The links to the following books are to my affiliate page at Bookshop.org. Buying from this post therefore supports independent bookstores across the country and a government employee in Los Angeles.

1. The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War by Graham Robb. I forget where I first learned about this 358 page history book, but it was an easy used purchase from Bookshop.org. The book is well-written, clear yet evocative when helpful, and full of interesting, well-documented facts. For example, I learned about the cagot, a pariah caste scattered around the west of France whose origin is unknown but likely dates to a carpentry guild, and tétaires, village men whose job was to help babies nurse by facilitating breastmilk letdown. More broadly, I learned a ton about rural life before industrialization; though about France, I expect the conditions and way of life described applied throughout at least Europe. Though I am happy to have read the book and recommend it without reservation, I cannot give it as high a grade as it could have earned because I do not actually know what the book is about. If the subtitle were different, I would have no idea that the French Revolution is a focus; it never has its own chapter and plenty of the facts and details, especially about rural social life, predates 1789. The first part of the book is about rural France from its inhabitants’ perspective, and this grounding of forgotten voices is very valuable. The second part is then about Parisians’ experience of the countryside, starting with map making, then I guess, from the chapter titles, monarchial conquering of the countryside, and then domestic tourism. But is the book about state development, homogenization, modernity, or something else? I cannot find the through line that unites the book, and for that I am left dissatisfied. The book is an exquisite tasting menu that leaves one hungry after.
   • Grade: B+
2. The Pleasure of My Company: A Novel by Steve Martin. This 163 novel is a gem. The story is unremarkable: a 25-31 year old man, Daniel Cambridge, in Santa Monica yearns for friends and lovers, but a traumatic childhood event has given him quirks that make friendship and love elusive. (One would call the protagonist weird; as Josh Flagg taught me, an eccentric is a weird person with money. Having started the movie Pink Panther just after the book, I also realized the protagonist is a common Martin type: overly confident in his own intelligence despite appearing to others as a bumbling fool.) Though I enjoyed the local setting, readers outside the Los Angeles metro area should also enjoy the book because of Martin’s humorous, witty writing; if Richard Ayoade wrote a novel, it would read like this one. For example, a love interest, Daniel’s former therapist, expresses her appreciation of his care for her toddler by resting her hand on his shoulder, he explains, “I didn’t know if Clarissa’s gestures toward me were platonic, Aristototelian, Hegelian, or erotic. […] I started at the celing and wondered how I could be in love with someone whose name had no anagram.” Joining the adjective derived from the famous philosopher with other famous ones but then ending the list with another, rhyming adjective is brilliant and hilarious, and I hope I remember to make this joke the next time I have the opportunity. The book abounds with similar quick wit, which was not expected since only one endorsement mentions its humor. I suppose the more a book’s endorsements emphasize its humor, the less humorous it will be. Steve Martin is a polymath and national treasure.
   • Grade: A
3. Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith F. Small. This 232 page parenting book is a bore. Small is an anthropology professor at Cornell and this 1998 book is meant as an introduction to ethnopediatrics, the comparative study of child rearing. Crucially, and a fact I did not realize until checking her biography before writing this review, it is not a book inspired by the author’s experience as a parent. If it were, I expect it would have information useful to WEIRD parents. As it stands, I learned a fair amount about !Kung San child rearing, some about the Gusii, and a smattering about Japanese and Dutch practices. But really, the book is not about comparative parenting so much as it is southern Africa hunter gather parenting. Worse, the writing is tedious. The book fractally repeats: paragraphs frequently have repetitive sentences, chapters conclude with paragraphs that repeat the argument of the chapter, and each chapter largely makes the same point: hunter gatherers parent differently than Western parents. There is also too much inside baseball and detail about specific studies; chapter 2 about the founding of ethnopediatrics is irrelevant to anyone who is not a professional cultural anthropologist. The book could easily have been 50 pages shorter without any loss of insight. I was also bothered by the constant invocation of motherhood: fathers are largely absent from the book. While I can understand that that decision would make more sense when this book was written in the middle of the 1990s, it nonetheless bothered me in 2023. Perhaps the best praise I can give it is that it makes me appreciate Bringing Up Bébé even more, though I learned a few interesting facts. For example, 22.5% of men report pregnancy symptoms, which matches my experience. Pediatricians are experts in pathologies, not parenting. Growth charts are based off of one study of white, bottle-fed infants from Yellow Springs, Ohio in the 1950s.
