Kait
Reads like a first novel, in the best possible way (though it's actually a sophomore outing). This story is so full of ideas, histories and emotions that I can't believe it didn't germinate and grow inside the author's brain for an entire lifetime before bursting forth in full bloom. I can't wait to go back and read other works, or for something new to come.
I kind of can't believe how much I disliked this book.
I will admit to being a huge Firefly/Serenity fan, so perhaps my expectations were too high. But this story felt like a pastiche, with familiar names and places jumbled together. I get the impulse to want to use elements that fans are comfortable with (Badger! Persephone! The store where Kaylee's dress came from! Jayne's hat!), but this story added nothing to the universe. It felt so rehashed I legitimately think it might possible to do this story as an episode simply by cutting and pasting together clips from the existing show and movie.
The writing is stilted (“[Inara] tried to think of a word to encapsulate how she personally felt about him. She didn't know if there was one. What was going on between her and Mal was too complicated for a single descriptor. It was a tangled knot of inhibitions and unspoken emotions which they themselves might never get around to unraveling.”), and while I know a lot of the character work on the show was nonvocal, there are subtler ways to deal with such things in literature.
If you're looking for new adventures of Serenity, I highly recommend Stephen Brust's unauthorized novel, “My Own Kind of Freedom.” Though it's technically non-canon and only fan fiction, it's a much more honest telling of a story in the Firefly universe. I hope the other planned novels take their cues from it rather than this.
A first-class book on the flash crash of 1987, which didn't happen nor recover quite as quickly as everyone remembers. Extensively well-researched, the author takes pains to lay out the likely causes and impetuses for the big day without seeming to lay the blame unfairly on any given sector. I was pleased that she drew connections to both the modern day and more modern crashes (2008) without swamping the rest of the work. It's a little dry, sure, but given the subject matter I'd say it actually overachieves with regard to readability. An excellent retelling of this chapter of financial history.
This is either a very poorly constructed argument for a taxonomy of technology that forever loses the thread when it wanders into blimps, or a decent history of the folly of Zeppelins with a malformed treatise on the author's invented “pathological technologies” grafted on. Either half can't be given more than three stars, and this is not a case where there's anything gained by pairing them together.
I don't even necessarily think the author's theory is wrong or uninteresting, but the examples he chooses seem spectacularly ill-advised and not internally consistent. He also presents an extraordinarily narrow of view of how science happens and what benefits any individual project or research brings.
Written two centuries earlier, one can imagine the scorn brought onto “electricity” — imagine the immense expense of installing wires into every home simply in order to give light, which we already have with fire. How could one possibly hope to harness such a fundamental energy of the cosmos?
Extra bonus raspberries are due for attempting to sarcastically damn with faint praise a DARPA project as having an “original” way of doing things because the agency funded an outlandish idea (a 100-Year Starship program) in the hopes that something good might come out of it — in other words, every DARPA project, ever.
I'm usually wary of epistolary novels - in the back of my head, English lit canon snoozefests loom large. No worries about that here, as the novel is both good and an excellent use of the form - I don't think the same story could have been told this well any other way.
Nuclear Family is thoroughly modem and consistently funny. It builds really well, using a number of different narrators (live, dead and inanimate) to advance the stories and characters, each imbued with a unique voice. Definitely worth a read.
I'm really conflicted about this book — it's very in-depth, well-researched and written in an engaging fashion. The author goes into exhaustive detail about the history of autism and Asperger's Syndrome ... but relegates the ostensible point of the book (neurodiversity, present and future) to what amounts to an extended epilogue. If you're looking for a comprehensive history of autism, you've found the right book. If you're looking for anything else, keep searching.
An excellent retelling of The Tempest, Atwood's update of a fairly dry 500-year-old piece of canon belongs in the same echelon as Ten Things I Hate About You in terms of remaining true to the essence of the story while making it comprehensible without a lot of work. It's lively, modern without being too insistent about it and maybe tends a little bit toward Hamiltonian rap-musical excess but ultimately brings it around.
