Earl 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 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 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 reviewsGraham Moore. The Sherlockian. New York: TWELVE, 2010. 350 pages. Book Review Friday is back with a bang. After a little bit of a layoff, I’ve recharged myself with some excellent fiction. I really, really liked this book. There’s only so many places a mystery can go. Someone has to get murdered, and someone has
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book reviewsSusan Casey. The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. New York: Doubleday, 2010. 336 pages. In THE WAVE, Susan Casey looks at the science behind giant waves (towering over 100 ft), which were once thought impossible. Turns out, they’re crashing around the middle of the ocean all the time.
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book reviewsAlyn Shipton. Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 283 pages. Cab Calloway was an important figure in American popular music history: over his career, which spanned decades, he sold millions of records and blurred several musical genres. His big band was one of the crucibles of bop. In this studiously
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book reviewsErik Sass, with Will Pearson and Mandesh Hattikudur. The Mental Floss History of the United States. New York: Harper, 2010. 448 pages. Book review Friday is back! Again! There are plenty of statistics out there that demonstrate just how little most Americans know about their history. This is doubtless a bad thing, and not just
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book reviewsEran Katz. Where Did Noah Park the Ark? Ancient Memory Techniques for Remembering Practically Anything. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010. 237 pages. Book Review Friday is back! With a vengeance! And since I’ve read this book, and I can’t cite forgetfulness as an excuse for not posting book reviews here each Friday. Everyone would
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book reviewsGraeme Donald. The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln, and 46 other stories of unknown players from history. Long Island City, New York: Osprey, 2010. 288 pages. Most people have an inkling of the major players in history: they know the name of John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Lincoln. But how
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book reviewsBeth Raymer. Lay the Favorite: A Gambling Memoir. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 201. 240 pages. Sports betting might be the clubbiest form of gambling. Every game has its own lingo, but sports betting, maybe because it’s rooted in real physical competition, just seems a little more insular. There are plenty of books out there
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book reviewsLeo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters. Android Karenina. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2010. 541 pages. I don’t review too much fiction, but I thought I’d give this one a shot. Quirk Books has put out a few “mash-up” books–combinations of classic (and public domain) works of literature with genre fiction. The titles alone–like Price and Prejudice
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