- Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear. I bought this 233 page memoir soon after my daughter’s birth on the back of strong reviews. I enjoyed it and recommend it to all parents. Brooks had a quick errand to run before the airport, her young son refused to stay at home with her mother, so she brought him with her. Since the weather was cool, the errand short, and getting a toddler into and out of a car for a short time a pain, Brooks rolled down the windows and left him alone for 5 minutes. A nosy Nancy saw, filmed the situation, and called the police as Brooks returned home, and the book is an exposition of the subsequent events. The legal drama is perhaps 1/3 of the book, as it turns out that if you are an educated white person with no prior interaction with the legal system, you are treated nicely. Brooks served 100 hours of community service and attended a parenting class, an anticlimax. The book is most interesting for its explanation for how we arrived at a state of mass fear where many states’ laws are so vaguely written that any stranger can report any parent for neglecting their child. Parents stress, fear, and low quality of mental life are a natural result. Worse, the behaviors people get reported for, such as letting their kid visit a park alone or staying in the car on a cool day, are much less risky than accepted choices such as owning a firearm, installing an in-ground pool, or driving with your kid in the car. Also, Brooks is a great writer.
- Grade: A-
- The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld. I avoided reading my wife’s 156 page graphic novel because its focus seemed too close to work. I was sort of right, though the book, not being academic, does not go into enough detail to to inform my research, except by anecdote, which is fine. Some interesting facts I learned are that William Randolph Hurst’s admonition, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” to his illustrator, Frederick Remington, by a reporter who was in Europe at the time; newspapers did not publish bylines until the Civil War; and the advertising revenue model was created in 1833 by the New York Sun, replacing the subscriber model and therefore inventing modern journalism; and in 1545, 90 years after the printing press’ invention, Conrad Gessner attempted to assemble every book printed but soon restricted himself to Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The illustrations are nice.
- Grade: B+
- Loot by Tania James. My wife bought me this 289 page novel for the holidays. It received rave reviews and made several best of lists, and I agree. The book is excellently written and joins the inner circle of books that have taught me vocabulary, or at least exposed me to new words. I don’t really have any quibbles, though I found the first half, set in Mysore, India much more fun than the rest of the book, probably because it exposed a world with which I am least familiar. The rest of the book was more character driven, less my style; still well-written throughout though. The Mysore vocabulary and characters are so alive that I thought they were fictional until I googled Mysore’s ruler for this review and discovered he, his kingdom, his collaboration with the French, and his focus on artillery are real. Definitely worth a purchase if you like historical fiction, South Asia, mechanics, or, of course, love stories.
- Grade: A
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. I picked up this 185 page novel in Monterrey, CA, where cannery row is, on my wife and mine’s babymoon in early 2022. It stayed at my bedside until February of this year, when I picked it up because I had forgot to bring down another book. It was much more enjoyable than expected, especially once I skipped the 27 page academic introduction (not written by Steinbeck). It has been a few years since I’ve read Of Mice and Men or Grapes of Wrath, but I think I like this one more. The writing is sparse but vivid, all of the characters have endearing qualities, and it rambles without a plot in a way that feels very modern. My favorite part are the short vignette chapters that occur roughly every 2.5 chapters. As far as I can tell, they bear no relation to the larger narrative – one is told from a gopher’s perspective, for example – but they are sweet nuggets. I couldn’t tell you what the book is about, but it’s worth picking up.
- Grade: A-
- Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write by Helen Sword. My mom bought me this 219 page study from my Amazon Wish List. The book is smoothly written. My favorite part is hearing the voice of nerdy famous people such as Alison Gopnik, Steven Pinker, and Douglas Hofstadter. I also took away some good ideas to help with writing, some of which I had forgotten: leave a day’s writing unfinished so it is easy to start the next day, track my writing pace in words per minute, listen to Baroque music at 60 beats per minute (that’s a new one), and set aside one full day for research writing. At the end of the day, however, the book is more a profile of the different ways in which people write than a specific guide to writing. That is precisely Sword’s goal, but what I was left with is the understanding, which I usually feel these days after reading self-help, of remembering what I already knew: the secret is to find the environment that works for and write. For some people that is large chunks of intermittent time, though for most people that is consistent writing at a consistent time of day. Nothing new there but good to be reminded of it. Reading it reminded me of reading Tim Ferris’ Tools of Titans: confirmation that your behavior is similar to high performers’ is comforting.
- Grade: B
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. I had put off reading this 239 page history book because I knew it would be depressing, and it was even more depressing than I realized. Because the book’s cover uses a zoning map (where the term “redlining” comes from), I thought it would be only about residential policies, but the took’s target is American society writ large. Rothstein documents the local, state, and, especially, federal government policies that intentionally relegated African Americans to second-class status after the end of Reconstruction. Contrary to common conservative claims, segregation is not a result of natural preferences but the result of the FHA refusing to insure real estate developments that would sell to African Americans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not insuring loans to them, and law enforcement turning a blind eye to harassment, intimidation, and violence directed against African Americans brave enough to move into White neighborhoods. The spatial segregation that defines American society, which I never really thought about as a kid and had not thought about in enough detail before this book, is a choice we made as a country. Even with race neutral policies, the lack of new housing construction in the last 30 years has frozen in place these divisions that started in the 1870s, grew through the 1920s, and became codified in the 1930s.
