Tag: nonfiction

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Review

“The Art of the National Parks”

Fifty-Nine Parks

This is my first coffee table book, and I’m quite happy with it as a representative of the genre. I’ve been a fan of the Fifty-Nine Parks series for a while—I believe, in my apartment, there’s now one of every product in their line-up.1 It’s just a really beautiful art series, inspired by one of the most incredible things the United States has ever done.2 There’s also a definite influence from the old Works Progress Administration posters, at least spiritually so, and that’s another style that I absolutely love.3

Beyond just being a beautiful objet d’art, the book is also a great way to get an overview of what all those national parks are. I may well wind up using this thing as a reference tome, especially as I contemplate visiting some of these parks.

I really highly recommend the whole 59 Parks project. As I’m writing this, their print shop is closed for a few months yet, but their partners for various non-poster items are still selling various things.4

  1. Well, every product family, I don’t have every single poster. I’ve got posters, notebooks, and this book, and gave my roommate their board game at one point. ↩
  2. Citation: search r/AskReddit for any of the monthly “non-Americans: what’s one thing America does right?” threads. The national parks are always mentioned. ↩
  3. Citation: 9 out of the 11 posters in my apartment are in that “inspired by the WPA” style. ↩
  4. And, I can add, restocking—some of the Field Notes sets were sold out for a while, but they’ve since reappeared. I’m glad that Field Notes isn’t being strict with their definition of “Limited Edition”, or I’d’ve been very sad that I missed my chance to get the whole collection. ↩
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Review

“Irons in the Fire”

John McPhee

The human experience is fractal; everything you might be interested in, there’s an entire subcommunity somewhere of people who share that interest, and have explored it in great detail.1 McPhee has a talent for finding one of these fractal subcommunities, finding the right people in it to talk to, and then writing about his experience of exploring it in such a way that he can bring the reader along for the learning experience.

There’s a couple of that type of story in this book. The titular piece, Irons in the Fire, is about the cattle industry in Nevada—cattle branding, brand inspectors, rustlers, and ranchers. The kind of world that I’ve thought about approximately never, and wound up reading through in fascination. There’s also The Gravel Page, which reappears somewhat in Travels of the Rock, that’s all about forensic geology, and some of the ways that’s been used. The latter part of The Gravel Page feels like the spec script for an HBO special.

Then there’s Duty of Care, which has that same “this is a whole community I’d never even thought about” aspect, but really gets into environmentalism, too. Consider the tire: petroleum-based, worn down somewhat by use, but once discarded… where does it go? How can you recycle that?

Release reminded me of being in design school, contemplating the importance of accessibility technology. Absolutely dated in terms of the technology now available, of course, but these personal stories of how impactful they are are a great reminder.

Lastly in my review, though not in the order of the book, In Virgin Forest talks about old-growth forest, and how shamefully little of it there is left in the US.

I love a John McPhee book. I’ve got a pile of ‘em to read still, and I’m trying to space them out so I don’t wind up writing a whole series of reviews just on one author. It’s a real effort of will, I tell you. Having said all that, what am I gonna do, not recommend it? Of course not. Check out the book, it’s a cool introduction to several new areas of the fractal human experience.2

  1. For example, how much time do you spend thinking about the keyboard you use to type on? Personally, I put very little thought into it the vast majority of the time. I know some people, however, who are into keyboards, and have entire collections of keyboards, frequently build custom keyboards themselves, and have strong opinions about the visual design of keycaps and which type of spring mechanism to use. ↩
  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

“Byzantium: The Early Centuries”

John Julius Norwich

I’ve realized recently that there’s a whole lot of history that I know basically nothing about. Prior to reading this book, the extent of my knowledge of the Byzantine Empire was “I think it used to be the Roman Empire, and then when the Roman Empire collapsed, part of it stuck around for a while? And then in the last century they renamed Constantinople to Istanbul,” and then after that some confused muttering that reveals I wasn’t even clear on the distinction between the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire.