   • Grade: C+
4. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. I took this 209 page memoir to read during a family vacation weekend. It was perfect for that but also perfect for any reading setting. The writing is very good and the characters vivid, especially Maxine’s mom. There was an element of magical realism that I was not expecting but enjoyed; it reminded me of Legend of the Condor Heroes I: A Hero is Born. It was interesting that Maxine’s mom came to the United States before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The extreme anti-female sexism in her world was shocking. I would understand her story better after a second read, though I have no idea when I will have so much time in my life. I am glad I read it and you should buy it if you see it around.
   • Grade: A-
5. What’s Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot, Ph.D. I started this 460 page tome around August 2022 and finished it near the end of February 2023. The pace does not reflect (negatively) my enjoyment but rather my use of the book: the chapters are not chronological, so I read them as I found them relevant to understanding my daughter. The author is a neuroscientist, so each chapter explains an aspect of children’s development via the brain’s development. I found this approach persuasive and reassuring: the younger a baby is, the more its development is immune to parental action. (Except neglect; do not ignore your baby.) My main complaint is that the first few pages of each chapter go into detail on cellular development of the brain, and I just do not care. Those sections demonstrate the author’s bona fides, which is unnecessary given her credentials. A secondary complaint is that some of the explanations felt hand-wavy, but that is to be expected in a book so large; no one knows everything.
   • Grade: A-
6. Parent Like a Pediatrician: All the Facts, None of the Fear by Rebekah Diamond, MD. I bought this 305 page breeze of a guide as opposition research. It reaffirmed my feelings from reading the American Academy of Pediatricians’ parenting guide: pediatricians do not cite anything to substantiate their claims, so their authority rests significantly on the gravitas of a white coat and six figures of debt. Diamond identifies a pressing need: unrealistic official guidelines and the presented perfection of internet advice create stress on parents, so what is needed is experience-based realistic advice. Her tone is also approachable and reassuring, like a doctor with good bedside manners. However, I could not overcome her lack of citations, which for me makes her advice closer to the internet influencers’ she derides than the doctor she is. Her advice is good though. I am also bothered by the formatting: the font is huge, the section fonts huger, and the top and bottom margins are bigger than 1″, plus each chapter ends with a summarizing text box. It feels like someone said, “If your book is not 300 pages long, it is not serious.” The gigantism comes across to me as insecure, which then makes me question the confidence of the writing (even though I agree with her advice). Instead, the book could be 250 pages – still plenty long! – and be serious if it used citations. I was afraid this book would have pre-empted my approach; I was wrong.
   • Grade: B
7. Slaughterhouse Five: Or the Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut. I borrowed this 275 page novel memoir from my wife’s bookshelf, though I read it in high school as well. There was a lot to like: it is an easy read, the style is clean but not callous like Hemingway, and the author inserts a lot of dry humor, especially in the last three chapters. At the same time, I liked it less than I remember liking it. “So it goes” feels wise when you’re 16 but now its constant repetition felt cheap. The jumping around through time was confusing; other than reinforcing that the protagonist was abducted by Tralfamdoreans (aliens), I am not sure what purpose it served. There is not much material here; the non-fiction first chapter contributes nothing for me, though I enjoyed reading it. Overall, I can’t tell if it is about war or brain injury and if it is science fiction or not. There is a railroad metaphor the protagonist gives to explain how humans view of time is narrow compared to the aliens. I thought it was a motif but it turns out to have only been two paragraphs; I was surprised it stuck with me this whole time.
   • Grade: B+
8. I Am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume. I think I learned about this 470 page Japanese novel from The New Yorker. I grabbed it immediately because I love media from pets’ perspective and reading old writing; that it was from a foreign country was a bonus. I could not get past the first 30 pages when I first picked it up, but the second read was easier because I realized the long chapters were a collection of scenes of no more than a few pages each and there was not much of a story to follow. This lack of a plot, as well as the characters’ witty banter, made the book feel very modern, but its frequent invocation of the Russo-Japanese war, ancient Chinese poets, baseball as a novel import, and domestic scenes kept it tied very firmly in turn of the century Meiji Japan. Its writing belongs in the same top class as Lolita, Patrice Ngang’s Cameroon trilogy, and The Education of Henry Adams. I have not learned this much vocabulary since Lolita, which is especially impressive since this book’s original language is Japanese; I ended up reading with a pen, which I have never before done with fiction, to track the new words. There were 48, some of which include discaul, infundibular (funnel shaped), roc (a midrange disc from Innova whose name I now know refers to a mythological Arabian bird), pavinity (use of idiomatic words), usucaption (a civil law term about gaining ownership rights of property), and so on. Our modern minds have a lot of difficulty sustaining attention for this long, so I also appreciated the practice, exercise for attention. It is the first book that makes me wish these reviews were longer. It is too long for me to reread anytime soon, but you should read it.
