book
Finished reading The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury
Wants to read Confessions of a Public Speaker
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 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 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 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 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 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration 10/10
Truly fantastic book about the black families who moved out of the South and into northern and western cities in the middle of the 20th century. It took up a decade and a half of the author's life and it shows: it's incredibly well-researched and well-written. The book is a mix of intimate stories and sweeping sociological analysis, focusing on the lives of three people who moved to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. One of the best works of American history I've read.
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 Made for Love 8/10
Weird, sad and funny. In the very near future, a woman leaves the domineering tech CEO she married and moves in with her widowed father and his life-sized doll. The humor is pretty dark, and you need a high tolerance for odd, particularly in a parallel b-plot that takes some getting used to. But I ended up really enjoying it, and it's a quick read. It mostly succeeds at being clever/dirty/creepy/touching in the way that [b:Super Sad True Love Story|7334201|Super Sad True Love Story|Gary Shteyngart|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320540909s/7334201.jpg|8996782] tries to but doesn't.
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 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 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.
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.