Linda
Disappointing. Fascinating topic presented with a lot of fabulist thinking, limited historical detail and the sort of charming aside that really only works if it really is an aside. I feel like I spent more time learning about the author's imagination and travel than getting any clear understanding of the topic, and in the end, the conclusion he reaches feels unearned in the context of the information he's provided.
Fantastically detailed and fascinatingly inside baseball about the political shenanigans of the Vatican viewed through the lens of a compelling main character navigating his own ongoing crisis of faith. I think I loved 95% of this book, but felt the ending was so abrupt. I literally sat there staring at the last pages saying, "Wait, what?" out loud for a beat. That said, still loved the twist, the intrigue, and the pageantry.
It's not the book, it's me. I made it all the way to chapter three, where the author was with the patience of a saint and very small words, trying to help people like me understand the concept of shapes, and I realized every additional thing I learned was making it worse. Loved the illustrations and the challenge to the way we typically view mathematics, but probably not for people with profound dyscalculia.
I knew absolutely nothing about Bess of Hardwick before I picked up this book, and I'm grateful that the cover was intriguing enough to catch my eye. It's hard to separate out what made this book more interesting: Bess's life, or the writing, but if you'd never known of her, it's worth a read just to get to know the former, regardless of the latter. She had four husbands and built an empire during a era that saw women sacrificed to the ambitions of men left, right, and center. The book gets a little dull and draggy toward the end – as most of these things do – but all in all, it's a really well-researched, very sweet biography, and I think if I had known Bess in person, I would have liked her as much as I liked this volume.
How you take the story of Madame de Pompadour and make it painfully milquetoast I don't even know but it's been accomplished with aplomb. Poorly organized (lots of jumping backward and forward in time cut in with sections that begin to broach interesting subjects that are abruptly snapped off with, “but more on this later” like a bad television cliffhanger) and given to promulgating easily debunked pieces of historical nonsense (ie: Athenais was not using witchcraft; no one who spends more than 12 minutes researching Athenais thinks she actually indulged in black magic; come on, seriously?) and dourly written. A book about sex and intrigue and power and intellectual romance in France that lacks all of the above. Except for the Frenchness. Loathe it. Save your money.
By now, anybody picking up a Mary Roach book knows that they're going to find something exhaustively and joyfully researched, packed with quirky tidbits, and written with that often-missing light hand and appreciation for the absurd. Apply all of that to the fundamentally absurd business of space travel and you have Packing for Mars. This book is incredibly charming, with something both for those overflowing with prurient interest (pooping in space! poop flying around in space! sex in space!) to the fascinating details nobody ever thinks about, but that become vital once Roach explains them. I actually stole this book from a houseguest (sorry, Ross), and I'm glad I did because like her other books, Packing for Mars was excellent reading and the perfect book for a long commute. (If I had to rank this among her other books, I'd say this was better than Spook – by far the weakest of her books, I think – and slightly better than Bonk, although nothing will ever come close to the revelatory wonder and tenderness of Stiff.)
Reading Antonia Fraser writing on the women that spangled Louis XIV's court makes you incredibly grateful for her scholarship and fluid prose, especially if you've read a locus of writing on the subject. Fraser's survey of Louis the XIV's female influences is fascinatingly comprehensive, interestingly salacious, and curiously journalistic. Most historians tend to take a point of view and set up camp there, and not many have the conviction or steady hand for their thesis to be, “it's complicated.” Fraser pulls it off in this book without seeming waffling or poorly researched, and every relationship documented – from Louis and his mother to Louis and Madam Right Now – is nuanced and rich. As much as I loved it, so much of the momentum for reading this book (especially in the second half) was motivated by personal interest in the subject, and not particularly driven by captivating storytelling. Partly that's a function of Louis getting older, slowing down, settling down with his secret morganatic marriage and ceasing his habitual tapping of every piece of available ass in court. Partly it's because the second half loses its tight narrative focus on Louis, having to spend a lot more time branching outward to cover the various tragic deaths of his dauphin, his other dauphin, the dauphiness – essentially everybody at court. Fantastic, comprehensive reading if this subject is in your sweet spot, but not recommended for general curious audiences.
