Category: Review

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Review

“Dairy Free”

Angela Litzinger

I went through this in two sittings, and sorta split it into the two key components as I was doing so.

The first part is, broadly, the ‘introduction,’ but while there’s a couple pages of usual “introduction to this book” type material, what it really works out to is an introduction to the dairy-free life. And, really, it’s the thing I wish I’d had available when I was just starting to figure out this “if I stop eating any dairy I’ll stop being sick all the time!” thing. There’s a line in there about taking six months to just sorta get used to it and start feeling confident in doing so, and that really struck me, sitting as I am on the other side of that line. Having that reassurance back at the beginning would’ve been helpful, as well as the general tips and tricks on how to do it. Although, admittedly, this is written from the perspective of someone with a severe dairy allergy, whereas I’ve just got a severe cow’s-milk intolerance, so some of the things I can ignore. I don’t need a recipe for a non-dairy goat cheese, both because I don’t actually care for the categorical ‘goat cheese’ taste… and I can just eat actual goat cheese, so long as it’s fully goat and not a blend.

The second part is the recipes, and this is where I played myself, a bit. “I’ll just read a little bit of this before bed,” I thought. Like a fool. Instead of some relaxing browsing to wind down, I instead sat there jotting notes about which recipes I’d like to try and what pages they were on. There was an audible gasp when I got to the ricotta recipe, and when I later got to béchamel I drew an arrow across the page, an excited “lasagne!!!” for emphasis. Because whilst I have mostly gotten used to this whole thing, the process of—to paraphrase the book—mourning the foods I grew up eating and can no longer have would certainly have been easier if there were slightly-higher-effort versions of some of my favorite comfort foods that I can still eat.

So hey, this is a super cool cookbook! If you’ve got a dairy allergy, or intolerance, or want to go vegan but just can’t survive without ice cream or lasagne, check it out.1 There’s a great deal of gluten-free and nut-free variations, too, making it a great resource for anyone trying to maintain an allergy-sensitive kitchen.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Coming into the Country”

John McPhee

There are three ‘books’ within this book, and each tell a different part of McPhee’s experience of Alaska. The first is what feels, to me, the most like McPhee: out in the wilds, on a trip with folks who know the area better than he does, and generally just writing up how he felt going through that experience. I quite enjoyed some of his remarks about this one — Alaska, being so remote, seems to have worried him more than, say, the Grand Canyon did. “I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things.” (13)

I laughed more, in reading this, than I recall doing with his other books. Maybe I’m just starting to get more of his sense of humor, or maybe I just don’t tend to remember the comedy in comparison to everything else. But there’s little lines that just caught me, like “In a sense—in the technical sense that we had next to no idea where we were—we were lost.” (44)

The second book is about the project to relocate the capital of Alaska from Juneau. While reading it, I refused to let myself actually check my memory to see if Juneau is, in fact, still the capital of Alaska. Spoilers! I felt a sudden kinship to Charles Marohn as McPhee shared his opinion of Anchorage: “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.” (130) Which really evokes an image!

The last part, the titular essay, is the longest of the three. In short, he went up into “the Country” — the most remote part of Alaska, Yukon territory — and hung around the town of Eagle, getting to know, so far as I can tell, everyone there, and in the neighboring “Indian Village.” This is the part that’s going to keep rattling around in my head for a long time, I expect. So much of it still feels entirely relevant today—it’s that same sense of encroached-upon white entitlement that continues to shape American politics. You have the people living in Eagle, complaining about the Native Claims Settlement Act, because it means the land surrounding their town now belongs to the natives… without a thought for the fact that said natives have been there a hell of a lot longer. (Nor is there a moment’s thought, by them, about the fact that, thanks to the “everything within five miles of a (white) town remains the property of that town” clause means that the native village, itself, is legally the property of the town of Eagle.) You get miners, incensed that the EPA wants them to install settlement ponds so that their mine tailings will stop killing all the fish downstream, repeating over and over that they’re ‘not doing anything nature doesn’t do’… which they have to shout over the sound of the hydraulic mining rig that’s applying 10,000 years of erosion per minute to a formerly-pristine valley.