   • Grade: A+
9. Do Parents Matter? Why Japanese Babies Sleep Soundly, Mexican Siblings Don’t Fight, and American Families Should Just Relax by Robert A. LeVine and Sarah Levine. I bought this 191 page parenting book after seeing it cited in some parenting thing I was reading and checking out a copy from the Los Angeles public library. Robert is an Harvard emeritus (retired) professor of education and human development; Sarah is his wife, has an anthropology degree and an active research career, and does not appear to be a professor. (I have seen a lot of older academic couples with this gendered division, very interesting.) The book is a summary of their research career and the broader field they find themselves in, which I’ll call comparative baby development. The writing is very clear and easy to follow, a strength though very dry. I wanted to love the book so much based on the tone of the first few pages I read, but ultimately the book reached a very different conclusion than the title suggests. In fact, parents matter tremendously. We know because kids raised in different cultures behave differently, and they learn behavior from their parents. What anxious parents want to hear is what affects a child’s long term behaviors, and here the authors punt. Not until pages 188-189 do they address kids’ later development into adolescents and beyond. It is fine that they do not want their book to be about that, but doing so makes the title and start of the book misleading. (Good marketing!) This is the book I wanted other comparative childhood books to be like, so that’s a plus. It is disappointing how comparative studies prioritize certain other groups, like southern Africans; sometimes a gaze still lingers. Chapter 7, Childhood, was the most interesting. I especially loved the history of British childrearing strategies and the rise of the anti-child labor movement. It helped me understand in context better how the royal family and other elites justify boarding schools.
   • Grade: B.
10. A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker. My mom bought me this 310 page history book for the 2022 holidays. Loving cafés and Jews, I put it at the top of my queue. It disappointed. Having read enough academic books, I knew the writing would be dry and overly detailed, but I was surprised at how little the contents support the framing in the introduction. The introduction describes a Jewish Silk Road and uses six chapters, each focusing on a city important to the diaspora, to document it. Other than focusing on the same time periods and occasionally reminding the reader of a person who appeared in an earlier chapter, there is no interaction between the cities. I was expecting to learn about how individuals moved across these cities and built international networks on which ideas were transported, but that dynamic, if it existed, is not shown. Instead, most of each chapter is devoted to analyzing different books, plays, and poems, which does not really interest me. Every chapter also emphasizes how masculine the spaces were and goes out of their way to find evidence of female participation. Such a move is fine but not in line with the rest of the book, which begs the question of why focus on gender as opposed to other sources of diversity such as class or nationality. The answer is never given.
    • Grade: B-.
11. The Great Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Puffin Classics edition, 1994). I grabbed this 281 page collection of short stories from my wife’s collection. She last read it in middle school, I have never read Holmes but seen screen adaptations, and it satisfies my requirement to be old. Overall, I liked it less than expected. For reason I thought it would be literature, but it is straightforward entertainment. That’s fine, except the “scientific reasoning” (deduction) Holmes is famous for does not seem very impressive 130 years later; perhaps the Flynn effect or inflated expectations from television and movies are to blame. In the first short story, “The Solitary Cyclist”, he does not really solve a crime; in “The Engineer’s Thumb” and “The Red-Headed League”, I did not see a crime solved. Still, I enjoyed observing how things were described, qualities of life, and turn of the century London. I do not regret reading it but won’t rush to it. There is not a bookshop.com link for a suitable edition.
    • Grade: B-
12. The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution in the Age of Analytics by Seth Partnow. I bought this 264 page basketball analytics plus memoir book on the recommendation of a colleague who knows the author. I was looking for an easy to read nonfiction book of moderate length, love basketball, and at least like data, so buying was an easy decision. I enjoyed the read and recommend it if you want to learn more about the NBA of the last 10 years, but the cover and endorsements raised my expectations too high. I thought there would be a bit more of a behind-the-scenes narrative structure to the book, but it was much more focused on analytics than I expected. At the same time the presentation of the analytics sometimes was unclear, both in words and visuals. Footnotes were used excessively and distractingly, which I rarely say because I am biased towards books with copious footnotes. My favorite chapters were the final 3 about playoff basketball, the operations of analytics departments across an NBA season, and the draft. I also enjoyed the appendix, 22 pages explaining different advanced stats that I wish I had been presented them at the beginning of the book. It was worth the read but is not close to a pantheon.
