Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold
I am enjoying this series, but I am finding less and less to say about it, especially the plot — especially given I am not a real plot person when it comes down to it (at least not in terms of something I care that much about for reviews). So I guess look at my other reviews for that stuff. In terms of this being either the third part of a four part book series, or just the third act of a long book (and […]
The Brothers by Masha Gessen
This book acts almost as a kind of ethnology of the Chechen, at least in their recent history, with added focus on some specific ethnic groups and certain parts of the former Soviet territory. It’s also the account of the meetings of parents, the moving of families, and integration of immigrants into American society, about both the success and failures of law enforcement, and the general discomfort many Americans feels with something that is clearly terrorism also evokes other questions about America. It’s also a […]
Native American DNA by Kim TallBear
I don’t always feel this way, but I really appreciate how much this book treats its readers as adults. There’s a lot of early work in this book that looks to situate itself and its methods, and in doing so, spends an appropriate and generous amount of time explaining to readers (which I found especially useful as an educated person with no particular experience in these topics and methods) explaining how the methods of anthropology were considered, why they were considered, and what limits and […]
No One is Talking about This by Patricia Lockwood
I really loved this book. It keeps getting called a book about “being extremely online” and while that’s kind of true, it obscures what the book is really doing (in the first half, leading to the second half). The book is not “about” being extremely online, but is narrating the experience of being essentially addicted to being online. Well, no. It’s about trying to narrate the experience of having your brain having been rewritten by internet communication to the point at which, while you’re incredibly […]
The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace
Four conspirators, ostensibly looking out for the good of society send a telecommunication to the government that unless certain changes happen, “Four Just Men” will assassinate will the head of the government. The novel then acts as a chase of these individuals. There’s a kind of bomb-throwing anarchist cartoonishness to this novel, and it already feels so familiar to so many other books I’ve read both from this time-period and much later. Within this time-period we have books like The Riddle of the Sands, some […]
My Time with the Kings by Kathryn Johnson
This is a short, focused memoir written by the legendary journalist Katheryn Johnson, who found herself covering the civil rights movement in the US in the early 1960s. Her constant presence, professionalism, and at times specific kindness gave her a kind of a access into the personal lives and inner-circles of the civil rights, and specifically found her in the grieving household of Coretta Scott King hours after Martin Luther King’s assassination. The book even opens with the quote “Let Kathryn in” where Coretta Scott […]