While McPhee himself winds up with an appreciation for the folks eking out a living in the Yukon territory, I must admit that I didn’t. I am, admittedly, reading about them 50 years later, with the changed modern perspective, but all it does is remind me of the staggering selfishness inherent in that whole survivalist/libertarian style. But then, at least one person he interviewed agrees… about the folks living outside Eagle, at least:

“They are unrealistic romanticists, and some are just plain stupid. They are devoid of values—materialistic, selfish people. We are constituents of a society grounded in law. They flout the law to live their romantic life style. They harvest moose, bear, fish—whatever they can get their hands on that they can fit in a pot—without regard for season or for sex, or for the law. Anything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims is fair game to them. They are interlopers. Every time they kill a moose or bear and toss it int the pot to feed their dogs, they deprive me of the opportunity to see that moose or bear. When I see something, I leave it to the person after me to see. Frankly, it just tees me off. I consider them to be a god-damned curse.”

“They’re a public nuisance.” (263)

As ever, I love a McPhee book. This one, in particular, feels like it’s of its time, anchored in the sweeping changes coming through Alaska in the 1970s; like any of the others, though, it doesn’t feel dated but rather like a time capsule. A flashbulb memory of a time and place, frozen so that we can visit it. Go check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Embers”

Vathara

I really enjoy the genre of “alternate history” — the idea of taking one moment in time and twisting it so that something went differently, and then rolling everything forward to see how much variation we’d get, it’s just so very fun. It’s the concept of the Butterfly Effect, applied.

Embers feels like… not the opposite, but the inverse of that, somehow. It’s taking the way things are and attempting to roll history back to see what some of the big moments were that created this state of affairs. And it gets to ask some really interesting questions as it does so.

Take as a given that, 100 years before Avatar: the Last Airbender really kicks into action, the Fire Nation committed genocide. They killed every last air nomad save, importantly, one. The show tends to paint this as a single event, a single day in which all four air temples were targeted in a coordinated attack, Sozin’s comet making an overwhelming strike possible, but do pay attention to the fact that they aren’t the “air nation”, they are the air nomads. They wouldn’t all have been in the temples; there would’ve been many nomads out being nomadic, and the Fire Nation had to hunt them down too.

This is, obviously, horrible. Genocide is one of the definitive evils, and the Fire Nation did it more effectively than any historical genocide has managed.1 But remember one part of those historical genocides: they weren’t immediate. Hitler didn’t wake up one morning and declare by executive fiat that it was time to kill every Jewish person on the planet… he, and others, spent years building up hatred against them.2 Painting them as the villains, as sub-human, as an insidious evil that was out to destroy the world. One evil dictator does not a genocide make. Humans are, at their base level, not that easily controlled. World War II was full of tales of people who did their little bit to help, who saved one or two people.

And now, ask yourself: how, exactly, did the Fire Lord convince his people that the Air Nomads had to die? How did he make them hate the Air Nomads, so much that every soldier sent into an air temple was willing to fight and die to eradicate an entire people?

Embers is a fascinating read, that goes deep into these sorts of questions. What are the cultural differences between the nations? How was one Avatar expected to solve all the problems of the world, given how dang big a place the world is? How can you put the world back in order after a century of oppressive genocide… without letting the vengeful Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes turn around and start slaughtering their way through the Fire Nation? All sorts of fun questions. With fun bonuses in the form of the end-of-chapter notes, where Vathara goes through and explains some of their thinking in what’s going on, the historical concepts driving it, all that sort of stuff.3 I highly recommend it, and it is, delightfully, free to read.