    • Grade: B
13. Paul Revere’s Ride by David Hackett Fischer. I bought this 295 page narrative nonfiction recently. I learned about it from teaching my networks class a nerd famous example about Paul Revere’s membership in Boston social organizations. That blog post’s data comes from Fischer’s book; when I researched the book and saw the rave reviews, it was a no brainer. I suppose I have not read about the American Revolution in a very long time, and this book is a very good read. Fischer makes pre-independence Boston come alive thanks to his mastery of primary and secondary sources — the book’s matter measures in at an incredible 124 pages -124!!! —– and sharp writing. Paul Revere comes alive as a dynamic, hustling, essential member of the revolutionary movement in Boston. Many other characters are made multidimensional as well; the detail Fischer puts forth for characters that would be NPC in videogames is so impressive. This book matches well with The Education of Henry Adams: I have a better understanding now of the importance of the Whig party in early America and especially in Boston and especially for the Adams family. Multiple Adamses appear in this book, including an 8 year-old JQA. I think the only reason I am not giving it an A+ is that I found the last 100 pages about the fighting at Lexington and Concord to be too detailed and therefore a bit boring; I can see how others would love those details. If the grade were a number it would be 96.
    • Grade: A.
14. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavre Smith. I read this 256 page script because I wanted something short after Fischer’s book, so I grabbed. It is my wife’s and we have had it forever, so I figured why not; plus I had not read a Los Angeles book in awhile. It is the dialogue from her one-woman play of the same name. Smith interviewed hundreds of Angelinos, from normal people to socialites to the Chief of Police I like that each person’s dialogue is short, so reading is easy; it was great nightstand reading. I dislike, very very very much dislike, how the speech was presented, like poetry – unevenly and with an implied importance in the random linebreaks that I’ve never understood. This layout decision really bothers me and largely accounts for the book’s low grade. I also did not understand why Smith spent paragraphs setting the interview scene for some people, several lines for others, and just a couple of sentences for many. The work was probably important for its time but now there are better books to read about the uprising.
    • Grade: B-.
15. 111 Places in Los Angeles That You Must Not Miss by Laurel Moglen, Julia Posey, and Lyudmila Zotova. I was skeptical about reading this 231 page sightseeing guide to Los Angeles because the title sounds like something aimed at a tourist that would not age well, and it was a gift. I put it in the bathroom because each sight is only 2 pages, 1 of text and 1 of high quality photos. It is perfect for that setting, but I enjoyed it more than most bathroom books. There were dozens of sights I did not know about that I want to see, and the ones included that I know are high quality. I learned a lot about what it is in this sprawling metropolitan area and its history. I will put it in the car and consult the maps, which is about the best praise I can give for this genre. I cannot in good conscience give a travel guide an A, but it is great for what it is.
    • Grade: A-.
16. The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende. I grabbed this 270 page short story collection needing a break from nonfiction. I have always been skeptical of endorsements for fiction, but this book is one of the few that lives up to them. I thought I would read just a couple of stories but ended up plowing through the book. Short stories are a great format for bedtime reading, and the writing is so smooth that it is effortless to keep going. If I were a creative writing student, I would study Allende’s prose carefully; I cannot currently explain exactly what made the writing so good, but I know it is. Worth a read.
    • Grade: A-.
17. How to be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikotter. I bought this 206 page nonfiction history book for $5 on a whim at a conference because I knew very little about 5 of the 8 dictators – Mussolini, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceauşescu (Romania), and Mengistu (Ehtiopia). I loved the first two chapters, Mussolini and Hitler, because they were using novel communication technology (radio and later film) to devise and enforce a new type of rule, totalitarianism. (Previous rulers such as Louis XIV could claim total control, but the reality of infrastructure and communication technology impeded their dreams.) By the time Stalin implements his cult of personality, it feels like he is following a playbook. The Mao chapter was interesting to learn about his maneuvering vis-à-vis the Japanese; I knew Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were weakened by the Japanese, but I did not realize the Communists largely sat the fight out. The book started stronger than it finished: the final four chapters were each 10 pages shorter than the first four and were closer to précis of the rulers as opposed to dissections of cults of personality. I also did not realize how personalized totalitarians make their rule: fear causes all decisions go to through them and makes them look strong, but it also hollows state institutions, weakening them when faced with a crisis.
    • Grade: B.
18. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran by Charles Kurzman. I do not remember when or where I bought this 304 page analysis of the Iranian Revolution. I do know I knew some of CK’s other work, liked it, and had seen this cited a bunch. Yes, it is an academic book, but I am including it here because it is well-written: rarely dry, with personality, often snappy. It is hard to imagine a better introduction to the Iranian Revolution. I especially like his emphasis on the contingency of events and how no one, including Ayatollah Khomeini, expected the revolution to happen until it was.
    • Grade: B.