This is a fairly thrilling account of the founding and actions of Britain's special forces during World War II. It is, by the very nature of its source material, gripping and exciting stuff. Macintyre is thorough (perhaps a bit too much), but the book seems determined to make sure that all who fought and died are remembered as much as possible; so while the account might drag on a bit at times, it certainly feels complete and, to an extent, definitive. I wouldn't be able to give you an accurate accounting of everything that happened (because of the wide range of activities described over a good third of the earth's surface), but I bet I could keep you enthralled a while.
A short but thorough enough behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Back To The Future trilogy. It (understandably) focuses heavily on the first movie, and its only real shortcoming is the lack of new Michael J Fox material. it's a true compliment to say that this is one old-movie recounting that performs better as a book rather than a lazy magazine oral history.
Less prescriptivist than most (to it's benefit), Hillbilly Elegy uses the saga of one Kentucky family to explain the societal pressures, pitfalls and opportunities (or lack thereof) faced by working-class whites. Surprisingly objective for a pseudo-memoir, Vance's appraisal of the sources of strife as multifaceted ring truer than most attempts to simplify it to “government,” “personal choice” or “culture” - all of which undoubtedly play a large role, but never an all-encompassing one. And despite a pretty dire personal narrative, the unique handholds in life that offered the author an opportunity to hold on and propel himself out of a bad situation undergird the book with an oddly uplifting, optimistic feeling even when at its darkest moments.
I think this biography does a remarkably even-handed job of presenting the facts about Donald Trump. The difference in opinion about him largely rests on how you read into those facts. Trump is unabashedly concerned with one person: Donald Trump. This does not make him unique or scary or terrible: It simply is his primary motivation.
It seems different and strange because a) he never says so directly, choosing instead to rely on his salesman's instincts to read the mood and close the sale, and b) this hyperfocused narcissism never faded or tempered the way we expect it to once a person reaches a certain level of success. It seems especially odd to us since politicians who run for president almost by definition have the same level of self-confidence, but they've learned it's better
electorally to obfuscate any self-interest - or at the very least it gets filtered by staff and handlers.
This book is unlikely to clear up any mysteries for you in terms of who you want to be president! You will likely find the right information to push you one way or the other in whatever direction you were already leaning. Nonetheless, it's worth the read if you're interested in the “why” of why Donald Trump does/did anything. I'll even give you a clue as his motivation: Because Donald Trump thought that doing that thing was the best for Donald Trump.
There comes a clichèd point in most stories that deal with insanity where the nutjob asks the sane one who determines what sanity is, and maybe we've got the whole thing inside-out. I can say without hesitation that The Hike is batshit insane, but there's nonetheless a steadfast internal logic and heart that undergirds the craziness and connects all of the terrifying parts into a cohesive (if hallucinatory) whole.
It's rare to find a “grounded” fantasy that doesn't traffic overtly in “magic” with laws and rules (think Harrys Potter and Dresden), especially when combined with a rollicking adventure plot. Think of The Hike as a modern-day Odysseus, only with lot more LSD involved (in execution if not authorship). Eminently relatable main character, highly entertaining and endearing sidekicks, thoroughly enjoyable to read (unlike trying to slash your way through the thickets of this review), this is a fun book.
It feels like a cliché to even say so (especially since it came up so often in the book itself), but I had no idea the situation was as bad as it is for women. The most insidious part is that for individual occurrences you can almost convince yourself that it's an outlier, or that it might be simple ignorance rather than malice. But the overwhelming numbers and similarities not only go toward proving that is blatant sexism, but that it's pervasive and probably affects things in non-obvious ways as well.
Knowledge is the first step toward making it better. Calling attention to it, cutting it off and speaking out when it happens is the next — a step we all need to take.
An interesting if one-sided look at how the personal computer industry developed during the 80s. Canion's obviously knowledgable — as founder and CEO of Compaq, his company led the charge against IBM's various attempted machinations to control the computer industry. There's more than a bit of rose-tinted hue around this tome (literally only one “bad decision” is ever discussed, hesitantly at that, and ultimately turns into a big company-rousing win anyway), but it's an interesting part of computer history nonetheless.