  1. Although, that concept is something that Vathara argues against, as well, over the course of the story. ↩
  2. Frankly, “years” is an understatement; antisemitism has centuries, millenia at this point, of history. Look up the history of pogroms. ↩
  3. The use of the chapter-end-notes in transformative works is such an interesting piece of meta-material in this form of writing. It’s almost like the footnotes of David Foster Wallace or Terry Pratchett, but can set aside the fourth wall entirely and speak directly to individual readers, if they were there and commenting as the piece was being written. Someone get a sociologist over here to look into this. ↩
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Review

“The Culture Code”

Daniel Coyle

I’ve been enjoying that the book club at work seems to bounce back and forth between books that are Very Programmer-Oriented and things that aren’t at all specific to programming. This time, it’s the latter, despite the word ‘code’ in the title: The Culture Code is, in fact, more of a management book.

The focus is, as you might expect, on culture. What is a culture of success/productivity/various-other-positive-buzzwords? How do you create one?

Very broadly, the answers are: “one in which people feel safe and can feel vulnerable, and do is in the pursuit of a shared goal”. As for creating that environment, well, that’s what the rest of the book is about. And, generally, the tips boil down to “show people that these things are the case.” Make people feel safe by showing that they belong, that they are part of the in-group of this culture. Demonstrate that it’s okay to be vulnerable by making yourself vulnerable, showing your weaknesses. And reiterate the shared goal… mostly through use of little catchphrases, seems to be the advice there. It does feel a little trite, but then, having those little catchphrases repeated over and over does seem to hammer them into one’s head.

I actually did find there to be a good bit of value in this book, but in that “useful self-help book” way, where there’s the broad topic that you could’ve fit on an informational pamphlet, and then there’s the rest of the advice, which is scattered around in a way that feels almost like one of those little daily desk calendar things. My pull-quotes notebook lost several pages to this book.

So, overall, I found this a good book to read! I think it is, perhaps, uniquely well suited to be a Workplace Book Club read, and could happily suggest it as the first book for starting one of those up if you don’t have one already. Give the book a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“In the Beginning Was the Command Line”

Neal Stephenson

My coworker mentioned this to me as we were discussing Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and did a great job of selling it with the summary “Microsoft and Apple are competing car dealerships on opposite corners, and then over on the other side of the street there’s a hippie commune giving away tanks for free.” Which, yes, really is an extended metaphor in this essay, and it really does make sense in Stephenson’s telling of it.

I’ll warn you right now that the word “essay” is rather underselling it — even with the scroll bar over there to warn me, it took me far too long to realize quite how big a chunk of writing this piece is. It’s novella-length.1

And in that span, it covers a whole lot of ground. It’s the history of computation, dating from before “a computer” was a machine at all, all the way back to the electromechanical teletype machines connected to the telegraph system. It’s a discussion of the psychology and business of selling operating systems. It’s an exploration of human nature, and choice, and culture. And it contains some truly wonderful lines, though my favorite standout quote has to be:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

There are parts of this essay which are certainly dated. There are parts that seem utterly incorrect, in retrospect. There are also things that feel eerily prescient. Stephenson has always been that kind of wonderful science fiction writer, able to pull things together like that.

So hey, take an afternoon, and go read about the command line. Stanford has helpfully provided it online.

  1. Specifically, 36,329 words. How did I check that? With the wc command-line tool that Stephenson mentions — that is, in fact, the exact part of the essay where I went “I wonder how long this whole thing is?” ↩
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Review

“Year of the Griffin”

Diana Wynne Jones

This is one of those books that I’ve read over and over, and picking it up again feels like coming home. It may well be the first of Jones’ works I read; I know that I read it before I did Dark Lord of Derkholm, despite it being the sequel.1 I think this may even predate Terry Pratchett in my reading history. Which is to say, I’ve been reading this book since well before I was in college myself. This was, I think, the first time I’ve read it since college, though, and it sure felt strange to be reading it from the other side of that divide. Two different kinds of nostalgia, all at once.

