I usually like these annual collections because I can sample a bunch of authors I don’t know writing about topics I’m not too familiar with in periodicals I haven’t read much. The Best American Science Writing 2007 comes up a bit short on all counts, but here are the ones I liked…
A clear favorite for […]
This makes the third Michael Lewis book I’ve read (see also my take on Moneyball and The Blind Side from last fall). It’s another good one. Liar’s Poker is Lewis’ first book. He writes about his years on Wall Street working with the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the heady 1980s. It’s a biography of […]
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote […]
By now you’ve probably heard Michael Pollan’s seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally […]
I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn’t do much for me.
Rodney Rothman’s piece—”I Still Like Jessica”—is probably my favorite. It’s a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see […]
Llewelyn, I dont even want the money. I just want us to be back like we was.
We will be.
No we wont. I’ve thought about it. It’s a false god.
Yeah. But it’s real money.
I don’t have much to say about No Country for Old Men other than that it’s every bit as good as the excellent […]
“If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?”
On his first trip outside of Poland, an editor gave Ryszard Kapuściński a copy of Herodotus‘ The Histories (which I’ve never read or read much about, besides this recent New Yorker article). The book became his off-and-on companion for the rest of his career in journalism. Kapuściński […]
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one […]
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.
Visual thinking is […]
In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing “Yankee Doodle,” “Home Sweet Home,” Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. […]
Posy Simmonds originally wrote Gemma Bovery as a 100+ episode serial in The Guardian. The story is told with a cool mix of comics panels, splash illustrations, big chunks of text. It all mixes in together.
The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s […]
Eric Wilson’s book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy “challenges the recent happiness trend and celebrates the meditative virtues of melancholy.” He’s most successful when talking about the meditative virtues. The argument is simple: acknowledging the tragic, the struggle, the rain, and the inevitable decline of all things makes joy, success, the sun, and livelihood […]
I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all […]
The title of Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a bit misleading. Don’t get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn’t feel […]
Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition […]
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we […]
Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes […]
A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne:
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—you’ll have to trust me that it’s worth your time]
Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. […]
It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, […]
If you’ve ever worked in a library (I’ve put in a couple years), or if you just like libraries and spend inordinate amounts of time there (I’ve put in a couple dozen years), Don Borchert’s book may give you a bit of déjà vu. Somehow he got the same customers I got, even though he […]
Each chapter of Faint Praise features a measured, workmanlike argument about topics like book selection, or matching reviewers and books, or the ethical minefields of the industry. Surprisingly thoughtful but not exciting. Gail Pool doesn’t work up much outrage or seem very enthusiastic about the status of the book reviewing trade. She doesn’t spend a […]
Each chapter of The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese takes on a broad topic, like criminal law, tort, money, or sex. Author Adam Freedman brings up the main vocabulary (habeas corpus, misdemeanor, legal tender) and some of the more obscure ideas (per stirpes, res ipsa loquitur), exploring their roots along […]
Why Mars & Venus Colllide is about stress and communication between men and women. Our modern lifestyle is breakneck-paced, relationship roles have changed, our responsibilities and stress levels grow as our time to deal with them decreases. Welcome to today, nothing new. So what do you do?
According to John Gray, the first step is to […]
Stradivarius: legendary quality, mystery. It’s upper-crust and exotic. How did Stradivari make such wonderful instruments? What sort of alchemy was involved, and why haven’t we solved it yet? John Marchese’s book The Violin Maker: Finding a Centuries-Old Tradition in a Brooklyn Workshop talks about the mysteries and realities of violin-making. His book follows the work […]
There’s potential for a doctoral dissertation about The Rhetorical Use of Capital Letters in the Writing Of George Saunders. The usage comes in a couple flavors. There are the ineffable concepts, like Freedom and Humility. There’s the personalization of general categories, like Writers and the Little Guy. There’s the tongue-in-cheek categorization of human sub-groups, like, […]
Clyde Fans: Book One, by the cartoonist Seth, is split into two halves. Each half tracks the memories and relationship between two brothers, both of whom worked for the family business, the Clyde Fans Company.
In the first section, set in 1997, we see the older Abraham walks from room to room in the old Clyde […]
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can’t survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, […]
Flash Fiction Forward collects a bunch of stories that only take a couple of page turns to finish. One thing I thought was odd is how none of the stories take on a particular genre, and how many of them seem to have a contemporary setting. Why not a tight little detective story, or a […]
At the heart of You Don’t Love Me Yet is a band. Well, a band without a name that hasn’t had a gig yet. The story follows Lucinda, the bassist, as she navigates the post-break-up phase with Matthew, the lead singer. The whole book is about process, creation, becoming, limbo, liminal states. The book starts […]
Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, […]
I first heard about A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age when Joshua Blankenship posted this excellent quote from author Daniel Pink. Great stuff, so I found the book, which isn’t as great.
The premise is that the Information Age was led by left-brained, linear-thinkers. Now, as we enter the […]
Ray Bradbury’s latest, Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan ‘99, gathers a pair of unpublished novellas that he’s been brewing for a couple decades. The first story, “Somewhere a Band Is Playing,” revisits the usual Bradburyan perfect-yet-eery small-town America, in the form of a writer’s colony where there are no children. […]
I enjoyed reading Moneyball last month, so I got the notion to explore some other baseball books. The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed is pretty good, and a surprisingly quick read. The author/ economist JC Bradbury runs Sabernomics, a baseball nerd blog that’s well worth your time.
As you might expect, Bradbury applies some statistical […]
I like books, and therefore tend to like books about books and the bookly experience. Enter Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. An excerpt from the first chapter from the book, “Marrying Libraries,” is available online.
Fadiman has a somewhat unique experience, growing up in a family that is pretty much insane when […]
I finished this one a couple weeks ago, but never wrote anything. In Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk writes with an eye to the reader’s experience of comics. He avoids a lot of comics theory (”You already pretty much know what they are, and ‘pretty much’ is good enough”), focusing instead on loving criticism.
It was […]
I’m fairly open to reading ‘girly’ books every now and then (see my reviews of Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge, How to Walk in High Heels, and The Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend). A friend of mine got me to read He’s Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. It’s […]
The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse is a book by Jonathan Selwood. Maybe I have a basic malfunction, but a lot of books that aim for humor are just kind of exhausting.
There’s some interesting goofy personalities in the book, but they just sort of drift between skits. Ehhhh… I don’t like whining about books all that […]
A little slow getting to this one, but it was worth the wait. The Best American Comics 2006. There’s a lot to cover in the collection, so I’ll just highlight the authors and stories I enjoyed the most.
Joel Priddy, “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack”: a short bio of an aging superhero who […]
I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. The Elements of Style is a handy little guide, sure. Brief, pithy. I suppose I’ve just heard it mentioned so many times that I was expecting a bit more. Honestly the best part of this particular edition of Elements was the illustrations by Maira Kalman. (Kalman […]
It hurts so much when you want a book to be fantastic, but it’s not. Before I go there, I’ll mention a couple saving graces for The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. There’s a great quote from one of the main characters, architect Daniel Burnham: […]
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