Book reviews
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On Lisa Randall’s ‘Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.’
I love cool stories as much as anyone, but not under the auspices of science for a general audience.
astronomy, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, dark matter, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, electromagnetism, Evicted, Gabriel Zucman, gold foil experiment, gravity, Lisa Randall, Matthew Desmond, Occam’s Razor, popular science, Rutherford, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, weakly interacting massive particles
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On Edin & Shaefer’s ‘$2.00 a Day.’
You can’t learn what it takes to survive poverty when you think about people as numbers.
$2.00 a Day, budget, ethnography, Evicted, extreme poverty, food deserts, food insecurity, food stamps, H. Luke Shaefer, Hand to Mouth, high cost of rent in the United States, Kathyrn Edin, Linda Tirado, Living on Almost Nothing in America, Matthew Desmond, Paul Theroux, people want jobs, poverty, PTSD, sexual assault, SNAP, The Hypocrisy of Helping the Poor
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On Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex.
Turns out it’s still a good idea to talk to your kids.
Amy Schalet, Charis Denison, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, dinosaur princess, Dutch vs. American parents, Girls & Sex, good lovers are good listeners, Haruki Murakami, Meatloaf, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights, Peggy Orenstein, performative sexuality, pop porn, pornification, pornography, problems with pop porn, sex ed, sexual education, Sputnik Sweetheart, Zara Whites -
On Mark Leyner’s “Gone with the Mind.”
Leyner: “Can a series of completely unrelated, violent, hypersexualized, scatological lines of prose be a kind of writing?” Yes, it seems. His is brilliant, incandescent.
Et Tu Babe, Frank Ocean, Fugitive from a Centrifuge, Gone with the Mind, Jack Handey, Mahabharata, Mark Leyner, measuring artists by their best, My Cousin My Gastroenterologist, Nostalgia Ultra, precise versus clear language, Richard Feynman, Stench of Honolulu, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, where writers work, why Gods expend so much energy seducing humans
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On Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.
Just Mercy: an achingly-beautiful account of the arduous pursuit of justice for all.
abuses of power, brain plasticity, Bryan Stevenson, children sentenced to death in prison, civil rights march, death penalty, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative, execution, false conviction, Ferretcraft, heroic human rights worker trading card game, innocents condemned to death, Just Mercy, Lydia Cacho, Midwest Pages to Prisoners, New Life New Leaf, police abuses, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, racial injustice, Slavery Inc, solitary confinement, state-sponsored murder in the United States, the human potential for growth and change, Walter McMillian trial, with liberty and justice for all, wrongful imprisonment
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On Ioan Grillo’s ‘Gangster Warlords.’
At great personal risk, Ioan Grillo documents the horrific violence fueled by U.S. & European drug policy.
cartels, cocaine, courageous journalism, cycles of violence, drug dollars killing fields and the new politics of Latin America, drug use in Silicon Valley, drugs, Gangster Warlords, harms caused by U.S. drug policy, heroin addiction, heroin crisis, horrific violence, incarceration crisis, Ioan Grillo, Knights Templar cartel, legalization, living cheaply, marijuana, mass incarceration, microclimes, murders in Mexico, narcoterrorism, Silicon Valley, vigilante uprising, violence in Latin America, War on Drugs
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On silenced voices.
Today’s mystery is, when is a mystery novel not marketed to readers of mystery novels?
black history, Candravati Ramayana, Dravida Kazhagam, Dravida Kazhagam interpretation of the Ramayana, erasure, free will, history is written by the victors, James Meredith, my own fragmentary education, mystery novel, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Nat Turner, Parul Sehgal, Percival Everett, prejudice, racial protests at elite universities, Ravana worship, Rudolph Fisher, Satan worship, shelving all black authors under African American Studies, silenced texts, silenced voices, The Conjure-Man Dies, The Iliad, the invention of race, University of Mississippi, yale protests
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On ‘Cat’s Cradle’ and whether or not it’s sci-fi.
The science is realistic, but, more importantly, the science doesn’t matter. The story is about people. Oh, and, the world ends. Whatever.
Cat’s Cradle, catalysis, classics, energy barriers, fate of the universe, ice-9, Kurt Vonnegut, literary fiction, mad cow disease, math analogies for non-math people, Pages to Prisoners, prions, qwerty keyboards, resistance to change, sci-fi, science fiction, science versus philosophy, speculative fiction, the big freeze, the meaning of life is protein?, the stickiness of bad ideas, thermodynamics, transition-state energy
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On paranoia, virology, conspiracy theories, & lemmings: my experience reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’
In which our hero stumbles across a Disney-promulgated conspiracy of lemming misinformation.
1958 Disney documentary, accidental death mistaken for suicide, Apophenia, are parents trustworthy, are politicians trustworthy, are scientists trustworthy, authority figures, being honest to your kid, being honest with my kid, bibliophile, book hunting, book review, characters trapped within the grand schemes of their creator, climate change, conspiracy, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, disappointment at rampant misbehavior in classic literature, Disney, Disney documentary, do lemmings commit suicide, do you know how they make pepperoni?, does life have any meaning?, Easter Bunny, evil cabal, fabricated documentary footage, faked documentary footage, fatherhood, Fred Tomaselli, Genesis 41, Gravity’s Rainbow, hidden meanings, honesty, human fallacies, human population, hunting to extinction, influenza, influenza virus is one step ahead of our defenses, is life random?, is the world random?, lemming migration, lemming suicide, lemmings, lemmings don’t commit suicide, library booksales, lying to children, lying to children about Santa Claus, lying to kids about Santa Claus, mental illness, novelist as God, overbreeding, overfishing, overpredation, paranoia, parenting, pattern seeking, pop psychology, population booms and busts, population dynamics, predator prey population dynamics, predator prey relationship, psychology, randomness, randomness is scary, Rob Brotherton, santa claus, Santa Claus conspiracy, schizophrenia, should children believe in Santa Claus, Slothrop, storing food for lean years, Suspicious Minds, Thomas Pynchon, truth, unrealistic expectations, used bookstores, water usage rights, White Wilderness
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On Akerlof & Shiller’s ‘Phishing for Phools’ and the increasing heterogeneity of the United States.
People aren’t exactly the same everywhere, but we’re all suckers. And huckersters know.
Frank Brown Cloud 