That’s really what the book is: freshman year at Wizard College. The overall setting is precisely as much a hodgepodge of Vague Fantasy Novel Setting as it was in Dark Lord, and the focus on this one little part of it does nothing to change that. It does make a delightful expansion of the concept, though, as well as that very British lampooning of higher education.

This has that categorical Jones book thing where at the beginning I don’t feel particularly invested, and there’s no individual moment where it really latches on… but suddenly I look up, and I’m 2/3 of the way through the entire thing, and desperately want to finish it at the cost of whatever other obligations I may have had for the day. She was really a master of that sort of slow build.

I think that’s particularly effective in this book, as it has a whole lot of different threads going on. It’s an ensemble piece; there isn’t one protagonist, there’s the whole handful of theme, and each of them has a full-fledged story of their own. You could draw out a Hero’s Journey chart or something for each individual character, and it’d work just as well—but the way they all interleave together, and support one another, is really what makes it. It’s a book about friendship, and growing up. Hell, it is a key plot point that they have a group therapy session at one point; that is, quite possibly, the high point of the conflict in the book. It’s not an action-adventure, it’s not particularly a romance, it’s… college.

I adore this book. You might want to start with Dark Lord of Derkholm, as it provides more context, but I can confidently state that you can do just as well the other way around. Give it a go.2

  1. And oh, would you look at that, I also haven’t done a review here of Dark Lord of Derkholm, so that’s something I may have to do sometime, as it’s also a wonderful read. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“How To”

Randall Munroe

This book is an exercise in decontextualization. It’s what happens if you take a Roko’s Basilisk style AI and ask it questions; you get things that are technically correct answers, but have left out all the context of, broadly, “being a human.” And, as always with Munroe, it’s hilarious.

For a general idea of what the book is like, one of the early chapters is “how to throw a pool party,” and consists almost entirely of instructions on how to build a pool. Said instructions include notes about how thick you would have to make the walls of an above-ground pool so that the water doesn’t burst out—if you were using Gruyere as the wall-building material. As it explains how the best bet for rapidly filling a pool, ignoring all costs, is to order tens of thousands of plastic water bottles and an industrial shredder—conveniently, the industrial-grade ones include the ability to separate out plastic shreds from liquids, which is probably quite useful to recycling facilities, and in the case of filling a pool means you should install it backwards—there’s an aside about the fact that using an atomic bomb is not an effective way to open water bottles.1

There’s also some neat guest appearances; Chris Hadfield answers a great many questions about… let’s call it flying a plane, as that’s the inspiration for most of the questions. Serena Williams makes an appearance, demonstrating that in the event of the drone apocalypse, she doesn’t need to worry.2

As with all of his books, “How To” is a delight to read, and I highly recommend it. Check it out.3

  1. One of my favorite jokes used in the book is the repeated instances of “this is a ridiculous question, and so of course the United States military studied it during the Cold War.” ↩
  2. I spent the entire chapter with this tweet stuck in my head: Screenshot of a quote tweet. The original tweet, from YouGov, reads “One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams”. The quote tweet, from Jason, reads “Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly” ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“SPQR”

Mary Beard

Very much inspired by my reading of the history of the Byzantine Empire, I realized that I also don’t know much about the history of Rome aside from the bits that you pick up by cultural osmosis, growing up here in the West. Bookstores are great for things like this, where you don’t know what specifically you want to read, but you do know the general topic—just wander over to that section and browse, and see what catches your eye! Which is how I arrived at this book.

I mostly enjoyed the read. I filled five or six pages of a memo book with quotes as I was reading, things that stood out to me, which I somewhat did with the thought in mind of pulling some of them for writing this review, but now that I’m doing the writing, I don’t think I’m actually going to follow through on the idea. Suffice it to say, it was well-written, and generally an enjoyable read. Easier to read than Norwich’s work was, at least, aided in part by being a single volume instead of three, and thus feeling like more of a general overview than the curriculum notes for a four-year course of study.

