• Scifi - about a sterotypical 'mad scientist' before it was a genre trope #trendsetter
• Satirical - largely about the soviet bureaucracy and censorship of the time (1930s), but also about the dangers of narrow mindedness of a few (our protagonist Persikov) regarding the ethics underpinning scientific experimentation 
• Funny little twists and remarks. My copy has a wonderful preface, introduction, and notes section at the back that tells you other little funny quips and play on words in the original Russian and references to contemporary figures and culture of the time. 

"So many of us start out in a desert. We feel disenfranchised, we feel alienated, we feel not connected, sometimes even to our families of origin. A desert is a place where small things grow, the life in the desert is often small and brilliant but it's not lush like a forest. It's very small. And many of us have lived lives like that where there's a little cactus with a brilliant red flower on it and then you go 500 miles and there's nothing. Many of us have learned to live like that because we were born into families that to us were like deserts. For whatever reason we were born into families that were not able to sustainable us and make us flourish with a wealth and abundance of ideas and creativity and relationship."

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”

"Learning about the soil has taught me, to a greater extent than ever before, that we establish our truths from information that's patchy and shallow, beneath which lie realities we scarcely imagine.  Widely accepted claims are based of hearsay and myth, while scientific findings, however dramatic and intriguing, are scarcely known beyond a small circle of specialists."

"Some of our knowledge gaps are so wide that humanity could fall through them. As systems becomes more connected, study paradoxically becomes more segregated: there is a trend in the academic research of greater specialisation over time. A tremendous body of knowledge accumulates, but the walls between disciplines are high. In science, modularity is dangerous."

"I look at the photos again, the ones I didn't delete. I look at his purple face, his bloody chin and nipple, his swollen cheek. I wonder what the fuck I have to do for people to recognise me as a threat, you know?"

"Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?

1. Sadness and anger at the generations before me that had the power to make meaningful change to stop the climate crisis and didn't.
2. Despair at humanity's continuing inaction (the science has only expanded further to confirm what we already know in the 1970s and added observed further compounding disasters). 
3. Dull recognition at the incredible nepotism, privilege, and old boys' club networks the book describes in the political, NGO, scientific, and journalism professions. 
4. A tiny amount of happiness for aquiring greater knowledge on the history of the climate crisis. I learnt many new things in this book and will certainly keep it for reference. At the moment I am unsure how we can use this knowledge in current praxis, but my gut instinct is that this is useful information to know. I would recomment to climate activists and to climate deniers.

"With an increase in civilisation, functional property increases with things. The individual may have several suits or dresses, skis... [etc.] All these possessions need not be different from functional possessions that exists in primitive cultures. Need no be, but often are. The change in function happens at the point where possessions ceases to be an instrument of greater aliveness and productivity but is tansformed into a means for passive receptive consumption. When having primarily has the function of satisfying the need for ever increasing consumption, it ceases to be a condition for my being but is basically no different to keep possession."

"If other people do not understand our behavior, so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us... Mostly they resent our freedom and courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting."

“Without effort and willingness to experience pain and anxiety, nobody grows, in fact nobody achieves anything worth achieving.”