy and Alberta's Right is a compendium of essays, masterfully compiled and edited by Professors Trevor Harrison and Ricardo Acuña, written by some of Alberta's most distinguished economic, political, and social scholars—people who Kenney himself would call "commie professors." It documents Kenney's rise as a young, homophobic, conservative activist to eventually serve as a loyal minister in Harper's government, to his founding and leadership of the UCP (a story that includes a kamikaze candidate and an ongoing RCMP investigation), his partial term as Alberta premier, and his dramatic political demise brought about by internal party conflict.

It also documents his highly divisive, hyper-partisan, neoliberal leadership style during his time as premier. Under his leadership, the UCP launched a war with the provincial healthcare system just as COVID arrived in Alberta. They ruthlessly gutted the post-secondary education sector to transform it into a blunt instrument of the state to serve at the pleasure of the oil and gas industry. They revised the provincial elementary school curriculum to reflect their own narrow political, religious, and racial values. They stripped away rights to protest against government policies, and established a so-called 'war room,' The Canadian Energy Centre—essentially a provincially funded Twitter troll with an annual budget of $30 million—to publicly discredit anyone critical of government policies. They removed a moratorium against coal mining in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in place since the 1970s, which local ranchers depended upon to protect their livestock from toxic selenium in their drinking water. And just as experts were advising the Kenney government to impose social restrictions to prevent the provincial healthcare system from collapsing under the demands of COVID, Kenney refused and declared the "Best Summer Ever!" A decision that effectively alienated more than half the province. Later, when COVID overwhelmed the provincial capacity and the Canadian military was called in for support, he imposed restrictions—including a vaccine passport that he refused to call a vaccine passport. A decision that effectively alienated the rest.

Kenney stepped down after only receiving 51.4% support in a UCP leadership challenge, which paved the way for Danielle Smith to take over the role of premier, after taking 52.6% of the popular vote in a provincial election. Smith is a former oil lobbyist and hard-right ideologue who has already made clear that her mandate as premier is focused squarely on supporting the oil and gas industry—damn the torpedoes!—even if that means invoking her first piece of legislation, Bill 1, The Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act and engaging in perpetual conflict with the Government of Canada. So much for legacy.

This is an excellent book if you're interested in a thorough, thoughtful, and well-researched snapshot of Alberta as it was up to, during, and after Jason Kenney's tenure as UCP leader. If you're interested in the never-boring, high-drama, power politics of UCP governance, you should read this book. Each author is a top expert in their field; you're sure to learn something. Or, maybe you're not an Albertan, but you live in a province that you think is governed by incompetent fools. Read this book. It'll make you feel better.

These days, people spend a huge amount of time in front of screens, largely disconnected from nature. Author Tristan Gooley implores his readers to back away from their computers, take a walk outside, and start becoming familiar with the natural world around them. By becoming familiar with nature, its inhabitants, its rhythms, its interconnectedness, its beauty, and its conflicts, one begins to appreciate their own place within it. It allows for a new perspective on the world and a new way of thinking. Merely glancing at the sky and observing what clouds are present, what direction they're moving, and how they develop over time allows you to make reasonably accurate short-term weather forecasts. Knowing local plant species offers natural foraging opportunities, or insights into the animals that are present. Observing wildflowers can tell you the time of day; observing the trees can tell you the season or the month. Learning how to listen not just with your ears, but with your entire body, provides a novel sensory experience that enhances your perception of the world.

Gooley is an expert in natural navigation, which means he knows how to get around in the world without a handheld GPS unit or even a map and compass. Instead, he reads the signs that nature provides as clues to establish his current position and possible routes he could follow to get to where he wants to go. Who among us in today's modern world understands their surroundings so well? But this book is not really about navigation (but it's that, too); it's about reconnecting with nature, developing a more natural worldview, and thinking about the world as it naturally exists. It's about being present in the moment and living a fuller, more meaningful life. This is an excellent book and one that all of us—city and rural dwellers, alike—should read for the sake of our own well-being, but also for the well-being of our over-exploited and misunderstood natural world.

This book redefines a geological age, the Anthropocene, where humans have had such a profound influence over the natural world that their presence is recorded in geological strata all over the globe, to the Pyrocene, which began when people started using fire to serve their needs. As long as fuel was available on the landscape and oxygen was present in the atmosphere, the world has always known fire. Once humans came along, they learned how to control and manipulate fire to suit their needs. Because of fire's ability to integrate the complex relationships that shape ecological systems, humanity's use of fire began to reshape those systems. It opened up a greater variety of food available to people from cooking, and it allowed people to migrate into colder regions of the planet where they could use fires to keep warm. More recently, humans have learned to exploit fuels from past millennia in the form of fossil fuels to drive its industry, which transfers carbon from long ago from deep geological reservoirs into today's atmosphere causing a massive disruption in our climate. Just as the accumulation of ice pushed the Earth into an ice age (the Pleistocene), humanity's growing need for fire--particularly this latter type of fire--is pushing Earth into a fire age; the Pyrocene.