The reason that I don’t want to go for my notebook, though, is that I have one main thought that I’ve kept circling around for the entire second half of the book: the study of history is not neutral. By studying, and teaching, and writing about history, we impose our own views upon it; we, as humans, are not able to view any objective truth. We are subjective creatures. And this thought kept circling around and around in my mind from the moment the word “friend” was used.

Friendship is a fine thing! Lots of people have friends, it’s one of those fundamental human experiences that historians should keep an eye out for. It is not, however, the only thing, and sometimes calling someone a ‘friend’ is a disservice. In this case, when the source material you are citing is a man referring to another man as his “same-gender partner”, discarding that in favor of “friend” is wrong. We have a word for that: erasure.

There is a reason that a through line in anti-LGBTQ sentiment is “these things didn’t used to exist,” and that reason isn’t that said things actually didn’t used to exist; it is that historians over the last couple of centuries have gone to great lengths to pretend they didn’t, to bury or destroy any evidence that they did. And yes, there is an argument to be made that we shouldn’t try to paint historical figures with our modern terminology—but then, that argument only seems to come up when we’re talking about whether or not a historical figure can be called queer.

Historians are, historically, extremely eager to find any possible heterosexual explanation for things, even when doing so requires extensive leaps in logic. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for men? Well, you see, back then cultural morays about how much affection men could platonically show other men were different. Alexander the Great was so distraught at the death of the man he loved that he demanded he be deified, and that when he himself died, he be buried in the same tomb? They were just the best of friends. President Buchanan was so visibly in a relationship with Senator King that their nicknames in DC were “Uncle Fancy and Aunt Nancy”? Say, is that is why my history classes sorta just didn’t talk about President Buchanan at all? Nevermind, don’t worry, there’s a perfectly straight explanation for this — it’s just gals being pals.

Once that thought was in my mind, it was hard to let go of it and not read this book in a queer-history light, and boy, does it ever not hold up well to that sort of inspection. The only clear mentions of homosexuality at all are a passing remark about a Senatorial insult being someone ‘enjoying nubile slave boys to an uncouth amount,’ and some mention of Hadrian—which is itself rather unavoidable when talking about Hadrian.1

So, here’s my summary: this is a good overview of Roman history, but it is, like all studies of history, flawed. It got me to break my usual “no writing in books” rule, and correct the word “friend” to “boyfriend” out of something akin to spite; but it also gave me pages of interesting quotes about Rome and the Empire, and taught me a great deal that I didn’t know. Plusses and minuses. It’s worth a read.2

  1. Although, having said that it’s unavoidable, I immediately noticed that the Wikipedia info-box on Hadrian lists three different burial sites for him, but somehow doesn’t have room for the name of the man he loved so much that he had thousands of statues carved in his image all across the Roman Empire, so, modern historians haven’t improved. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Test Driven Development by Example”

Kent Beck

‘By example’ books really aren’t my cup of tea—going back and forth between a book and the actual thing in order to follow along is too much overhead for either activity to work well, and just reading along without doing it myself leaves the book feeling rather anemic a lot of the time. That said, this book wasn’t terrible; I enjoyed Beck’s writing style throughout the whole first part, he did a good job livening it up with some personality so it didn’t feel like reading a WikiHow article. But where my interest really kicked in was in the third part, where it switched to more of a traditional Programming Book style, just dispensing a bunch of condensed advice.

There’s some good little tidbits in the earlier part, though; I think my favorite one was:

[Automated] tests are the Programmer’s Stone, transforming fear into boredom.

A great way to think about it! Write tests so that instead of worrying something will break as you continue working on it, you just go ‘meh, now I’ve gotta wait for the tests to run.’1

This was a quick read; if you’ve been doing some form of TDD, it probably won’t continua much that’s new, but it’s a nice way to get an overview. And if you aren’t doing TDD, go ahead and read it; as I said, it’s quick, and Beck makes a better case for TDD than I will in a single blog post. It’s available in the O’Reilly Library.