The completely unnecessary add-on of a section about the iPad/iPhone/iPod is both completely unnecessary (as evidenced by this sentence's preface), self-serving and even then judging it wrong. It's a really bizarre jump from the end of the book (1991) to the introduction of the iPad (2010) in the span of a page turn.
History is as much about what you don't write as what you do. Because of the legitimately incomprehensible entangling of stores and narratives, you have to choose a place to start, decide on a place to end and define the boundaries along the way. The Boys in the Boat does a brilliant job of this, despite the notable handicap of dealing with history's most unexplainable character, Adolf Hitler.
The book is mostly the story of one man, Joe Rantz, whom the author (Daniel James Brown) met in the last few months of Rantz's life, though it does weave the story of the other men in the crew throughout as well.
Rantz alone would provide one hell of a compelling narrative on his own, though — born to a gifted, hardscrabble mechanic who buried two wives before Rantz graduated college, Rantz embodied the epitome of the self-sustaining man. He joined the crew team because he thought it would allow him to attain a personal goal (have enough money to graduate). He learned how to subsume his own desires into the team's, to strive for the mystical rowing notion of “swing,” all rowers in perfect harmony. (A side-effect of the book: I now feel like I know as much about the sport as a JV member of the crew myself, though obviously that's not enough.)
Gliding through some of the more tumultuous years of American history, Brown does a masterful job of giving just enough historical background to render the story more relatable and comprehendible. With skillful suspense, Brown kept bringing me to the point of active rooting for a team during a race that ended more than eight decades ago. Don't even think about putting it down once you get to junior year — it'll require a solid sprint to the end.
I typically describe Klosterman as the authorial equivalent of “fridge logic” - really interesting stuff in the moment that starts to logarithmically decay the moment you close the book until it settles in around 50 percent of where it started from. But, given that Klosterman often succeeds in nimbly managing previously less-explored areas of your mind, this is not at all a bad thing.
BWWW is a series of thought experiments that attempts to examine modern life through the same lens we view the distant past: What is likely to survive, what artist or author will emerge to represent his or her medium as Platonic ideal (for example, were we in Ancient Greece Klosterman might be telling you that this Plato guy that no one's heard of [at the time] might make it big because he's not as popular now).
As thought experiments, they're mostly interesting but even more so than traditional futurology, it suffers by virtue of being unprovable and contrarian. I don't even think most of them are wrong - all at the very least have inner threads of logic that seem more or less resilient when you tug at them. But my mind can only be so elastic, and building up one brain-stretcher upon another leaves me weary, and accepting of arguments if only to prevent defeat by them - not out of any real consideration or judgment.
Then again, I'm not sure the specific arguments were the point, anyway. The main takeaway seems to center around the idea of being open to new ideas - not in the traditional sense of “maybe I should do something different” but “maybe ideas or formulations I possess that are central to my understanding of reality might be completely wrong.” The point is not to run screaming in the streets, tearing out your hair and warning everyone you meet of their inevitable doom. It's to leave space in the your mind (and in the world) for possibility, to not let things go unexamined simply because they're familiar or widely accepted. Interrogate reality, so that you might make sure there's no unreality simply cloaking itself in the veil of normality.
But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong, too.
Dan Lyons is a Journalist. I can't emphasize that last word enough. Nor, it seems, can Dan Lyons.
Lyons, a former Time writer and internet content raconteur, found himself in his early 50s without a decent job. After decades of covering the latest 20-something billionaires, he (sensibly) decided he wanted to jump into a startup to try to make his own big hit. Disrupted is his tale of woe, bemoaning the millennials and their shoddy union sensibilities and their loud music (no, seriously).
I don't want to dismiss Lyons' takedown of his former employer, Hubspot, as a simple case of “Old guy doesn't get how things work now.” There's absolutely no doubt that the management, owners and coworkers at his new employer are insane. The problem is, the things he brings up as issues on which to prosecute an entire industry/generation aren't exclusive to either the industry or that generation: As someone who's worked for a marketing agency, the headquarters of a multilevel marketing company and yes, even newspapers, all of the traits and peculiarities he mentions are things I've encountered. The trait of “being a shitty manager/coworker” is not endemic to a certain age group; it's more just an indicator of shitty people.