Part of the problem with this third type of fire (fossil fuel burning) is that it's being used to fuel equipment to suppress the first type of fire (natural fire). Natural fire is an important feature of terrestrial ecosystems. It clears out dead underbrush and liberates nutrients locked in dead biomass, providing access to sunlight and nutrients required for ecological and agricultural rejuvenation. When natural fires are suppressed, fuels accumulate such that when fire finally arrives it ravages instead of rejuvenates. We now tend to think about fire as a disturbance that requires human intervention, rather than a necessary ecological feature of natural systems.

Fire transmutes stubble and slash into accessible nutrients and typically stimulates nitrogen-fixing organisms. The alternative? Manure and artificial fertilizers. Fire can burn away the unwanted vegetation at least long enough to plant a year or two of crops. The alternative? Chemical herbicides and tractors. Fire sweeps away and smokes away, for a time, problem species. The alternative? Chemical pesticides. Fire does all this in a single process of flaming and smoldering. The alternative? There is none. In intensive cultivation, there is no desire to achieve all these outcomes, only those few that maximize production.

Science has finally come around to recognizing the value of fire, and the profoundly consequential effects of liberating fossil carbon into today's atmosphere. We are finally in the early days of a global transition that will reduce the quantity of greenhouse gasses that we release to the atmosphere. However, that transition does not consider how we can re-establish a healthy relationship with fire. As the pace of this global transition increases, we would be wise to consider fire as an ally instead of a foe, and make use of its powerful integrative capacity to help restore our damaged world.

Although the writing can be a bit saccharine at times, this book offers a unique perspective of past, present, and future fire and offers several insights into what we can do to use it to secure a sustainable future. Having said that, I'm not convinced that the concept of a Pyrocene usurps that of an Anthropocene inasmuch as it is complementary to it. Fire has always existed since plants invaded land. In the end, it was humans who dug up old coal, oil, and bitumen to transfer ancient carbon into future atmospheres. As the author argues convincingly, fire is a net force of good in the world, but its irresponsible use by humans has led to the ecological turmoil we face today. The agency of this ecological abuse rests squarely with humans, best captured by the Anthropocene (Greek "anthropo" = man) concept. What this author defines as the Pyrocene is but a symptom, albeit an important one, of the Anthropocene.

Write for Life is ostensibly a six-week program to lift struggling writers out of any kind of difficulty they may be having with their writing. But really, it's a set of essays that are organized in chapters that loosely relate to the weekly lesson. The author, Julia Cameron, is perhaps best known for her earlier book, The Artist's Way (1992), where she introduces the concept of Morning Pages; a regularized free-writing exercise designed to clear a writer's mind and awaken the muse. Morning Pages are the backbone of this six-week program, together with artist dates (a writer's self-indulgent interlude to spark creativity), long walks, a trusted process, and the courage to write poorly but consistently for the sake of getting words on the page. Although some of the spiritual references can be a bit off-putting to some, if you can get past that, the book has some good--if not novel--writing advice. The basic take-home message for me was that creativity needs to be nurtured, but consistency in the act of writing gets the job done.

Ryan Holiday's book, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, has a simple theme. Rather than throwing up your hands in defeat whenever you're faced with a difficult problem, approach it with a Stoic mindset and turn it into an opportunity for personal growth. Holiday has become somewhat of a modern-day popularizer of Stoic philosophy with his many books on the subject. In fact, this book is the first in a series of three.

The book is divided into three parts, each representing overlapping elements of his plan for everyday people to incorporate Stoic philosophy into their own lives: perception, action, and will. In the final chapter, Holiday summarizes how these elements can be adopted; "See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must." His view is that facing life's challenges with this tripartite ethos presents opportunities for personal growth, if you're open to it.

Stoic philosophy has become popular over the last several years because it offers a way for people to get the most out of life without deferring to religion. There are some very good books on the subject, but this isn't one of them. This book is written in the simplistic, condescending tone of a self-help book written by a self-anointed sage on the topic. Holiday's version of Stoic philosophy is less philosophical and more productivity-oriented—despite a postscript chapter declaring those who finished reading this book are now philosophers. According to Holiday, philosophy has been hijacked by academics and squirrelled away from the public in the hallowed halls of the Ivory Tower. Such a sentiment betrays the author's profound misconception of philosophy.

The book is peppered with examples of famous people incorporating elements of Stoic philosophy to overcome some seemingly insurmountable obstacle. These examples are used to illustrate basic Stoic maxims. Some of the advice provided is good. But some is ill conceived at best and flat out wrong at worst—like disregarding rules when they get in the way of achieving some objective. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book nor can I bring myself to endure two more books in this series, let alone the other dozen or so by the same author.