Anyhow, someone mentioned that they were reading this series, and I thought I’d check it out. I’m certainly not a historian, but I can at least be a little better-informed than I’d been previously! Though, honestly, despite this being the first of the trilogy, I feel like I started much too late in the story. Turns out that the successor state to the Roman Empire requires a lot of context on how the Roman Empire works that I, unsurprisingly, also don’t have! So at some point I suppose I’ll go in search of a similar high-level overview of Roman history, backfill more of my knowledge.

Frankly, I don’t expect to retain much of the detail here. This is a few hundred pages covering hundreds of years of history; you can’t get a detailed overview at that density, and thanks to the inability of royalty to have unique names, it’s all a horrific muddle to try to keep track of regardless. I’m fairly certain there was an entire dynasty who never named a child anything that wasn’t a variation of “Justinian” or “Constantine,” and that just seems like a great way to give a kid a complex.

Still, I’ve got a bit more high-level overview, which is what I wanted going in. At some point, I’ll dive back in and pick up the second of the trilogy, but at least for the moment, I think I need to give my brain a break and go read something with a lot fewer facts… and a lot fewer horrific slaughters. I don’t recommend against this book, but… maybe see if your local library has a copy, rather than trying to buy it.

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Review

“The Doors of Perception”

Aldous Huxley

Huxley is the kind of author I’ve tended to shy away from, entirely based on Brave New World. Dystopian science fiction, popular with literature teachers? Nope, not for me. So I was a bit wary of this, going in, but after a few pages I realized that what I was reading was nonfiction, and nonfiction with a very interesting writing style at that.

I actually found myself collecting quotes as I read, along with ideas. I quite liked his semi-utopian vision of a future where we’ve replaced alcohol’s role in society with something like a short-lived mescaline derivative. No hangover, no belligerent drunkenness, just a feeling of being one with the world and experiencing something greater than yourself? Sounds pretty neat! Shame we went all “war on drugs” instead.

Some of the quotes just hit me with a sense of poetry:

In a few minutes we had climbed to a vantage point in the hills, and there was the city spread out beneath us. Rather disappointingly, it looked very like the city I had seen on other occasions. So far as I was concerned, transfiguration was proportional to distance. The nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was hardly different from itself.

Others just made me laugh:

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World’s Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as “being in one’s right mind.”

I also, being the big fan of Snow Crash that I am, liked some of the discussion about words-as-symbols, and the inability of symbols to be the real thing:

This may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

Another one that felt like a reference, this time to Timeheart in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series:

In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.

And the discussion of art was just marvelous throughout. I want a museum setting of this book, walking you through his discussion of each piece as you walk by the piece itself.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are rediscovered by every succeeding generation, its values reassessed, its meetings redefined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its patented and copyrighted Hellas. Today, thanks to recent advances in the technology of lighting, we can go one better than our predecessors. Not only have we reinterpreted the great works of sculpture bequeathed to us by the past, we have actually succeeded in altering the physical appearance of these works. Greek statues, as we see them illuminated by a light that never was on land or sea, and then photographed in a series of fragmentary close-ups from the oddest angles, beat almost no resemblance to the Greek statue seen by art critics and the general public in the dim galleries and decorous engravings of the past.

. . .

This may be bad art history, but it is certainly enormous fun.

One more block quote, because the final line really reminded me of Saturn by Sleeping At Last:1

A single candle, as Caravaggio and Spaniards had shown, can give rise to the most enormous theatrical effects. But Latour took no interest in theatrical effects. There is nothing dramatic in his pictures, nothing tragic or pathetic or grotesque, no representation of action, no appealed to the sort of emotions, which people go to the theater to have excited and then appeased. His personages are essentially static. They never do anything; they are simply there in the same way in which a granite Pharaoh is there, or a bodhisattva from Khmer, or one of Piero’s flat-footed angels. And the single candles used, and every case, distress this intense but un-excited, impersonal thereness. By exhibiting common things in an uncommon light, its flame makes manifest the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of mere existence.

