book
Reviewed The New Father: A Dad's Guide to the First Year by Armin A. Brott
<a href="https://smus.com/books/the-new-father">Full review on smus.com</a>
Reviewed Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery
<a href="https://smus.com/books/asimovs-chronology-of-science-and-discovery">Full review on smus.com</a>
Complex and brainy, but very interesting; I think it's the best you can do at explaining what Bayes' rule is to non-specialists like me. With an admirable minimum of equations, McGrayne talks about the origin of the Bayes statistical method, the controversies around it, and its wide range of applications. I almost wish I could give it something more like 3 1/2 stars, because I feel like I should have come away from the book with a better ability to explain exactly what Bayes' rule is, rather than having a sort of vague intuitive sense. But I think this is a great intro for non-mathematicians, even if only for the glimpse inside the world of mathematicians and engineers and programmers that I wouldn't usually get.
Rated Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction 8/10
Big-thinky book about the history of life on earth and what we'll need to figure out to survive another million years. Cleverly-constructed, slightly overglib but a quick read and relentessly interesting. The most fun you can have reading about pestilence, famine, disaster and doom.
Rated Between the World and Me 8/10
Beautiful and important. A letter from the author to his teenage son about growing up black in America, and the very real risk of bodily harm that comes with it. A sharp, lyrical mixture of autobiography, history, and sociology, centered around the memory of a friend who died from police violence. Powerfully makes the case of America's racial divide not in abstract moral terms but viscerally, physically, in terms of injuries, rapes and death, in terms of exploited labor and stolen wealth and enforced poverty.
Rated Bird by Bird 8/10
This is lovely. Basically a writing class with a teacher with a free-floating mind. Anne Lamott just seems like a delight and she's tough, funny, practical, inspiring.
Rated Necessary Trouble: Americans In Revolt 8/10
This is terrific. An overview of protest, activism and radicalism in the years since the financial crisis, weaving together a strong argument from threads like Black Lives Matter, the Tea Party, fast food and retail worker organizing and Occupy. Serious, wide-ranging and well-researched, but manages to be a brief, fast read - lots of elegantly-put truth bombs. She puts the activists she talks with in historical and economic context and illustrates how systems like the housing industry, student loans, police and courts work to distribute power upward. I like especially that this is not just disaster porn, the opening chapter to some dystopian novel - Jaffe is angry about important things but an optimist too, and she spends her time talking to the people who are fighting and winning some concrete victories. Highly recommend.
Rated Homesick for Another World 6/10
Well-written short stories that are hard to read more than a couple of in a sitting because each one is a bummer. Moshfegh is very good at portraying people who are alienated, disconnected, bad at being people in one way or another; in her novel [b:Eileen|23453099|Eileen|Ottessa Moshfegh|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479545528s/23453099.jpg|43014905] this sort of works to create a nasty claustrophobic atmosphere but in story form it just feels kind of sour, even as the prose is terrific. Soft recommendation if you like George Saunders or Miranda July.
Rated The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated 8/10
a quick read that i highly recommend. compassionate, straightforward and realistic - simple tools to upgrade your financial practices offered without shaming or elaborate promises, and not premised on the idea that there are silver-bullet secrets.
Reviewed Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
<a href="https://smus.com/books/timefulness-by-marcia-bjornerud-audio">Full review on smus.com</a>
Rated Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space 6/10
A layperson's guide to the physics and the human effort that went into the discovery of gravitational waves from massive, distant events like black hole collisions. I wanted to like this a little more than I did but it's still a nice clear story about a complicated subject and the complicated people who found a way to measure an elusive signal. Physics! It's weird!
Rated How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life 8/10
I kind of want to buy a copy of this for everyone. I really love Havrilesky's generous, warm approach to life, and there's so many gems in this book. It's a *little* overwhelming to absorb what is, in essence, a collection of advice columns, but this one is thoughtful, engaging and a fast read, full of extremely well-put versions of truths I sort of know at 38 and wish I had understood better in my 20s. <br/><br/>"Every morning, you will wake up and see that life is all about fumbling and accepting that you're fumbling...life is about feeling your way through the dark."
Rated Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business 8/10
Clear and well-constructed look at how finance is overtaking rather than fueling the economy. None of it is shocking but it's a very well-assembled, well-documented argument. Highly recommended - it makes a technically complicated subject accessible and presents some infuriating facts in a straightforward and dispassionate way.
Rated The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War 8/10
A new thing I learned: there was a small but real interracial anti-Confederate insurgency in southeastern Mississippi during the Civil War. The book is a little academic, with all that entails - it's quite narrow, somewhat dry, and takes for granted that you're well-read on the larger context. You have to read between the lines to get to the real meat of it, but when you do, there's a ton of fresh insight on the complicated relationship of race, gender and class in the South. The author's afterward, in which she explains her decision to let the book be the basis for a movie, is a great look at the role of the historian.
