Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
By Vince Beiser ’89
Journalist Vince Beiser’s first book, The World in a Grain, explored the surprising role of sand in the building of civilization, then alerted us to the fact we could soon run out of it. In Power Metal, he examines how two of the most important developments in modern society—alternative energy and digital technology—are exacting an alarming toll on the environment as industries go to greater and greater lengths to get at the metals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, etc—that are required to make our cell phones, solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. Turns out it ain’t easy being green, and tech is just another polluting, extractive industry after all. “The human race is facing a paradox,” Beiser writes in the introduction. “We need to do everything we can to stave off the catastrophes of climate change, but, in doing so, we may create a whole other set of catastrophes.” This might seem obvious upon reflection, but who among us wants to reflect? It’s yet another inconvenient truth.
—Pat Joseph
Amy Tan’s Backyard Birds
The Bancroft Library Gallery
Amy Tan’s bird-watching career began later in life. In 2016, grappling with a sudden rise in anti-Asian hate, she turned to nature seeking solace, resilience, and a renewed sense of wonderment. At the age of 65, the acclaimed author of several books, including blockbuster novel The Joy Luck Club, rediscovered her love of drawing and, through a new practice of nature journaling, started to notice—and sketch—a cast of feathered characters right in her own backyard.
For five years, Tan filled more than a dozen sketchbooks and journals with whimsical, annotated bird portraits, which became the heart of her 2024 publication, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Now on exhibit at the Bancroft Library Gallery, Amy Tan’s Backyard Birds is a tribute to the quirks, charms, and dramas of her bird companions. These original art pieces are just a fraction of the 62 boxes that compose the Amy Tan archive, recently acquired by the Bancroft Library and containing troves of unpublished works, drafts, and manuscripts.
Tan, who came to UC Berkeley in the 1970s to take courses toward a doctorate in linguistics, brings her wit and empathy to these, at times, cartoon-like sketches. No drama is too small: She documents everything from the “sneaky nonchalance” of some juvenile scrub jays in the midst of a food fight to a teasing collage of the great horned owl’s many moods (think: six identical grumpy, wide-eyed portraits).
“I meditated on the life of each bird I drew,” she said. “I puzzled over their behavior. Do they have emotions? How smart are they? What is trust to a bird?”
Amy Tan’s Backyard Birds is on exhibit at the Bancroft Library Gallery through June 27. Admission is free and open to all.
—Leah Worthington
Portrait of My Heart
SPELLLING
Thirty-three-year-old Chrystia Cabral ’13, M.F.A. ’19, has taken the experimental music scene by storm.
Portrait of My Heart, Cabral’s fourth album as SPELLLING (yes, that’s three L’s) is, in her words, an exploration of “love, intimacy, anxiety and alienation.”
With incredible vocal range—her voice easily swelling from haunting whisper to transcendent wail—Cabral dominates as the lead singer and songwriter. But she’s backed by a force of instrumentalists who build complex soundscapes and shine in their own right, as in the standout guitar solo on the driving rock track, “Ammunition.”
From “Alibi,” which has the accusatory lyrics and rhythmic heart of a 2000s girl rock band, to “Destiny Arrives,” whose anthemic melodies and sweeping first-person narrative could take center stage in a Broadway musical, Cabral’s latest album is an epic and eccentric listening experience. Though lacking some of the ethereal fairytale quality of her previous work, Portrait of My Heart continues her bewitching, genre-bending tradition. (Even her record label’s description—“avant-pop”—feels reductive of Cabral’s musical project.)
Cabral is a lifelong writer, though she didn’t pursue a career in music until 2015. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she briefly studied philosophy at Berkeley before switching to English literature. Her education finds its way into the music—and her sensibility as an artist. “I really love Gothic literature,” she told Atwood Magazine in 2001. “I’m a sucker for this combination of horror and wonder.”
Portrait of My Heart was released by Sacred Bones Records on March 28, 2025.
—L.W.
Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness
Robert Aquinas McNally, M.A. ’69
If the American environmental movement has a patron saint, it has to be John Muir, the Scottish-American adventurer, writer and naturalist who co-founded the Sierra Club and persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to make Yosemite a national park. A kind of natural mystic, John of the Mountains brought a religious zeal to his love for nature, famously gushing in his journals about the glory of wilderness. “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world,” he wrote. And, “After a whole day in the woods, we are already immortal.” Sadly, his outpourings of love did not extend to the indigenous people who often aided him in his travels and who inhabited the American wilderness for millennia before Muir came to behold it. Muir found the Native Americans he encountered to be “unclean” and strangely alien. “Somehow,” he remarked, “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” It’s a shocking blind spot in a man who otherwise seemed so far ahead of his time. This briskly written account is hardly the first reevaluation of Muir’s legacy in light of his bigotry, but it may be the most complete and unsparing.
—P.J.