Rather a long review, courtesy of the many quotes, but at the end I think all I’ve got to say is that I enjoyed it. Get a paperback copy; this is the kind of book that really wants to be perused on the couch on a rainy day, pen and paper available for jotting notes. Give it a go.2

  1. Specifically the line — “how rare and beautiful it is to even exist” ↩
  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

“Overcoming Bias”

Tiffany Jana & Matthew Freeman1

This may be the first time I’ve read one of these business books and not had the thought “yeah, this could’ve been a pamphlet.” Whoever edited it did a great job, presumably ruthlessly cutting out all the unnecessary parts, and the result is a lean, clean read.

The backstory of the authors—they’re married and co-own a company that basically consists of the two of them going around running corporate workshops on the topic of overcoming bias—helps it make a lot of sense, actually. This might not be a book that’s been edited down to the right point; it might be the rough script they use for their workshop sessions, expanded out from bullet points on a notecard to a book form. And from that perspective, it’s also done very well; they added just enough storytelling without getting bogged down, and make their points very well.

And, aside from that, it contains one of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read:

But just as we have told countless white people we have worked with, “by the power vested in us (by virtue of Tiffany’s negritude and our combined dedication to racial reconciliation), we hereby absolve you of your white guilt.” Now don’t get all excited and start throwing around slurs and crazy talk. We are just saying that we are fully aware that you did not personally create racism.“

Beautiful. I don’t know that I have ever read anything as hilariously, brutally honest about the concept of white guilt as “by the power vested in us (by virtue of Tiffany’s negritude)”. Just impeccable.

This is the most glowing review I think I’ve ever written of something that’s categorized as a “business book,” and I stand by it. This book feels like it can be useful as an introduction to diversity, as well as a useful reference material as you continue to learn more. Check it out.2

  1. Formatting- and voice-wise, I’d say Matthew was the primary author of this, with editing and interjections by Tiffany, but the fact that her name is alphabetically first is one of those “it is what it is” kinds of things. The fact that it then shows up in places as being written by “Tiffany Jana et al.”, though, that is hilarious. ↩
  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 Simple Art of Business Etiquette”

Jeffrey L. Seglin

I’ve actually read several books in this genre since my last book review. In general, they all contain the same advice, just phrased slightly differently. This is the one I’m actually choosing to review, though, simply because it was the best-written out of the variety I’ve now sampled.

It’s a hallmark of this genre of productivity/business/self-help books that they’re basically a bulleted list of tips. Given that editors tend to frown upon a manuscript being ten pages of bullet points, though, they all get padded out. Generally, that padding is some mix of anecdotes about the dos-and-don’ts espoused in the bullet points, and some form of interactivity—quizzes, “write your own response”, that kind of thing. Seglin did a great job of balancing those three types of things; each short chapter is a brief intro to the point, an anecdote on the subject, and then a multiple-choice question, followed by an explanation of the answer. It ends with the actual bulleted list, which feels like a nice mix of review and expansion of the already-given points.

The book, like the chapters, is short and easily digestible. My jotted notes from before I started writing this review end with the following: “No eureka moments, but nice gathering together of points.” I stand by that; there’s nothing huge, exciting, or new in this, but it’s useful to have all this disparate advice gathered into one easy-to-read unit. 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

“Physics of the Impossible”

Michio Kaku

I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of these “explain the whole field in broad strokes” books lately. I do enjoy the twist in this of focusing specifically on impossible things, particularly science fiction tropes; it provides a bit more of a narrative through line, a nice organizational structure to hang the various facts on.

Two caveats to this book:

Firstly, it’s somewhat dated; just from reading, you can narrow down the publishing date to sometime in the mid-aughts. The downside to writing about something as inherently contemporary as “the latest scientific discoveries.”

