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>
Rated Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite 8/10
A very brave and well-done piece of journalism; a Korean-American woman goes semi-undercover as an English teacher in an elite North Korean school. rare, compellingly-drawn glimpse into the deeply strange parallel universe of North Korea.
Rated Gas, Food, Wifi: On The Road in the American Southwest 6/10
Pleasant travelogue, doesn't honestly have a ton of justification for existing but a quick and engaging read. Makes me want to explore more places out west.
Rated Just Kids 10/10
Beautiful, sad, enjoyable memoir of the friendship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as they lived the starving artist life in 1970s New York, on their way to becoming the punk rock poet and groundbreaking photographer they grew into. Mostly a two-character play, but populated by iconic side characters like William S. Burroughs, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Rated The Genius of Birds 8/10
A really interesting look at cognition in birds, which is much more complex than we used to think, and how it compares to our own. Many species of birds display kinds of intelligence that evolved separately from humans. Goes into concepts like tool use, the ways birdsong resembles language, social behavior and navigation. It makes me think about human intelligence more - how contingent it is evolutionarily and how many other animals display bits and pieces of it - planning, decision-making, memory and recognition, problem-solving. Intelligence is a funny, fuzzy concept and the lines between ours and other animals' is not clear-cut. Highly recommend this - it's a little long and sometimes technical but mostly pretty absorbing and enjoyable.
Rated D.C. Trip 6/10
Slight, endearing, often quite perceptive; a high school trip as seen through the eyes of both the sophomore students and the chaperoning teachers. Cutesy but funny, and a quick read.
Reviewed The Yes Brain Child, Brainstorm 2 Books Collection Set By Dr. Daniel J Siegel
<a href="https://smus.com/books/yes-brain-by-siegel-and-bryson">Full review on smus.com</a>
Reviewed Trigger Warning / How the Marquis Got His Coat Back / Smoke and Mirrors
<a href="https://smus.com/books/smoke-and-mirrors-by-neil-gaiman">Full review on smus.com</a>
Rated Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions 8/10
Bright, smart, no-nonsense: the author's letter to her sister upon becoming a mom, with advice for raising a feminist kid. It almost seems like cheating to count it as a book here, but there's a lot of insight and consideration packed into an hour or so's worth of reading.
Rated Hell to Pay 6/10
Really well-constructed - an unusual take on the noir murder mystery because the death in question doesn't happen until more than halfway through the book.
Rated The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession 8/10
Fair-minded, wonky, well-done book that looks at the history of schoolteaching and the struggle to make it work. Illuminating/depressing in how many the controversies and arguments are the same as they were a century ago; offers a strong defense of the role of teachers, and the organizations that represent them, even as it identifies new models and advances that can improve schools. Modest in scale and in the prescriptions Goldstein recommends, but really well-researched, with great portraits of historical figures both major and obscure.
Rated Outline 8/10
Remarkably little happens; it’s brief and there’s no real plot or conflict. A writer travels to Greece and listens to the stories of people around her as they work through ideas and memories. Still, it’s very compelling - beautiful writing, the well-spoken characters eliciting insights and aphorisms about life from their own experiences for the benefit of the listening narrator. Mostly what it captures is the writers’-eye view of the world and the weird loneliness of traveling by yourself, not feeling quite like you exist beyond your observations of what’s going on around you. Quite lovely and enjoyable once you get past looking for what it’s “about.”
Rated The Girl on the Train 6/10
A soapy, clever mystery that's a little too much of a bummer to be as fun as it should be, but it's well-plotted, especially toward the end.
Rated Boy, Snow, Bird 8/10
A strange little book - a quick, enjoyable read, shot through with touches of dreamlike/fairytale weirdness. A woman flees her abusive home in New York in the 1950s and marries into a slightly mysterious family in New England; the book is told from the perspective of this woman (the Boy of the title - that's her name) and her daughter (Bird) but also revolves around her relationship with her stepdaughter (Snow). Lots of metaphorically rich stuff about race and gender in mid-century America.
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.