Don't get me wrong, the book is fun! See him learn that manager does not equal friend when his crazy direct supervisor's power-tripping petty bullshit constantly tears into Lyons after acting like they're best pals. Watch through some veiled sexism (paraphrase: “I'm not saying all women are shitty, but the three or four whom I interact with the most and are the only ones I talk about in depth in the book are terrible workers AND people”) as he grovels to the PR manager for offending her (paraphrase: “I don't understand why she's all upset just because I said an interview she arranged for the CEO went terribly.”). Revel as he reveals just how freaking out of touch he is when he tells us about his “hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers” then acts shocked and violated when it turns out his employer is watching what he writes and doesn't particularly enjoy his raining criticism down upon them.
As a former journalist, I particularly disliked the part where he complained about how much better journalists are as people. DID YOU KNOW that journalists: a) don't like meetings; b) would “[slam] doors and [turn] the air blue with profanity” if their boss made them a promise and then someone up the line changed their mind; c) if made to go to training, make fun of each other and the instructors and intentionally waste time. Oh, and also joke about killing someone in front an HR person; d) are lousy when asked to write someone beneath their level, like lead-generating blog posts (because of all their JOURNALISM EXPERIENCE).
Some of those are true, about some of the journalists I've worked with. Most are not. (Though, in fairness, journalists - especially older journalists - do tend to complain a lot that they're not allowed to say literally whatever they want in the newsroom, regardless of sexism/racism/profanity/just terrible ideas. As someone who's listened to a lot of them, this censorship is decidedly in everyone's best interest.) In fact, I'd bet you could replace the word “journalist” with “white guys who worked a white-collar job in the 80s/early 90s” and a lot of Lyons' complaints would have exactly the same meaning. Please note that I'm not calling him racist; I'm saying he's a overprivileged twit.
I'm not so much upset with the book or the writing as I am the idea of the book. Michael Lewis rose to fame with his (then-)shocking expose of the financial industry in Liar's Poker precisely because we didn't already know about. Lyons tended to follow trend stories (he did write for Time, after all) back when he wrote regularly, so his explosive reveal that “most web-based startups have terrible products and even worse business plans” isn't shocking, it's late and, most importantly, lazy. There's lots of good journalism out there about the bad and the good of our current economic/business/cultural climate. And it doesn't require taking a single company as evidence/harbinger of the doom of all things.
In a way, it's a tale of two mistakes. His, for his choice of employer, and me, for choice of reading material. I doubt either of us will make the same mistakes again. Oh, well. Unlike most of the readers of this book, at least I learned something.
It's a weird feeling, to be disappointed by a success. Like a much-beloved athletic record being broken, or being the runner-up in a beauty pageant: Yes, great for the person to whom the good thing happened, but it's not met, and I might personally have been better off/happier had it happened another way.
The book works. It might even work too well. If you're looking for a plausible (I don't say “likely” or “realistic” here because of the infinite possibilities of the human condition, and also it's fiction) view of the life of a child with autistic tendencies, Mark Haddon's provided an excellent sample. And it seems like that's what he set out to do, so congratulations and yay for him.
And at the same time, y'know. I wish he wouldn't have.
Maybe it hits too close to home. Maybe I look at how Christopher's parents fail in dealing with certain situations, and don't see how I could have done any better (and likely could have done worse). Maybe it's because Christopher's worldview ultimately seems to boil down to everyone having exactly one opportunity to screw something up and then being cut out for a considerable length of time, if not forever, and that reminds me too much of myself.
Regardless, I can't say I liked the book. Stories don't necessarily need happy endings for you to have a positive reaction to having heard them, but there should be some redeeming quality. I'm almost certain there's something here, I'm just having trouble seeing it right now.
But I don't hold that against the book. It's probably more about me as a than it. I just don't know who it's for.
In the end, it might be a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy conundrum. The book solved the problem. I just don't know what it's an answer to.