I finished this one in one long gulp in a London to San Francisco flight and came off the plane feeling it all the way in my fingers and toes. I think I have always loved science writing because while I loved science, the math of it evaded me, and to access the curiosities of the subject I've always had to go in through the side door of the scientists and subjects themselves. This is one of the best and most intimate books of that nature I've ever read. Given the endless impact of Henrietta Lacks and her cells on medicine and science, I can't believe I went through my entire life without knowing anything about her. Absolutely everybody should read this. It can be grisly at times, but this book is hugely eye-opening and wonderfully researched.
Mary Roach's science writing is always reliably well-sourced and entertaining, and Bonk was definitely no exception. Reading this was even more entertaining because I consumed it over the course of about 24 hours of travel time between London and Seoul, which earned me a few funny looks at Heathrow, and a ton of funny looks on my Asiana 777 flight, surrounded by scandalized young families. I went into this book with the same prurient, pervert-laughing curiosity that I think plagues the researchers Roach talks to in the work, which is a sort of humbling thought, but I came out of it with a new perspective on the thing, and an even deeper appreciation for the lengths to which she's willing to go in order to get her story. Anyone who can talk her husband into having sex with her while someone X-rays them is a champion as far as I'm concerned.
Of the three Bourdain books I've read, this one is right in the middle. Funny and dishy as always, and Bourdain has important leanings insofar as traveling and writing that are right up my alley: eating and consuming alcohol. But I have to say that this book, while very enjoyable, didn't leave the sort of resonant impression that Kitchen Confidential did, and that when someone asked to borrow it, I surrendered it without a lot of second-guessing and possessiveness, which I find usually to be a sign, since nobody ever really “borrows” a book.
Third in the Material World series, as far as I'm concerned, only this time it's about how people eat and interact with food and how all of that is changing. The profiles of the two families in China – one in rural, one in Beijing – are startlingly telling, and so were the profiles of the English and American families. I never get sick of looking at what people are eating or how they cook it, and what it says about people to see how they consume.
It's about football, data, and families. Also, in the movie version, Sandra Bullock played a Sassy Southern Lady. I was never not going to love this book, all right?
One of the funniest and best books about eating and restaurants and our pathos about knowing who the New York Times food critic is in the world.
My favorite of Kathyrn Harrison's novels, that darts between two women in vastly different social spheres and suffer this sort of debilitating and bleak lack of choice that I only really truly understood toward the very end. I found this paralyzingly creepy, but maybe that was only me. And maybe it's just Kathryn Harrison – whose work I usually find paralyzingly creepy on some degree.
Incredibly, incredibly wonderful book. Young adult fiction at its very best, I think. It's about Sparrow Delaney and her incredibly zany family that lives on a commune, and her attempt to pass as a norm in school. Oh yeah, she can see spirits. It's an incredibly rough adolescence. All of those pieces sound like a terrible Disney Channel movie, I recognize, but the story is put together very carefully, and each of the characters is individually lovely and interesting. I got it as an advanced reader copy from our review department and finished it in a day, I couldn't put it down.
Another brilliant and fascinating book, where they go to different families the world over and turn out their houses. Just the differences between what people own is amazing. I used to work at Ten Thousand Villages and would leave a copy of this at the front counter to reread it in between customers.
Beautifully photographed, and accompanied with wonderful and intimate interviews. One of the best books I have ever owned, and one i return to over and over again. It lives on my coffee table and I take it to bed with me a lot to read over. The interviews and pictures are sort of dated by now, but if you're at all interested in the experience of being female in all corners of the world, this is unmissable. You have to read this book. It's lush.
Recently reread this for probably the hundredth time and continue to love Catherine entirely too much. Sadly, a revisit to this book as an adult highlights, to my great despair, that I always wanted her to marry the goatherd, and that part of me has been mourning the fact that she doesn't for like more than a decade. What is my life. Accessible for kids and (obviously) for adults, it felt very in the moment, like I could see and hear and live all the delights and discomforts of Catherine's time – still one of the best books I've ever read.