Archives: Book Reports

I con­fess: I find it dif­fi­cult to respect short nov­els. It has to do with expec­ta­tions, I’m sure, as I love short sto­ries. When I can fin­ish a book in under 24 hours I feel as though per­haps I did­n’t get my mon­ey’s worth. Faith­ful was part of my enter­tain­ment for a flight from the East Coast back to San Fran­cis­co. Grant­ed that this was a trip with a can­celed con­nec­tion where I end­ed up wait­ing in the Las Vegas … Read the rest

Mal­colm Glad­well’s Blink: The Pow­er of Think­ing With­out Think­ing is a clear­head­ed and ratio­nal exam­i­na­tion of our minds’ abil­i­ty to make rapid deter­mi­na­tions based on small amounts of data. And thank good­ness for this. Most peo­ple lump this sort of thing either into mys­ti­cism or com­pli­cat­ed Freudi­an sub­con­scious mechanisms.

I don’t believe in any­thing super­nat­ur­al. If peo­ple can pre­dict the future with tea leaves, I fig­ure that’s got to be per­fect­ly nat­ur­al. I’ve worked up my own lay­man’s the­o­ries … Read the rest

To Kill A Mock­ing­bird is one of the five best nov­els ever writ­ten, and I’m not sure what the oth­er four were. I just fin­ished read­ing it for prob­a­bly the fifth time, this time out loud. One thing for sure, read­ing aloud makes it hard­er to miss nuances.

Read­ing To Kill A Mock­ing­bird aloud was a plea­sure in some ways and dif­fi­cult in oth­ers. Even if I weren’t a damn yan­kee read­ing Alaba­ma dia­logue, I was brought up bet­ter than … Read the rest

See? I read fic­tion some­times, too. I mean nov­els, of course. I can find plen­ty of fic­tion in the news­pa­per. Haw haw haw.

Match­es is a semi­au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal account of a short span of an Amer­i­can Israeli’s time in the IDF. Kauf­man was care­ful not to glo­ri­fy or dehu­man­ize, and the nov­el feels warm and compassionate.

That said, I find myself won­der­ing if it would have been bet­ter as a mem­oir. Per­haps some details he could not have divulged except as fic­tion, … Read the rest

Read­ing books that only make points I already agreed with is tedious. So yeah, yeah, Bush lied, peo­ple died, what­ev­er. Show me some­thing new already.

I have a prob­lem with this kind of book. It is not intend­ed to con­vince any­one of any­thing, but mere­ly to pro­vide sound­bite-lev­el evi­dence for peo­ple who already believe one thing to use to sup­port their views. This book does­n’t chal­lenge any­one to reex­am­ine their beliefs, it sim­ply ral­lies around a point of view and … Read the rest

There is a prob­lem with writ­ers who learned to craft the lan­guage for a tele­vi­sion audi­ence. The writ­ing some­times reads as a sur­face gloss. Stos­sel’s book, while inter­est­ing, nev­er delves deeply enough to sup­port his asser­tions. He may be a fine inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, and the sit­u­a­tions he describes as wrong tru­ly appear wrong, but in this book he does­n’t go beyond assert­ing his opin­ion as fact.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly frus­trat­ing is his ten­den­cy to only cite the sta­tis­tics he con­tra­dicts. He tells us … Read the rest

Our Endan­gered Val­ues: Amer­i­ca’s Moral Cri­sis, Jim­my Carter

I admire Jim­my Carter. For all the crit­i­cism he’s got­ten for being «Amer­i­ca’s least effec­tive pres­i­dent» I think we could do with more pres­i­dents just as inef­fec­tive. I admire his com­mit­ment to his Chris­t­ian val­ues and his abil­i­ty to unite peo­ple and nego­ti­ate between adver­saries. While the infla­tion in the late 70s may be attrib­uted to his admin­is­tra­tion’s mis­man­age­ment, the oth­er of our nation’s ills com­mon­ly blamed on Jim­my Carter … Read the rest