Secondly, the use of the definite article when referring to theories. It’s never “quantum theory”, always “the quantum theory.” Which I’ve listed as a caveat, but really it falls somewhere between being overly tied to semantics and doing a good job of reminding us that all theories are theories—sure, the theory of gravity is pretty well understood, but it remains a part of the scientific process; it remains a theory.

All told, I found this a pretty good read. The chapters are about the right size for chunks of reading time, and it’s a nice overview of the various impossibilities. (It also feels like it’d be a great reference book for a science fiction writer—it provides enough terminology and understanding to get the realistically-wrong physics you want for good sci-fi.) Give it 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

“Economics Through Everyday Life”

Anthony Clark

I can make this review pretty quick: it’s a good overview of the field of economics, and is probably worth a read for anyone who wants to have a good foundation in understanding what the heck they’re talking about on the news. The title is a bit odd, though, because the “everyday life” part never makes much of an appearance. It’s just… a regular book about economics. I suppose it’s “everyday” because it explains, like, the concept of the Gini Coefficient without burying you in the math of how it actually works, but still. Not really “everyday life,” just “Economics: Approachably Told.”

Still, a good read, worth reading.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

“Solutionary Rail”

Bill Moyer & Patrick Mazza

Right off the bat, let me say: the name is not great. Having just read the whole book, which mentions its own name quite often, I feel as if I’ve been somewhat inoculated against how bad a name it is, but even with that, it’s still very clearly not a great name.

That said, the actual concept is, in my opinion, rock-solid. In short, the book is arguing that we should convert from diesel to electric power for our rail networks, and use the existing rail right-of-ways to build the transmission lines that we desperately need in order to make the green energy transition.

In slightly longer:

  • Rail freight is, inherently, way more efficient than truck freight, and hilariously more so than air freight. Rolling resistance is a hell of a thing; the least efficient train is still twice as energy-efficient as the most efficient truck.
  • Making a train run on electricity is a lot easier than making a truck run on electricity. Turns out it’s way easier to run power lines over a train track than it is to run them over every road ever. (And, bonus, electric trains have the exact same benefit electric cars do: way less maintenance.)
  • Truck freight is massively taxpayer-subsidized: by gallon of fuel purchased, a heavy truck pays, very roughly, 1.75x the gas tax of a sedan. But, for every mile driven, that heavy truck does around 5,000x as much damage to the road it’s driving on that the sedan does. tl;dr: the reason our roads need so much work is because of trucks; every time we use taxpayer money to rebuild a road, the trucking industry is getting a big ol’ present.
  • Railway right-of-ways are a Whole Thing, but for historical reasons, are basically a perfectly-interconnected network that ties together every city in the entire country, as well as whole lot o’ non-city land. This description also applies to the sort of long-distance power transmission infrastructure we need. Is it a coincidence I’m putting these two facts in the same bullet point? Not even remotely!

By these facts combined, we arrive at the argument that a) we should be using a whole lot more rail freight, b) we should be electrifying as much of our rail network as possible, and c) we shouldn’t be afraid to have government step in, because the competition literally could not exist without the massive government intervention that is the creation and maintenance of the interstate highway system.

The bit about using rail routes to also do power transmission is just a really clever way to combine two big projects and get them to pay for each other. Electrified rail means power companies have a brand-new, large-scale customer; siting power transmission literally on top of that large-scale customer not only provides guaranteed demand, it also significantly reduces the amount of time the power companies have to spend shoveling through the horrific mess that is the approvals process for power transmission.1

There’s some weird parts to the argument, namely the way that the book bends over backwards to never yell at the Class I rail carriers for their horrible business practices. Sure, there’s an appendix about it, courtesy of the rail unions, but within the actual text, they’re very careful not to say “and hey, maybe if Wall Street spent less time turning rail freight into the highest-profit-margin industry in the country and instead focused on making it actually good at its job, these problems wouldn’t be as bad!” But then, given that the target demographic of this book is Warren Buffet (owner of Berkshire Hathaway, owner of BNSF, monopolist of the Seattle-Chicago rail route that the authors have identified as the best starting point for electrifying the rail network), it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he’s kinda the villain of the story.2

Overall, I found this a fascinating read, and I heartily recommend checking out their website, if not the whole book. (There’s a video summary, but you can also get a free download of the book if you, like me, saw the concept and went “oh I have got to know more about this.”)