Rated The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks 8/10
Really good in depth bio of Rosa Parks, from her decade of community organizing before the Montgomery bus boycott through her decades as an activist and Congressional staffer in Detroit after the boycott. She's more thoughtful, more radical, struggled through more than the reductive popular version of her story lets on. Highly recommended - the only thing keeping it from being five-star is that it's a little dryly academic, but Parks' life and the power of her political commitment are enough to keep it compelling.
Rated The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures 8/10
A thoughtful look at how DNA and heredity shape human lives. I enjoyed this but I feel like I have more critical things to say about it than good ones; it's a little messy and hard to explain what it's "about." Tonally, it reads like a book with an argument, but there isn't much of one; it's best approached as a series of essays about DNA, genealogy, and human history, rather than looking for a thesis or a through-line that isn't there. But it's full of insights and ideas that are challenging and eye-opening. <br/><br/>I had my guard up a little around this book because of the shoddy way these ideas are often used to justify inequity, but to the author's credit she doesn't either avoid or endorse those aspects of how we think about genetics and heredity. Instead, she does a really good job of swatting down that kind of thing, explicitly talking about the ways heredity has been used to oppress (including a chapter on the Nazis' obsession with ancestry), and also explaining how "race" is not a robust scientific concept. While the book doesn't explicitly address "Bell Curve"-style race-based genetic determinism, it's pretty good at showing implicitly that race-based genetic determinism is dumb. <br/><br/>I don't think she did a great job of explaining the science and mechanics of DNA - I found myself skimming past some stuff because I wasn't really getting it. There may be a ceiling for how technical she can get in a book for laypeople about the history and cultural ramifications of heredity rather than a science text. <br/><br/>Recommended, overall, but more as a set of angles and perspectives and case studies on its theme than as a single story. I've found myself thinking a lot about this book even when I'm not reading it.
Rated The Fever 6/10
A good airplane read - a vivid, pulpy, paranoid story about a high school seething with teenage tensions and the mysterious medical phenomenon that makes it explode. Slight but very well-done.
Rated Speedboat 8/10
Odd and haunting series of vignettes about a reporter, her social circle, New York and the 1970s. Doesn’t really pull together into a plot but it’s worth the trip. Reminds me of Lydia Davis or Donald Barthelme.
Rated Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe 8/10
Terrific tour of the latest ideas in physics about the evolution and structure of the universe and how it relates to the history of our solar system and life on earth. The centerpiece is Randall's theory about how dark matter in the galaxy could cause gravitational disturbances that could result in comets like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Highly recommend if you have interest in how theoretical physics works and how a physicist thinks. <br/><br/>The most interesting part for me is in the middle of the book, where she talks about the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm just old enough that when I was a big dinosaur nerd as a little kid, "what happened to the dinosaurs" was described as a distant and maybe never-to-be-solved mystery, but by the time I was old enough to check back, the comet-strike explanation was as clear and concrete as a scientific theory can be. In one chapter, Randall explains how scientists figured this out over the 80s and 90s and it's honestly riveting (at least to me). It's a great case study in how science works. <br/><br/>Randall is very good at explaining very abstract, complex subjects, although there's a limit to how well you can do this - there were things I had to skim over, as there were with her last book [b:Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World|12470311|Knocking on Heaven's Door How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World|Lisa Randall|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328760741s/12470311.jpg|16225008]. Dark matter is very hard to get your head around because its defining feature is that it interacts barely at all with normal matter and normal light, so we can't really see it even though there's actually more of it than there is of normal matter. The theories about what dark matter is are head-hurty abstract and the descriptions of how scientists try to detect it are a little numbing and technical, so those are the parts I skimmed. <br/><br/>Still, I love Randall's attitude, her enthusiasm and the ease with which she walks the reader through the incredibly weird/cool work she does as a physicist. <br/><br/>
Rated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era 10/10
Masterful. At 800+ dense pages, one of those books that feels like an accomplishment to have read. Really told me a lot I didn't know about the Civil War.
Really fantastic - highly recommend to anyone who works in politics, community outreach, etc etc. In-depth look at the nuts and bolts of the civil rights movement in the Delta region of Mississippi, particularly the local people who worked with SNCC. Thought-provoking and well-reported.
Rated Dead Is Better 4/10
A modestly clever mystery novel, the gimmick of which is that it's narrated by a ghost who's accompanied by a ghost dog. It should have just leaned into how slight it is, and been more fun, rather than having aspirations of depth. It's weirdly structured, too, and sort of fell off at the end, in ways that make it obvious that it's setting up to be a series, which I'm not inclined to pursue further.
Rated Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City 8/10
Great book on DC's native-born party music; mixes sociology, personal essay, journalistic reporting to explain how go-go binds together Washington's black culture. Especially worth reading if, like me, you're a white person who moved to DC in the past decade - it's so easy to think of DC as just one thing when there's a whole other city happening.