  1. Although, ideally, it’s not much of a wait – this is the benefit of unit tests, in particular, that you make them small and very quick to run, and with that you’re able to run the relevant segment of them after every change. ↩
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Review

“Confessions of a Recovering Engineer”

Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

Having quite liked the Strong Towns book and some of the YouTube channels based on it, I’ve had the sequel-of-sorts on my list for a while, and was finally able to get around to reading it. My overall review is “this is definitely an addendum to Strong Towns” – you can read it on its own, it goes to pretty solid lengths to reiterate material when it’s referencing it, but even with that it doesn’t particularly feel like it can stand on its own.

As a book, I think it’s fairly well-written; the use of a single street and a single incident as something to reference back to throughout is an effective device for centering the policy discussion.

Said policy discussion really comes down to two things. Firstly, that there should only be Roads and Streets — Roads being a thing focused on getting people from place to place quickly, and Streets being a place that people go to.1 The word/concept “stroad” comes up quite often in the book — a sort of painful middle ground, something trying to do both things and as a result doing both very poorly. Think of how you get to Best Buy, or Walmart, or any other big box store like that; clearly that’s meant to be a Road, because it’s a terrible place to walk around so it can’t be a Street… except it’s also pretty bad at driving on, because there’s people trying to turn onto or off of it, and probably a bunch of stoplights, and a general poor attempt at being a Road. Marohn makes a very good argument for abolishing these awkward things and forcing every piece of driving infrastructure to be either a Road or a Street, and then to be good at being what it is.

Which leads to the second point, and for this I’ll just use his own words:

T one safe, the street must communicate the real level of risk to the driver. In other words, the driver must feel discomfort driving in a manner that is unsafe. (40)

Or, more viscerally: when was the last time you went 45 on a narrow, technically-two-lane-but-for-the-people-parked, tree-lined, watch-out-for-the-kids-playing-basketball neighborhood street? Probably never, because doing 45 there feels deeply unsafe. You didn’t have to look for a speed limit sign to know that you should be going slowly; you can tell that the street does not want you going fast, and that if you try to go fast, you’re gonna have a bad time.

And that’s the design policy he advocates for. Our infrastructure is built around the idea of forgiving drivers for their mistakes… but once you account for human psychology, that means that drivers will make more mistakes, because they know they don’t have to pay as much attention.

And now, really, I’ve kinda spoiled the whole book. Those are the core arguments; everything else is filling in details or repeating points to drive them home. There’s a couple chapters at the end that felt like later additions, and in particular the one about his legal arguments with the state licensing board feels entirely out of place. The whole section on transport technologies is entirely too generous to Elon Musk, but then, at the time this was written, his reality distortion field hadn’t failed yet, so we were all a bit more forgiving.

One last pull-quote, though, to which I’ll add emphasis, because I thought it was a really great way to discuss some of the issues with policing in the US.

Police target areas they perceive as high crime. When they discover criminal activity, which they inevitably do given the approach, it reinforces the initial perception. There is no control group receiving equally aggressive policing to create comparable statistics. (195)

An excellent point about sampling bias, at the end of a chapter that’s a pretty good quick overview of everything wrong with the ‘routine traffic stop’ as a concept.

Overall, this is a pretty good read; go for the first one first, and if you’re still interested in more, give it a read.2

  1. Interestingly, this concept can be broadened – I quite liked his discussion of how transit options like trains and planes are a form of road, whereas, say, a cruise ship is a street. Feels weird to say, but within this framework, it fits! ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Tenth Island”

Diana Marcum

“Travel” is a new book genre to me, and it may be a dangerous one, because about 2/3 of the way through I finally sighed and admitted to myself that I now want to visit the Azores, and added them to the list. Helpfully, I’ve even got a few notes about where specifically to go and what things might be good to visit. Broadly speaking, as described in the book, the Azores are something like Hawaii, but with the old-world European cultural flavor. There was a remark at one point about “in the village where I was staying, the garbage truck was pulled by a mule,” is the idea.