And then, as a secondary call to action, write to your representatives (state and federal!), your governor, and whoever you know that owns some shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Point out that, hey. Trains. They’re pretty cool. We should do more with them.

  1. As a side note, we desperately need to fix that. Hey, Congress, get on that! ↩
  2. And, frankly, he really should be listening to the idea of using the rail right-of-ways to connect all the wind farms he owns to, y’know, places people actually want to buy that electricity. If you’re gonna be a capitalist on that scale, at least actually get the benefits of vertical integration! ↩
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Review

“The Fifth Risk”

Michael Lewis

It took me a bit to realize that this was a reread—I thought that I’d just read some of the marketing materials when the book first came out, maybe an excerpt, but no—by the time I got to the end of the book and it continued to feel familiar, I had to admit that I’d read it before and just missed marking it as read in my big list o’ books.

Still, it holds up well! Honestly, I think it’s almost more interesting now, during the Biden administration, than it was during the Trump years. Sure, it felt more urgent when these things were being actively undermined, but now, it works well as a reminder that our institutions are still fragile. Just because everything is alright in this moment doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Hanford’s still got about 100 years and $100 billion in work necessary to clean it up; publicly-funded databases are still one executive order away from being inaccessible to the public that funded them. The core function of government is to handle these big problems, the things that business incentives just don’t work for.

Given the subject matter, it feels like this book would be a tome, something that’ll take you ages to work through. In fact, it’s quite short and easy to read—and, in a way, reminds me of some of McPhee’s stuff. It’s an exploration of the huge, banal things that the US government does every day to keep the world turning.

Overall, it’s an interesting read, and not a huge time investment. I heartily recommend 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

“Global Catastrophic Risks”

Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković

I’d love to see an updated version of this book, because some of the chapters held up really well, a couple need some revised timeline estimates,1 and a couple would be heavily revised in light of how the last couple years have gone.2

The gist of it is, there’s a category of potential problem that can bring human civilization to its knees… or wipe out all life on earth. Some of them, we’re working on; some, we’re powerless to stop; and some, we’re actively making worse.

After establishing that core concept, the book splits up; each chapter is by a different author or authors, and they each address their own area of expertise. A volcanologist addresses the possibility of a super volcano eruption; an astrophysicist talks about the likelihood of gamma ray or cosmic ray bursts.3

Being the kind of person that I am, there wasn’t actually much in this book that was a new concept to me. This is the kind of thing I think about all the time! And so, given that background, it was a surprisingly uplifting book. Aside from the “the universe decided there isn’t life on earth anymore” type issues, every chapter came with advice on how to prevent or mitigate the issues, and discussion of who’s already working on it.

None of the problems discussed are solved, or anywhere near. I’d say that the one that’s currently in best shape is either naturally-occurring pandemics or nuclear proliferation—we have reasonably robust institutions, within the UN, working on those. Building a nuke is frighteningly easy, but getting the raw materials is, fortunately, very difficult. New diseases keep cropping up, but we’re getting reasonably good at developing vaccines, and things with sufficient lethality to totally collapse human civilization kill to fast to spread that well.

The other issues, though? Well… they remain a work in progress. AI researchers are still playing with fire, and CRISPR CAS-9 has made the possibility of engineered pandemics terrifyingly real.