19. L.A. Noir by John Buntin. I bought this 347 page history book on a whim at Skylight Books, the best bookstore near me, but did not read it for awhile because the small font and narrow margins intimidated me. In fact, it was an easy, pleasurable read. Reading between the lines, I think the book started as a biography of William H. Parker, LAPD’s chief of police from 1950-1966 (then and now the longest tenured ever), and Micky (Meyer) Cohen, a major and then the major crime figure in LA gangsterdom (and a Jew!), provided a worthy foil for much of his career. As the book followed those two, I learned a lot about the national cooperation of gangsters, the rise of Hollywood, the professionalization of police, the importance of William Randolph Hearst for the rise of Billy Graham, RFK and the national fear of the mob, the spontaneous origin of the Watts riots, and much else. The book would have been 75 pages shorter if it was truly just about Parker and Cohen since Cohen stopped being a threat when he went to trial on tax evasion in 1951, just when Parker became police chief. Oh well.
    • Grade: B+.
20. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Conquest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen. I bought this 463 page history book for my wife, and of course I figured I would read it at some point. It received widespread positive coverage upon publication, and I understand why. I wrote many more notes about interesting points than normal and feel like I learned a lot. For example, I did not really understand what it meant to be Comanche or Lakota, especially the extent to which they were major powers for a not insignificant amount of time. That said, the book did not live up to the hype for me. It is true that I have never read a book narrated from the perspective of Native American history, much of the rapture around that seems to me like rapture about rewriting history, and at times Hämäläinen stretches to adopt that tone. Despite such desires, in the book the incessant European colonization of all parts of the continent is the driving force. Hämäläinen does make it sound like the Iroquois, Lakota, Comanche, and maybe other groups I am forgetting were able to dominate the
    Spanish, French, British, and eventually Americans for some decades. The fast pace of the book and huge corps of characters make it difficult, however, to fully appreciate those accomplishments. The most interesting fact I learned is the identity of Daniel Boone. I knew he was a frontiersman, I did not realize he was part of the first wave of homesteaders to break across the Appalachia Mountains, into Kentucky in Boone’s case. In the Revolutionary War, he fought Native Americans allied with the British. Separately, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands are African.
    • Grade: B+
21. Boyle Heights: How A Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy by George J. Sánchez. I bought this book unplanned from Skylight Books, my favorite nearby bookstore. The author is a USC professor born in Boyle Heights, so the book blends the detailed citing of academic works with the passion of personal writing. The best I can say about this book is that I learned a lot. For example, originally it was going to be the location of higher income homes, but the difficulty of establishing reliable water kept those homes on the other side of the LA River. Once zoning decreed that industry would be south and east of Downtown LA, Boyle Heights became the working class neighborhood it still is. I knew Boyle Heights was more ethnically diverse pre-war, but I did not realize how prevalent Mexican-Americans have been throughout. It’s not so much that Boyle Heights wasJewish, Japanese, or Black neighborhood but that they and other groups passed through the neighborhood. Perhaps the most interesting fact I learned is that the first live local news in LA was the 1959 removal of families from Chavez Ravine to clear space for Dodger Stadium. I am glad I read the book but you probably won’t find it interesting unless you care about the neighborhood. I’d give it a higher grade but think As should be saved for truly outstanding books.
    • Grade: B+
22. The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father by Dr. Anna Machin. My mom bought me this 270 page nonfiction fatherhood popular science book from my Amazon List. I had added it as research for my book on fatherhood but never got around to ordering it, so I’m glad she did. (If you are or know an agent interested in parenting books, please get in touch or refer me.) The main lesson of this book, written by an Oxford psychologist, is that I can write a better book for fathers.  I also appreciate being able to use, justifiably, very bad grades in these reviews. Otherwise, this book was horrible, honestly. I have rarely written so few future notes for myself on the cover page, and I have never made all of those negatives, as they were here. The book is bad pop science – modern humans exist because fatherhood was invented! – and boring summation of literature the author knows (but does not cite), without a clear framework to understand it. Some people say you should stop reading a book once you get nothing out of it, but to them I say I never would have reached Chapter 10, the worst chapter I read this year. Machin all of a sudden uses the second person extensively. Worse, confusingly. When explaining the quality vs. quantity reproductive tradeoff, Machin writes, “One other aspect of your life history, influenced again by the unique way your species apportions its lifetime’s quota of energy […]” as those the reader could be of a different species than human. Or the basic knowledge failure 14 pages later: “the most effective time to achieve [socialization] is during those first 1,000 days, up to your child’s second birthday.” The author is British, but I believe years are as long there as here, 365 days. So, is the father to wait 730 (365*2) days or up to 1000?!?! Perhaps the author is of another species.
    • Grade: C-