As a book, I found this a good read; Marcum did a really good job of bouncing back and forth between her life and the experience of being in the Azores, and provided a great deal of historical context, as well. It makes a lot of sense when you consider her background as a journalist; the Pulitzer win just locks that feeling in.

There’s a lot of short chapters, which makes for a good bit of light reading, and quite often there’s a good little life lesson or memorable moment tucked in there to end them. A collection of vignettes, rather than a single long narrative. It works well! And who doesn’t love little bits of advice, like:

When traveling, one should forget constant exploration. Go back to the same spots. You’ll be recognized as a familiar face and you’ll discover more.

It was a fun read, nice and light, and I enjoyed it. Check it out!1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“What If? 2”

Randall Munroe

One of the tropes of the internet that I really enjoy is the concept of “relevant xkcd”. As it turns out, when you spend nearly two decades publishing three comics a week, you wind up covering a staggering variety of topics, to the point that pretty much any topic will have a relevant xkcd to link to. And, in thinking about that, I’m amazed all over again at Randall Munroe’s work; there is so much xkcd. Thousands of comics… and they aren’t always stick figure things, a few times a year it’ll some sort of complex piece of software, or a gigantic world to explore, or some other exploration of what a “webcomic” really is in light of the technology of the web.

Anyhow, that’s all a digression, because in the spare time he’s apparently got from all of the above, he’s also had time to write a couple books, and all the ones I’ve read are delightful. A couple years later, I’m back to report on the sequel of the last one I reviewed, and it’s… exactly what the title implies. More “absurd hypothetical questions,” answered with a great deal of research. “Can a person eat a whole cloud?” Well, that depends — are you squeezing the air out first? If so, you can! If not, definitely no, and you may actually wind up dehydrated amidst a larger cloud than you started with.

It’s all things like that, and it really shows that Munroe is, in his way, a very effective science communicator. This feels like a great book to give to a curious kid to encourage that curiosity, and get them to ask some really interesting questions in class.1 It’s a delight, and, in the truest sense, fun for all ages. I absolutely loved this book; give it a read.2

  1. And, based on the notes in some of the questions submitted, a great many of those will quickly be directed back to Munroe, for a continuation of the series. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Doctor Alien”

Rajnar Vajra

I’m really starting to like this ‘small, episodic’ format—it makes it easy to get into things quickly, and also provides clear points at which you can notice that you have once again stayed up too late reading and need to go to bed so you can function tomorrow.

This sorta reminded me of reading, like, an old Sherlock Holmes thing. Or, maybe, Elementary, rather than classic Sherlock Holmes, because of that episodic (and modernized!) vibe. Each one has a nice amount of mystery going on, that feeling that you’re racing the protagonist to figure out what’s really going on. And done in that very satisfying way, too; in the first story, I figured out Patient #1 almost immediately, and felt quite happy when my suspicion was eventually confirmed.1

The introductory material felt a bit overly-congratulatory, but I found myself agreeing with it eventually. Vajra did a really great job of creating interesting aliens—not only is there a very impressive amount of variety in the physical appearances of the aliens, but there’s also some fun cultural differences on display as well. That latter aspect feels like it’s a rich vein for exploring that hasn’t been nearly thoroughly explored enough, but the former, this may be one of the best explorations of this “aliens can be weird” thing I’ve ever seen.2 The aliens are, truly, weird; even with the visual descriptions, there’s a couple that my brain just gave up on trying to visualize, and I wound up as that parable about blind men arguing about what an elephant is.

The third story did a great job of tying things together, and felt like a reasonable close to the series. There’s definitely room for more, if desired, but in these three pieces we’ve got a complete arc, and I was quite satisfied with the ending. Plus, it just had a great sense of cosmic wonder to it, which is a great note to end on. Hopeful science fiction! This is what I want to read.