All told, I’d call this book “required reading for anyone working at the UN.” And every world leader. It’s a long read, but the chapter divisions make it fairly digestible; I do recommend it, though with a caveat of “maybe not if you’ve been suffering from anxiety.” It… isn’t likely to help with that, unless you, like me, are already anxious about all these things. Give it a go.4

  1. I can report that we didn’t crack self-replicating nanotechnology by 2020, for example. ↩
  2. Although, actually, the one on dealing with pandemics was pretty much spot-on for what should have been done; the revised version would probably include a lot more pointing at our new historical counter-examples. ↩
  3. The latter being, by my standard, among the scariest concepts in the book. No way to see it coming, and nothing we can do about it regardless. To borrow a term, it’s an out-of-context problem. ↩
  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. ↩
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Review

“Palaces for the People”

Eric Klinenberg

This book felt so familiar throughout that I had to check, several times, if I’d read it before. Evidently I haven’t! Which, I suppose, tells me that I’m more of a hobbyist civil engineer than I thought.

The very quick summary of the book is that, along with everything we usually think of as infrastructure, the US has also severely underinvested in social infrastructure—the things that make it easy for people to connect with one another in a space. The shining example of this, and the titular palaces for the people, are libraries: a completely free, completely public place where people are given the freedom to explore whatever may interest them.

For me, the familiarity of the book was a negative; I didn’t get much at all new from it, and so feel like it wasn’t a great use of my time to read. Conversely, though, if you haven’t spent a bunch of your spare time learning about this kind of thing, it’s probably a very good introduction to the topic. With that in mind, it’s an interesting read; give it a go—or, y’know, check it out from your local library.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

“The Final Hours of Portal 2”

Geoff Keighley

Another one for the ‘short reads’ category!1

Portal 2 is an iconic game, and I’ve spent many, many hours happily playing it with friends. It was cool to get a bit of visibility into the process of making it, and to hear about what Valve is like on the inside. (Very, very different from anything I’m used to, is the moral of the story.)

If you’re interested in video game history, check it out.2

  1. Which I don’t actually have on this site, but maybe I should. On the other hand, going back through hundreds of these book reviews and adding more metadata doesn’t sound particularly fun, so I think I’ll leave it. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon 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 prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base”

Annie Jacobsen

Structurally, I think the only descriptor I can come up with for this book is “inverse shit-sandwich.” Which is a disgusting mental image, but it fits—the first and last chapter of the book don’t fit with the rest of it, and are undoubtedly the worst parts. They make for an interesting conspiracy theory, and the first chapter actually sticks mostly into the realm of believability, but the last chapter comes back, swipes away that believability, and tacks on a whole lot more conspiracy theory energy. She had one source—who may well have been messing with her—and upon finding that it was impossible to verify anything he told her, instead of throwing it out or putting it in a single chapter with some very big caveats wrapping around it, she went “well, this’ll work as a hook” and made it the start and end of the book.

With all that said, it’s the inverse shit sandwich for a reason—everything else in the book is well-researched, well-cited, and absolutely fascinating to read. So perfectly up my alley, as I just love these histories of the completely wild things going on during the Cold War. The sheer amount of UFO sightings, and conspiracy theories, that came about because the CIA was testing spy aircraft out in the desert is just incredible. And the storytelling as she leads the reader to the reveal that the CIA was leaning in to the UFO theories because it kept people from trying to figure out what was actually happening? Impeccable.

There’s also some great stories from the larger Nevada test site. I had a great moment of realizing that the NERVA research being done involved a whole lot of underground facility—that kind of thing immediately makes me want to go explore an abandoned research site!1 And, beyond that, there’s a great story of someone who invented a whole new level of screwup.

So, set the scene. It’s 1980something, and today’s the day of a nuclear test, with another one coming up in a few days—meaning, there’s a live nuclear warhead, and materials to assemble at least one more, on-site at the Nevada test site. You’re a security contractor for the Department of Energy, and you’re going to do a penetration test of the security at the site—take a helicopter and a couple guys with guns full of rubber bullets, and see how well they’re able to handle it. But first, pop quiz, what’s step zero of a security test like that?