- Grade: A
- My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. I received this 51 page book from a mutual fund I used to own that has not updated their mailing list since I sold my shares. I took it on vacation because it was short, and that was the right decision. The best parts were learning about his backstory and personality. His father fought for Napoleon, he grew up rich (horse, maids), and his older brother was the true genius. He was a champion crow catcher but stopped competing when a a murder attacked him to free their friends, designed inventions in his head, had very acute sight and hearing, had some OCD tendencies, and was an even harder worker than Edison. Most of that I learned in the first 15 pages, while the rest of the book is given to describing his inventions in ways that are not understandable at all. For example, I thought he was delirious describing a machine that could send energy all over the world, and only later did I learn he was talking about radio, which he invented. The book would have been better if he had a ghostwriter.
- Grade: C
- Feeling jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum. I purchased this 250 page book because the topic sounded relevant, I’ve learned I like literary criticism, and the reviews were strong. I stopped reading at page 92 because it read like the worst of the academic humanities. First, there is a persistent engagement with Freud that I don’t understand except for the fact that he is Jewish, though I don’t think that’s why he recurs because the author frequently clarifies that everything she says can apply to everyone everywhere. Second, I cannot define envy (chapter 2) or guilt (chapter 3, where I quit) after having read the book because Baum gives tens of definitions of each as described by others. On one hand, that is fine because in my own research on emotions I have realized there are not agreed upon definitions of them; on the other, the author should at least have her own voice or endorse a definition. This incessant invocation of others’ voice reminds me of Maria Popova’s emails, but those I enjoy because they are short and focused. It was basically this constant genuflection to a discredited psychoanalyst and refusal to take a stance on anything that made me put down the book. Third, the writing that is not quotes is assertion. Since the assertions are about interiority and are not substantiated by any studies, I have no idea what to make of them. They are statements without data, my least favorite type of statement. The only notes I made were “I’m not into it, too much assertion w/o fact” (page 63) and “Adorno is Jewish” (page 90). For the latter, I at least learned an iota.
- Grade: C-
- The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul’s of Today’s Students by Allan Bloom. I grabbed this 382 page cultural criticism from the giveaway table the neigbhorhood’s hippies maintain because it is famous. Once again – I feel like I say this for every third nonfiction book – the contents barely correlate with the title. The book’s reputation is as the 1980s’ conservative critique of higher education, a genealogy starting with at least William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, so I hesitated to read because that book and the modern critiques are unhinged. While the book does express dismay at the state of students and learning in universities, the critique does not map onto any American political ideology. Bloom, a 1955 University of Chicago PhD who wound up back there for most of his career, is very hinged. He is a political theorist advocating for deep, personal engagement with classics of Western political thought. His favorites include Plato and Rousseau, and he identifies Heidegger and Nietzsche as the most impactful modern philosophers. The first 120 pages are about how modern students are not inquisitive and are too quick to let moral relativism prevent them from serious intellectual engagement, the middle 100 pages are political philosophy I had trouble following (chapter titles include “The Self”, “Culture”, “Values”, “Our Ignorance”), and the final 140 are a passionate interpretation of Enlightenment and the university as philosophers’ project to protect themselves from society’s ire against their frequently enraging arguments. The last half of these pages are about the 1960s and universities’ abandonment of their courage in the face of student agitation. I was not expecting a political philosophy book but enjoyed reading one for the first time since graduate school. The writing is also unique. On one hand, I always appreciate a book that teaches me vocabulary, in this case the most since Henry Adams or Nabokov: desuetude (state of disuse), corybantic (frenzied), votary (devoted follower), detumescent (subsidence of a swelling), purgation (cleansing), noumenal (existing independent of human senses), peripety (reversal of fortune), and architectonic (foundational to society). On the other, sentences are quite peripatetic (meandering) and include more demonstratives than are necessary. The writing style did not feel old – Bloom was born in 1930 – but simply ponderous. While we almost always rely on others’ opinions about things to form our own, reading the book was a reminder that we would all be better off outsourcing judgment as little as possible.
- Grade: B+.
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. My wife bought me this 1,162 page history book after it received some media coverage last year and I remarked several times that I wanted to read it. I put off reading it for a few months because of its size, but I finally picked it up because I told myself that if I did not complete it I could blame it on my then incoming second child. I only regret that I had not read it years earlier. This is the first book for which I’ve felt the urge to write a full review, so here I will focus on big picture things. The most remarkable feat of the book is that it is excellently written on every page, probably the best written non-fiction book I have ever read. It was like dozens of New Yorkers put together, which perhaps makes sense given that Caro’s editor was Robert Gotlieb, who would later edit the magazine. The book is about good governance movements, bureaucracy, leadership, and so much more. I was surprised to not see Jane Jacobs at all. I understood her career as having taken off because she successfully opposed Moses’ plans to raze Greenwich Village. That could be true, but by the time she opposed him, he had already been weakened by the First and Second Battles of Central Park, against mothers and Shakespeare in the Park specifically. I put off reading it afraid I would learn I can’t read such a long book. Instead, I learned that very few people can write such a long one.
- Grade: A+
- Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita. My mom bought me this 230 page magical realism novel a couple of years ago. I had never heard about it, probably because it was published in 1997 (though reissued in 2017). I am a sucker for magical realism, though I don’t think I’ve read any since The Sellout. The book tells the story of one week from seven characters’ perspective. Reviews tell me it is considered a classic LA novel. It is very Southern California and still reads as relevant; the book is clearly set in the 1990s but I assumed it was written more recently. The stories weave together and are clearly about some mixture of globalization, colonization, the slow growth movement’s failure to grow housing, media, and the internet, but I cannot tell if those come together into a single theme. There is an orange that is meaningful that interacts with the magical character, but I am not sure what the symbolism means. I thought I missed something because of the late night reading, but reading a few book reviews reassures me that is not the case. The book is chaotic and interwoven, but no one can tell you exactly what it is about. In a lot of ways, that is what LA is.
- Grade: B
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