Reviews of other people’s books
Audrey McClelland and Colleen Padilla. The Digital Mom Handbook: How to Blog, Vlog, Tweet, and Facebook Your Way to a dream Career at Home. New York: Harper Business, 2011. 256 pages. I’m not a mom, but the idea of mommyblogging intrigues me. It seems like most infant and toddler commerce is sold primarily to women, […]
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book reviewsClayton M. Christensen and Henry Eyring. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 496 pages. In this book, aimed chiefly at university professors and administrators but also trustees, regents, and potential students, the authors attempt to identify just what’s got higher education costing more and
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book reviewsMichael Levy. Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China’s Other Billion. New York: Henry Holt Company, 2011. 256 pages. China’s burgeoning middle class and growing economic power is all over the news these days. But there’s more–about a billion people more–to the large Asian country than Beijing and Shanghai. IN KOSHER CHINESE, Michael Levy
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book reviewsTom Hopkins. Selling for Dummies: Third Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2011. 362 pages. If you’re in sales, you’re probably always looking for that extra edge. If you’re not, you’d probably like to know a little more about how salespeople get you to sign. In either case, Tom Hopkins’ SELLING FOR DUMMIES is a good
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book reviewsTali Sharot: The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. New York, Pantheon, 2011. 272 pages. People always seem to expect the best, despite the odds. As Tali Sharot discusses in THE OPTIMISM BIAS, most people have unrealistically positive expectations of their future. She does a great job of summing up much of
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book reviewsJen A. Miller. The Jersey Shore: Atlantic City to Cape May. Second Edition. Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 2011. 207 pages. The phrase “Jersey Shore” is heard a lot these days, but mostly for the wrong reasons–shorthand for the kind of low-class self-indulgent behavior that will land you a gig on an MTV reality show
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atlantic city, book reviewsEarl Swift. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 384 pages. Even if you don’t use it every day, the interstate highway system affects your life every day. Odds are the food that you eat traveled at least part-way on
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book reviewsJane Woolbridge and Larry Bleiberg. The 100 Best Affordable Vacations. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2011. 288 pages. Right now, most people who like to travel are looking at stretching their budget as far as they can, so a book about affordable travel destinations is a practical idea. This book is divided into four chapters: Americana,
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book reviewsRuth Brandon. Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good. New York: Harper, 2011. 304 pages. Ugly Beauty looks at two historic icons of the beauty industry and, through them, the underside of the selling of glamor. Helena Rubinstein became a brand name in the early 20th century thanks to her
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book reviewsFranz Kafka and Coleridge Cook. The Meowmorphosis. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2011. 208 pages. Book review Friday is back! This week, I’m taking a look at a little slice of fiction that merges modern man’s sense of alienation with kittens. Quirk Classics pioneered the literary mashup genre. Basically, you take a classic work of literature (e.g.,
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book reviewsTim Wu. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 336 pages. This is a hard book to review because it’s really two book ideas melded into one: a history of the empire-building and empire-busting that characterized the first century of information industries, and a policy piece
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book reviewsDavid Orr. Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. New York, Harper Collins, 2011. 256 pages. Poetry is in a curious place. There’s undoubtedly many poets writing great poetry out there, but the art form seems to be in crisis–even accomplished poets have a sneaking suspicion poetry isn’t getting the respect it deserves. For
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book reviewsNeve Maslakovic. Regarding Ducks and Universes. Las Vegas: Amazon Encore, 2011. 340 pages. I’m back with a fiction review. REGARDING DUCKS AND UNIVERSES is a clever novel that mashes together science fiction and mystery. Some backstory: in 1986, a scientist duplicated the universe, with Earth A and Earth B gradually diverging because of random chance:
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book reviewsLin Zhe. George A. Fowler, trans. Old Town. Amazon Crossing, 2011. 704 pages. A really good novel, even more than a film, can get the reader inside the minds of its characters. OLD TOWN is a novel that lets the reader vicariously experience three generations of life in China. Spanning much of the 20th century,
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book reviewsGraham Joyce. The Silent Land.New York:Doubleday, 2011. 240 pages. I’m back with a review of a “suspense novel” that isn’t that suspenseful, but which has its charms. In THE SILENT LAND, a young vacationing British couple, Jake and Zoe, find themselves trapped in an Alpine ski resort, completely alone, after an avalanche. Unable to contact
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book reviewsHoward Mansfield. Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart. Rockport, Maine: Down East Books, 2010. 195 pages. Today we take for granted that time is rigidly (and sometimes mercilessly) segmented. But the way people think about time has changed dramatically over the last two hundred years, with local and natural time, based on
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book reviewsEdward Dolnick. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 400 pages. In THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE, Edward Dolnick gives the reader a sense of the world that the scientific greats of the early modern period inhabited, and lets us see that there was
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book reviewsPaula Szyuchman and Jenny Anderson. Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes. New York: Random House, 2011. 352 pages. Spousonomics is another addition to the growing popular economics literature that makes concepts like division of labor, comparative advantage, and information asymmetry digestible for a lay audience. As such, its publication is a
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book reviewsGB Tran. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. New York: Villard, 2011. 192 pages. Graphic novels can be an extremely effective medium for memoir–Art Speigelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’ Persepolis have proven. GB Tran’s Vietnamerica is very much in the mold of these two classics, and it tells a story that similarly mingles memoir with history. Tran’s
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book reviewsCharles Elton. Mr Toppit. New York: Other Books, 2010. 400 pages. With MR TOPPIT, Charles Elton gives the reader a look into the life, not of an author, but of his family. The Hayseed Chronicles are a mashup of A.A. Milne’s Pooh books and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with Luke Hayward, the book’s chief
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book reviews