If you answered “call the Department of Energy and let them know you’re doing a security test,” congratulations, you’re smarter than the people who actually did the test that day.

And, as I was reading this story, my thought was “wow, this is a whole new level of screwup I can aspire never to achieve—‘they had to scramble fighter jets about me’”

Except, as I found a page later, I was wrong. It was worse than that—the phone tree made it to the White House, who put the Navy on alert—Tomahawk missiles targeted at the site. Which, all told, is actually quite sensible, in an obscene way: there’s already a nuclear test scheduled, so it’s nearly evacuated. If the Mystery Bad Guys manage to take the nuke-and-a-half that’s there, well, the people on-site are already dead. And “the Mystery Bad Guys have a nuke or two” is pretty much the end of the How Bad Can It Get scale. So, here we are with the actual brand new level of screwup: “the White House decided the best option for containing what I did was a nuclear strike.”

Yikes.

So, seriously, with the weirdness of the first and last chapters aside, this book was really, really good, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. That said, it would be an Extremely Bad Idea! Firstly, it was full of spiders when it was being actively maintained, so it’s probably not gotten less full of spiders since then. Second, it’s officially decommission and was, y’know, a tunnel under a mountain, so it’s very possible it’s caved in. Thirdly, it’s smack dab in the middle of the Department of Energy’s test site, which means if you actually get they’re you’re technically either a terrorist or doing a treason, just by being there. And fourthly, it was the site of two distinct nuclear reactor meltdowns, so it’s not exactly the healthiest of environments. ↩
  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

PDFs, Various

I’ve been working my way through the big pile of ebooks I own, and recently—ahead of the delivery of a new ereader—decided it’d behoove me to go through all the ones that I’ve only got in PDF form. It’s a fun pile, because I have no idea where I got most of these, but that’s the story for a great deal of my ebook library. I spent college on the mailing lists of several websites that would do charity ebook sales, and I’m the kind of person who’s rather unable to resist that kind of thing, so it’s unsurprising that, after over a year of making a concerted effort to read through that backlog, I’m down to only a couple hundred books left.

Most of those ebooks I’ve got as various ereader-compatible formats, because, books, duh. A few, though, were determinedly available only as PDF—things that had a lot of visuals and hand-laid-out pages that tend to get, at best, rumpled up by the conversion to epub. None of them felt quite right for a full review on their own, but having gone through the pile, I feel like I should at least mention them here.

“Sushi at Home: A Mat-to-Table Sushi Cookbook”

I remain utterly unconvinced on the concept of sashimi, and am not likely to actually take up sushi-making, but learning the history was interesting. I’m also feeling a bit more open to the idea of trying sushi again for the first time in several years; now that I’ve got somewhat more of an idea of what things are, I’m hoping I’ll be able to better-select the things to try that I have a chance of liking.

“Real BBQ” – Will Budiaman

Similar structure to the sushi book, being primarily recipes that I skimmed over, but the first couple chapters on the history and general techniques of barbecue were interesting, and there’s a few tips in here that I hadn’t seen before. A useful read, if you’re in a skimming mood!

“Handcrafted Bitters” – Will Budiaman

Only now, in writing this review, do I notice these two are the same author. Probably got them at the same time, then!

Same structure, some overview and techniques and then many recipes. More of a disconnect than the sushi book for me, given that I don’t drink, but again, interesting to read the history and see at least a little bit of what this thing is about. I do like having enough background knowledge on a topic to at least ask interesting questions, and I feel like this got me there.

“Hallucinogenic Plants” – Richard Evans Schultes

This was actually the first of these four that I read; I ended with BBQ, and joked that I’d been in a sequence of three books on topics I have no intention of ever getting much involved in.

Beautifully illustrated, and kinda reminded me of John McPhee at times. An interesting read, although I spent a lot of it wondering how, exactly, the various cultures involved figured these things out. I guess before the invention of writing, “licking random plants to see what would happen” may have been a pretty good form of entertainment?