Bookish Thoughts

After taking several months off, I finally made it back to my book club the month we read The Library Book . This one took me a while to get through. It was a little bit dry, but it ended up being interesting. This book is about the central library in LA. It takes as it's entry point the time the library burned down and the arson investigation that happened after, digging in to the main suspect's life. The author also looks at the deeper history of the library - how it grew and changed under varying leadership through the decades. And she follows around the current staff to get a sense of how the library operates today. These three threads are all woven together in a way that got frustrating at times. The various threads meant that this book wandered and jumped around a lot. It worked for me, because I was having trouble focusing at that point anyway. Each chapter is pretty self-contained, so I was able to follow those. But I had a hard time putting it all together and remember...

If knowledge is power, then ignorance cannot be bliss. I first read this critique of high school American History textbooks when I was in high school. I was just precocious enough that I couldn't resist the title. Especially since I was at the bookstore to pick up a text that we'd received a censored version of in English class. I was keenly aware that my teachers were holding information back, and I was not happy about it. Loewen argues that kids hate history because the textbooks have removed everything interesting from it. Historical figures are presented as two-dimensional heroes rather than complex people and every major decision is presented as a foregone conclusion rather than the result of a complicated debate with many competing interests. In an attempt to make (white, male) students proud of America, the textbooks authors remove anything that might paint the country in a bad light. The narrative that's left is flimsy, inconsistent, and largely untrue. There...

Code Girls  is a phenomenally well-researched book about the role women played in code breaking during World War II. The author interviewed everyone she could find, read countless declassified documents and requested that more be declassified, and toured several buildings in and around DC that were used as the various bases of operations. There's no question that she has a really good handle on what was a largely unexplored aspect of American history. Unfortunately, she had a hard time wrangling all of that into a cohesive narrative. I think this book would have benefited greatly from a more aggressive editor. Mundy wants to share everything she learned, and it just doesn't all fit into a ~400 page book. Multiple paragraphs could have been moved to an appendix or the end notes. And while it's great to hear about all the women involved, it became hard to keep track of them all. The narrative as a whole would have been better served by focusing in on just a few women, inste...

This is one of those books that I debated not finishing. It's a history of the world, seen through the lens of salt. It's all about how salt has influenced trade, taxes, and cuisine around the world. How it helped to globalize the economy and the culture, and what's changed as we've begun to understand it (and chemistry) better and salt has gone from rare to common. This is all interesting stuff, and I honestly learned a lot while I was reading this book. Which is why I pushed through and finished it. I kept coming across interesting facts that I found myself having to share with Kevin. It gave me a new appreciation for the food I was eating and all the many uses of salt in our world. It made me want to visit the Italian Riviera But it was also an incredibly dry, boring book. There were innumerable lists, and it was easy to get bogged down in all the details. All the ins and outs of tax codes and ship building got tiresome and difficult to navigate. I wanted a bit m...

This is the book I wanted The Science of Discworld II: The Globe  to be. It deals with the same material and comes at it from the same perspective, but it's much better organized and more comprehensive, with less of a tendency to wander into the "what if" of it all. Sapeins  is a comprehensive history of humankind, looking at large trends over the existence of our species and mostly glossing over details. Harari focuses on large, sweeping trends in an effort to find larger patterns. He breaks this history down into three revolutions. The cognitive revolution, when humans leaped to the top of the food chain. The agricultural revolution, when we went from hunter/gatherers to farmers and started building cities. And the scientific revolution, when we admitted our ignorance and started making great strides in understanding. The thing that sets us apart from other animals, Harari argues and I find myself agreeing, is our ability to tell stories. To make up fictions and e...

I'll admit, I struggled with this book. It was a surface-level round-up of a very long history spanning decades of aeronautical and space history in Langley, Virginia. It was the author's first book, and it showed in her run-on sentences and difficulty in nailing down a cohesive narrative. It didn't help that I was trying to read the book in 5 and 10 minute chunks, and I was having trouble really getting into it. That said, this is a really important book, and I'm glad I read it. I have yet to see the movie, but it's clear that it condensed the story dramatically, reducing some of it's effectiveness. This isn't the story of a handful of black women who, against all odds, contributed to America's space program. It's the story of generations of black families who were employed buy the Army and NASA. Hundreds of men and women who were able to put their engineering and mathematical talent to use building planes and later spaceships. An entire town that...

Mary Roach is a delight. Her books are often filed under pop-science, though I think they have more of a historical lean than a scientific one. She picks a topic and then delves into all the interesting little nooks and crannies, resulting in books that are equal parts hilarious and informative. I read Bonk (about the study of human sexuality) ages ago. (Actually, it was the book I was reading when I moved from Colorado to Virginia). Picking up Stiff reminded me that I need to track down the rest of her books. Stiff is about the historical use of human cadavers. They've mostly been used in medicine, everything from organ transplants to labs for student surgeons to strange, traditional treatments. But there have been other uses as well, particularly in the auto industry and the military as we search for ways to make dangerous things safer. There are also chapters about cannibalism (mostly urban legends, from what I gathered) and the disposal of human bodies. For the most part...

Oh my God, Benjamin Franklin is such a pompous blowhard. This book read like a 200+ page humblebrag, and the takeaway message was that Franklin was perfect and if we were all exactly like him the whole world would be perfect, too. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But only slight. And maybe part of my problem with this book was the style in which is was written, with Franklin holding himself up as a shining example of virtue and prosperity and Capitalizing every other Word for Emphasis or Something. I mean, as soon as he listed Daniel Defoe as one of his favorite authors I knew this book would be a struggle to get through. Thankfully it was short. And there was a lot of military stuff at the end that I basically just skipped. But for all that this book was a struggle, there were a few interesting things. Though Franklin fought to make even the interesting bits extremely dry and a tad repetitive. He was influential in even more ways than I remember learning about...

The Boy Genius and the Mogul tells the story of the invention of television. This is one of those inventions where you can't really point to one person. It's not like the lightbulb and Thomas Edison or the cotton gin and Eli Whitney. Television was something that a lot of people were working towards at the same time, a race to create this new technology that everyone expected and could tell was very near. It was also at the time when science shifted from lone men with a lot of money and leisure time inventing things on their own to massive, well-funded research divisions under the umbrella of technology companies. So there isn't really one person who can take credit for the invention of television. But there are a handful of key people, and one in particular whose ideas, at least, were a few years ahead of everyone else. The book focuses in on Phil Farnsworth (namesake for the professor in Futurama ), a young genius who worked tirelessly to get a television i...

I continue my recently renewed interest in non-fiction works with Rosalind Miles' Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World . I'd seen a few excerpts floating around the internet and, honestly, who can resist that title? This wasn't the greatest book I ever read. There's a lot of anger in these pages, and an uncomfortable amount of flipping some Freudian theories to accuse men of womb envy and natural inferiority to account for their oppression of women over the millenia. Additionally, while individual women are referenced a great deal, their struggles tend to be painted with a single brush. Intersections of gender with race or class are largely ignored and glossed over. There is a chapter about imperialism that touches on some of these issues, but Miles also misinterprets Sojourner Truth's famous "And Ain't I A Woman?" speech as being about the virgin/whore dichotomy rather than race relations. Despite that, ther...