Overall, I really enjoyed this; it’s a fairly quick read, and manages to hold onto that ”god bless you, old sci fi, you had such high hopes for us”3 kind of vibe while also, like, knowing that cell phones exist. Striking a great balance. Give it a read.4

  1. Spoiler:“She’s a baby!” I muttered to myself, over and over, as I read that one. ↩
  2. The other contender I can think of is Robert L. Forward’s Rocheworld series — between the flouwen and the icerugs, he’s got some really interesting alien lifeforms as well. ↩
  3. Screenshot of a tumblr post by user “ghost drama” that reads “i love old science fiction because it’s all like “IT’S THE DISTANT YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND THREE AND MAN IS EXPLORING THE DEEP CORNERS OF THE UNIVERSE” like god bless you old sci-fi you had such high hopes for us"↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Ocean of Storms”

Christopher Mari, Jeremy K. Brown

Picked at random out of my library of science fiction ebooks, and came up with a good one! The general vibe I have of this book is that, while it could use one more pass from a good editor, it’s got solid bones; the plot tracks fairly well, and feels engaging all the way through, and I was delighted to find that I couldn’t predict the ending ahead of time.

My notes to the authors, should they ever read them:

  • There’s a little of “as you know, Bob” at times—the explanation of the difference between a fission and fusion reactor felt a bit silly, given that it was happening on the moon. By the time you’re there, you’ve probably picked up enough background knowledge about science in general to get the concept.
  • Not every story needs a romance arc!1 The first time around I actually, for the benefit of nobody but myself, pantomimed gagging. It felt forced, and also highlighted how thoroughly male-dominated the cast is.2
  • The pacing feels a bit odd towards the end—about 50 pages from the end, I started wondering if this was going to end on a cliffhanger to set up the next book.3

Editing notes aside, however, I really enjoyed it! I should come up with some kind of pseudo-award to give out to books that successfully trick me into staying up late reading; this would be a winner. And really, what higher praise can I give? Give it a read.4

  1. Well, if you’re writing a romance novel, maybe it does — although, come to think of it, a romance novel without a love story does sound like a pretty interesting exploration of genre. ↩
  2. The president being a woman is a nice touch, but a) I can’t recall her actually having a name other than “the President”, and b) I don’t think she ever talks to another woman, so, there goes the Bechdel test. ↩
  3. Spoiler: It didn’t, the book actually tied things together reasonably well; while it feels like there’s still room for more, it’s less “second movie” and more “spin-off TV series” territory. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The John McPhee Reader”

John McPhee

To date, The Control of Nature remains my favorite McPhee book, and the one I’m most likely to recommend to a new reader, but this is a very strong contender. It is, as the title implies, something of a sampler platter of his work; subsections of a variety of pieces, and as a result, covering a far broader topic area than any of his other books. The books are usually more focused, tied around a single theme; in this one, that single theme is John McPhee.

It’s a broader swathe of his work than I’ve read before; if you skim through what I’ve read of his in the past, it definitely has that naturalist perspective locked in, but I haven’t spent time with his “focus on a single person” type things, or his sports coverage. It’s an interesting change of pace; I don’t really expect I’m going to dive into those as much as I have the outdoors, but I won’t go out of my way to avoid it, either.1

One part really captured me, and immediately added a book to my wish list: the excerpt from The Curve of Binding Energy. Somehow I hadn’t yet found out that he did an entire piece on the progenitor of Project Orion. My favorite nonfiction author, writing about one of my favorite topics? Sign me up.

Overall, I continue to love everything McPhee wrote. I’ve got another of his books in my queue, but I’m deliberately holding off on it, trying to space them out. If I haven’t yet convinced you to read some of his work, give this one a try; it is, like I said, a great introduction to his writing.2

  1. And I figure I will eventually read his entire oeuvre, it does seem to be what I’m working my way towards at this point. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