I’ve been abandoning books left and right this year. Maybe my patience is getting thinner or my attention span shorter. Or maybe I’m always getting better at knowing if I’ll like something and what topics or style issues will put me off a book. I hope it’s the latter. Most of the books I abandoned weren’t terrible, they just weren’t for me. I could see … Continue reading From the Did-Not-Finish Files
Book review: The Dragon Behind the Glass, by Emily Voigt Once upon a time I had wanted to find out why a pet fish was so irresistible that people smuggled it into the United States, risking their very liberty. Three and a half years and fifteen countries later, I was now in Brazil (possibly illegally) pursuing the fish myself. At some point, things had gotten … Continue reading The Obsessive, Expensive World of Arowana Collecting
Book review: Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire … Continue reading The Fall of a Too-Good-to-Be-True Medical Startup
Book review: Orca, by Jason Colby Author Jason Colby’s father was one of the last orca hunters in Washington state, capturing the apex predator from its natural habitat to fill orders for aquariums worldwide. Colby writes this detailed, descriptive but very readable history of human-orca interactions from a place of lifelong personal interest, having witnessed his father’s deep regret over his actions. It also allows … Continue reading The Strange and Sad History of Humans and Orcas
Book review: The Food Explorer, by Daniel Stone One of the humbling parts of being an American is the regular reminder that no matter how swollen America’s pride or power, nothing has been American for very long. A few years ago, it occurred to me that the same way immigrants came to our soil, so did our food. I was at my desk one morning … Continue reading America’s Plant and Agricultural Immigrants
Book review: The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano The front cover of the book whispered of a back-to-basics approach to wellness, lifestyle and nutrition. Of course, Gibson had no expertise in any such area. But that didn’t matter. Her credentials were listed in the first words of the very first sentence on the back cover. Social media sensation. I … Continue reading A Cancer Con Exposes the Sick Side of “Wellness”
One post of anticipated reads for 2018 wasn’t enough to include them all, especially with so many exciting -sounding ones already on the release calendar. Here, a dozen more of the year’s upcoming reads I think are worth taking note of, mainly from the latter part of the year. Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found (Gilbert King, … Continue reading Upcoming New Nonfiction in 2018, Part 2
Featured photo: President Barack Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia shop for books at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., on Small Business Saturday, Nov. 29, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) President Obama published a list on his Facebook page of his favorite books and music of 2017 and it’s pretty wonderful. As I’ve said, I love lists, especially of others’ favorites … Continue reading Obama’s Nonfiction Reading Recommendations
Photo of Baroque bookshelves in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, via Wikimedia Commons I couldn’t confine my favorites to one year end best list. I need three! First, here’s the companion to my midyear best-so-far-titles published in 2017 list. Next week, my favorites read but not published this year, plus a final roundup of my favorites from the whole year’s new releases. … Continue reading 2017 Favorites, Published July-December
Review: The Best American Magazine Writing 2017 Sid Holt compiles this year’s Best American Magazine Writing for the American Society of Magazine Editors. For anyone who loves topical, well-written and affecting long-form journalism, this year’s collection of award-winners and finalists is excellent. It should come as no surprise that the selections swerve heavily towards the political. Some of the strongest standouts include multiple journalists’ dispatches from the … Continue reading 2017’s Award-Winning Journalism
Book review: American Wolf, by Nate Blakeslee Maybe you’ve seen this video that made the social media rounds awhile back, about the effects wolf reintroduction has had on Yellowstone National Park: It’s a beautiful, almost heartwarming story of humans helping nature to right itself (after humans messed it up in the first place): a feared and misunderstood predator reintroduced to a park where it has an … Continue reading Tales from Yellowstone: Triumphs and Struggles of Wolf Reintroduction
My photo of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the last time I visited in December 2016. I don’t know why I took the picture from that angle with the tree barging in, it looks spooky. This magnificent granite pile, this Museum on the west side of Central Park, between two rivers, in the New World, holds between its walls perhaps the … Continue reading Secrets and Stories from the American Museum of Natural History
