If you like The Emerald Mile, I would also recommend The Tower by Kelly Cordes. I don't think it is as strong, but it is another book at the juncture of outdoor adventure and history, and I liked it a lot.
Glemek
Eggs aren't a large part of my current diet, mostly because I am not cooking in the morning often right now, but there was a time when they were very cost effective. Where I was living about a decade ago they were about $1.70 per dozen, and I ate probably a little over a dozen a week. If I was still in that mode; seeing a dozen eggs for $9 would definitely stop me buying them, throw my meal planning into a bit of chaos and tick me off.
If I recall correctly the ones on the plastic coil can be put back on the coil. I definitely misremembered how nail guns work, it's probably been a decade since I used one with any regularity, and I have made a handful of compressed air blowguns.
You could probably easily add some fletching to them and maybe a little bit of a barrel to the nail gun to get a little extra muzzle velocity.
When I imagine such a book, I think of beautiful descriptions of a forest and the things that live there. The weather. The scenery.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, it is about a nearish future colonisation of Mars, and Mars is as much a character as any of the humans. He spends a lot of time talking about geology and how they go about the project of terraforming. It does have conflict, and it can be exciting, but a lot it is just people work to solve problems.
Another rec would be The Emerald Mile, by Kevin Fedarko, which is just awesome. It's about the grand canyon generally, and in particular about the rafting scene there.
Sadly, even there; it would've been better if he didn't
It definitely could have happened, its just a moderately high effort joke. With the right class and building on shared buy in over a semester or more its not that wild that someone would come up with the idea to do something like this. After all even if it is fake someone came up with the idea just as a written joke.
I love Kim Stanley Robinson, but yeah, he is definitely handwaving past a lot of the feasibility and hard work involved in many of the solutions presented. He is just a writer throwing out ideas more than working thru the struggles of implementing and getting adoption of those ideas.
Rational might be stretching it a bit. There's a reason this is called the Greater Fool Theory.
That's not an answer. What should he have done? How do you prevent the cold war in February of 1945?
Oh. The Yalta Myth, I should've guessed. A contender for the founding enemy within type myth for the modern American far right.
What do you think they should have done instead? Immediately gone to war with the Soviets? Congrats! WW3 is much worse than the cold war.
The Soviets already held nearly the entirety of Poland by the time of the Yalta conference. The rest of the allies probably couldn't have done anything to prevent that level of Soviet imperialism, even militarily. See: operation unthinkable, the korean war, the chinese civil war
A decent essay with citations, even if it is from a firmly neoconservative source. https://nationalinterest.org/article/the-yalta-myth-1052
An article from an american liberal source, responding to the same W. Bush Speech as the previous essay, and whose talking points you echo. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/05/what-really-happened-at-yalta.html
Finally, to round it out; a pair of articles by Alger Hiss, who attended the Yalta conference, and who was later investigated by McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee, specifically by then rising star Richard Nixon. One from the 50s: https://algerhiss.com/alger-hiss/in-his-own-words/yalta-modern-american-myth/ Another from the 80s: https://algerhiss.com/alger-hiss/in-his-own-words/two-yalta-myths/
The Eye of the Heron, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Expanse Series, by James S.A. Corey
The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson