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Best Books I Read in 2016

It’s hard to narrow down a year’s worth of reading to a manageable list of the cream of the crop, but I’ll try. From the books I read in 2016, here are the fifteen books I would most recommend. First are the top three essential books that I would most enthusiastically recommend to anyone. The other twelve were also great, and I recommend them heartily, too. If you want to check out last year’s list, click here. Like last year, I’m putting them in the order that I read them. Unlike last year, I’m including longer excerpts from my reviews to give a fuller recommendation. But if you’d like even more, click on the title of the book for the complete review. Now to the books!

The Top Three

Evicted (Matthew Desmond)

“an essential book. Please, please, read it. Desmond makes the convincing case that there is a serious lack of affordable housing that exacerbates, and is a root cause of, the hardships the poor face. The book follows the lives of a small number of tenants in Milwaukee and their landlords through their evictions and searches for shelter. […] If you have any interest in understanding poverty, please read this book. It is uniformly excellent. I can hardly recommend it enough.”

Kindred (Octavia Butler)

“a visceral novel about slavery in America. It’s 1976, and the narrator Dana, an African American, is somehow transported back to antebellum Maryland where she is confronted with a drowning white child. She travels back and forth, seemingly at whim, until she realizes that she is connected to the child. […] The story takes the jumps in time as a given. One of the strengths of this device is that it puts our modern sensibilities back into the past so that we can better imagine what life was like for slaves and their owners. It’s so easy for me as a white person today to think that I would have of course been an abolitionist if I had lived back then. But what if I had lived in the south where slavery was an institution interwoven into the fabric of everyday life? What if my own family had owned slaves? Would I have really held beliefs that would be to the detriment of my own welfare? It’s a tough question. The book makes us consider that it was the times that made the person. In describing the slave owner, Dana says this, “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). And she describes many monstrous things that he does. It’s enough to make us weep.”

The Warmth of Other Suns (Isabel Wilkerson)

“an essential work of history. Wilkerson tells the story of the internal migration of millions of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West during the 20th century. Actually, she focuses her attention on three individuals as representatives of those millions. […] Throughout these three stories, Wilkerson weaves in all the appropriate context so that we as readers can see the big picture, too. It’s really a marvelous narrative history that illuminates so much of the 20th century and today. I can hardly say enough good about it. Everyone should read it.”

And all the other great ones

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

“It starts with one of the famous lines of literature: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” From there, we follow Clarissa Dalloway (and other characters) through all the preparations for a party that evening at her residence. […] The narration floats and glides from character to character, in and out of minds, seamlessly transitioning from one to the next, like a butterfly flitting here and there. It can be disorienting, but it is also so fluid. We get to experience life through so many eyes and minds. It’s exquisite.”

Our List of Solutions (Carrie Oeding)

“a collection of poetry full of longing and insight and barbecues. One thing I noticed is that this collection works as a cohesive book and not merely a random selection of poems by one author. Characters and objects and themes recur throughout the book, filling out the neighborhood feel to the proceedings.”

Sula (Toni Morrison)

“a really great novel. It tells the story of two friends, Sula and Nel, who grow up in a small, segregated Ohio town. In brief chapters the story flows as the two girls share life together and then separate when Sula leaves town to live freely. Nel stays and settles down until the day Sula comes back and shakes things up again. […] I began the book worried that it would be too “literary,” which by itself is not a fault and which I often love about books. I love many difficult literary books. But I’ve found that it’s harder for me to give those kinds of books the attention and concentration required these last few years now that I have kids. I’m more easily distracted. So I loved that I could follow the story in Sula, and it was still a deep and rich book even if not as difficult as I expected. An impressive achievement.”

The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)

“There have been five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and we are currently living during the sixth. Previous extinction events have been caused by catastrophes like asteroid impacts. Not so for the sixth extinction, which we are currently witnessing. Human behavior, whether greedy or careless, has caused the extinction of untold numbers of species.”

This One Summer (Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki)

“a touching graphic novel about growing up. It’s the story of Rose, a girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager. Every summer she and her parents travel to a cabin on a lake for vacation. The routines are established: swimming in the lake, bonfires on the beach, reading in her room, and playing with Windy, another girl a year or two younger whose family also comes to the lake every summer. […] The art is a real strength, too. At times cartoony, and other times more detailed and realistic, it’s in total harmony with the story.”

Inspiration and Incarnation (Peter Enns)

“I feel like it is a book that was written for me, a book that helps me make sense of the Bible and modern scholarship at a time when I’m full of questions and doubts. The main thesis of the book is that there is an incarnational analogy between the Bible and Jesus where both are fully divine and fully human. […] I would highly recommend this book to any Christian, especially anyone with an evangelical background who finds themselves asking how modern scholarship on the Old Testament can be reconciled with believing that the Bible is still God’s word.”

The Historian (Elizabeth Kostova)

“a thoroughly engrossing literary thriller. Playing with the historical Vlad the Impaler and Bram Stoker’s character Dracula, the novel follows the investigations of an unnamed narrator, her father, his mentor, and other historians as they try to unravel the mystery of what exactly happened to Dracula and where he is buried. It all starts when the narrator finds a letter in her father’s library, tucked away in a strange book. The letter starts, “My dear and unfortunate successor…” and the book is an ancient volume with totally blank pages except for a woodcut image of a dragon at the very center of the book.”

Does Jesus Really Love Me? (Jeff Chu)

“a fascinating series of snapshots of the American church and how it is currently dealing with LGBTQ issues. Chu spends a year talking to Christians–some gay, some not–all over the country to find out about their experiences. When I first heard about this book, I thought it was going to be mostly a memoir about Chu’s own life. While he does give some autobiography, almost the whole book is given over to other people’s stories. He talks to people with views and experiences all across the spectrum. What I really appreciated is that Chu allows people to talk and give their opinions, really seeing them as individuals, even when he disagrees with them. […] I think any Christian, no matter where they stand on the issue, would profit from hearing the stories of these individuals.”

Thunder & Lightning (Lauren Redniss)

“an extraordinary art book about the science and stories of weather. Melding her skills as an artist with her ability to present research in an interesting way, Redniss has created a unique and fascinating book. Chapters range from the history of lighthouses and fog off Cape Spear in Newfoundland to the shipping of ice from New England to warmer climes all over the world to forest fires in Australia and the American West to the science of weather prognostication especially as practiced by the Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich)

“a beautiful novel spanning several generations of two families on and off the reservation in North Dakota. Through a series of interconnected stories that span at least 50 years, Erdrich introduces the reader to marvelous characters who remain alive long after closing the book.”

The Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell)

“a terrifically fun history lesson on Puritan New England. While not a historian, Vowell has done the research in primary documents to get the story right. […] She loves America and its history, but she’s also willing to looks at its faults and how it has failed to live up to its ideals. I would highly recommend this take on the Puritans. It’s made me want to read more on them in a way no other previous encounter in a history textbook has.”

Julio’s Day (Gilbert Hernandez)

“a fascinating look at one man’s life and the life of a century in a graphic novel that is exactly 100 pages long. Julio himself lives to be 100, born in 1900 and dying in 2000. The story of the century is also there, but the focus is on Julio and his family and friends.”

I mentioned in my last set of reviews for 2016 that I don’t plan on doing my monthly roundup of mini book reviews anymore. However, I’ll still do a best books of the year feature of the books I liked and would most recommend. I’m already working on that list. I hope I find as many good ones as this year.

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Selected Book Reviews, October – December 2016

This batch of book reviews round out last year’s reading. I got behind in writing them for reasons that I can’t even recall, but it nagged at me that I hadn’t finished them. These will probably be the last set of book reviews I do in this format. In the future, I may do a deep dive into a particularly insightful or powerful book. Or I may do a roundup of a few books on one topic. I’m not entirely sure yet. But I’m not planning on doing monthly reviews anymore. However, I think I’ll still make a list of the best books I read in a given year to recommend. Speaking of which, I’ll put up a year in review of the best books I read in 2016 shortly.

Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley is a careful critique of evangelicalism by someone who grew up in that world. It reads as a succinct summary of some of my own changes in thinking on these topics. Dudley’s book can be summarized well with two quotes. First, his thesis: “Evangelicalism has defined itself by weakly supported boundary markers, which are justified by a flawed understanding of biblical interpretation and maintained by suppressing those who disagree” (24). The four boundary markers dealt with in the book are abortion, homosexuality, environmentalism, and evolution. Basically the hot button topics in the culture wars. If one takes the wrong view on any of these issues, one cannot be in the evangelical club anymore. The second quote concerns the justification from the Bible part of the thesis: “Biases and prior beliefs are not something that get in the way of interpretation, something that must be brushed aside; rather, biases and prior beliefs are behind every interpretation” (108-9). Everyone approaches the Bible with prior beliefs and biases. Even the straightforward plain interpretation that we think is objective is certainly a matter of the lens we use when we read. An easy example from the book is that Christians were not all that concerned when Darwin first published his theory of evolution in 1859. It wasn’t until decades later that fundamentalists and evangelicals felt that they had to reject evolution and believe in a young earth. Christians approached the same text with different prior beliefs at different points in time and came to vastly different conclusions. Besides this major point about interpretation, Dudley also wants to make a point about the Christian use of science. He notes how Christian pro-lifers claim that science shows that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception (an argument Dudley doesn’t accept). But when it comes to other matters of science, such as the widespread scientific evidence for evolution or global warming, evangelical Christians often find themselves dismissing science. Evangelicals only like science when it seemingly agrees with their political beliefs. Dudley grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home to several evangelical colleges and publishing houses. He attended Calvin College, then studied religion at seminary, and then began medical school, while finishing this book. I don’t have the same educational path, but I can relate to his intellectual and faith journey and some of his conclusions. I would definitely recommend this book.

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The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1: Squirrel Power by Ryan North and Erica Henderson is an incredibly fun comic book. It’s light-hearted and funny. I find it hard to decide which I like more, the writing or the artwork. North has fun with Doreen Green and her supporting cast of friends and squirrels, as well as the villains, but he gives them all a lot of heart and personality. Henderson does a great job balancing cartoony action and characters, but never exploits or sexualizes the characters, a problem all too rampant in comics. Doreen looks like the college student she is, not an unrealistic supermodel in a swimsuit trying to fight crime. She’s someone I’d want to be friends with if I had a friend who could talk to squirrels. She eats nuts and kicks butts. Even if you think you don’t like superhero comics, you might like this one. I’m really looking forward to reading more of this series.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is an essential work of history. Wilkerson tells the story of the internal migration of millions of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West during the 20^th century. Actually, she focuses her attention on three individuals as representatives of those millions. Through the story of Ida Mae we learn how tenuous was the position of sharecroppers in Mississippi, how hard the work was picking cotton and how little they got paid, if at all. So much depended on the whims of the white landowners. After Ida Mae’s husband’s cousin Joe Lee, who lived a few shacks down from them, was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and subsequently half beaten to death, Ida Mae and her family packed up and left for Milwaukee, ending up on the South Side of Chicago before long. There they face housing discrimination; all the black families moving in are forced into strict geographical boundaries, and any time they try to move into a new neighborhood, the white neighbors first try to fight their arrival, and if that failed then they all moved out. If you want to know why cities are like they are, this book is illuminating. Even the world famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson faced housing discrimination when she bought a house in a nice neighborhood. She received death threats in the middle of the night before she moved in, and after she did, bullets shattered some of her windows. Police had to keep guard around her house for nearly a year to prevent violence. No one was immune from discrimination. Despite the hardships in the North, Ida Mae experienced some measure of true freedom. She was able to vote for the first time. The family was eventually able to buy a house, but soon after they did, the whites in the neighborhood took flight. The two other individuals the book focuses on, Dr. Robert Foster and George Starling, provide more glimpses into life in the Jim Crow South and how they tried to make a better life in L.A. and New York, respectively. Dr. Foster left a life in rural Louisiana where the highest he could have risen was to a country doctor making house calls to black families with no admitting privileges at the local hospital. He wanted fame and fortune and a good life. George Starling picked fruit in the groves of Florida, chafing at the unfair labor practices, before he headed North. He worked for the railroad on a line that traveled up and down the east coast, so he got to see the changes from North to South for decades. Throughout these three stories, Wilkerson weaves in all the appropriate context so that we as readers can see the big picture, too. It’s really a marvelous narrative history that illuminates so much of the 20^th century and today. I can hardly say enough good about it. Everyone should read it.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert is a short and excellent primer on climate change (I read it in a day). The book is based on a series of articles Kolbert wrote for The New Yorker magazine, where she is a staff writer, in order “to convey, as vividly as possible, the reality of global warming” (2). By traveling to locations across the globe, Kolbert tells how things are changing: glaciers are shrinking, permafrost is melting, oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, animal migrations are shifting towards the warming poles, and plants are earlier than usual. A small island community in Alaska has to move because of the rising ocean level. While telling the stories of various changes worldwide, Kolbert also explains the science to a lay audience without getting too technical. The only downside to this well written little book is that it is already a bit out of date. It was published in 2006, but since then we have had still warmer years, and the trend continues upward. Despite that one drawback, I would highly recommend it. [Note: there is a newer revised and expanded edition, so forget what I said. Read that one instead.]

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit by Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella is a very helpful book for parents. Kazdin draws on the available social science on children’s behavior and his experience working at the Yale Parenting Center to give useful guidelines for how to change problematic behavior in kids. The key is the focus on behavior. Parents, me included, want our kids to be kind and generous, resilient and motivated, and not selfish jerks. But how do these qualities get cultivated? It starts with behavior. Kazdin explains his ABC method, which is backed up by research and with examples of how it works. He describes his techniques as tools in the toolbox. They are adaptable depending on the situation; some will be used more than others. The first thing to think about when considering children’s behavior is the Antecedent of the behavior. How can parents set up the situation for the behavior they wish to see? The goal is to make the choice for the child as likely as possible. Asking in a calm voice one time helps. Giving a choice also helps. Children like to have at least a small measure of autonomy. The next consideration is the Behavior itself. Sometimes this is clear like when I want my kids to clear their places by putting their dishes into the sink after a meal or brush their teeth before bed. But often I want them to stop an irritating or dangerous behavior. It’s not very effective to merely say don’t do that. What kids need is positive reinforcement for the behavior I do want to see. In order to make that happen, I have to think of the positive opposite of undesirable behavior. This isn’t always easy to do, but it’s crucial. So for example, my 3 year old throws screaming tantrums sometimes. I can’t change the fact that he gets upset by things, but I do want him to deal with his upset feelings with a different strategy than by screaming. So I will praise him for any approximation that gets us closer to the desired behavior. This is called shaping the behavior. If he never has done the desired behavior, then we can practice a simulation so he can try to do it when he does actually get upset. The third part is the area of Consequences, which is where a lot of people want to start. For Kazdin, consequences are positive reinforcement for the desired behavior. Mostly this means praise from parents that is immediate, effusive, and specific, with some sort of affection added. Sometimes other methods can help, too, like a point chart, but praise from parents is the best reinforcer. Kazdin has a lot more to explain and tons of examples (as well as another book for the tough cases of especially defiant children), but this is the outline. Some of it is definitely counter-intuitive. But I can see that barking at my children to stop doing something rarely works and it often escalates. When I’ve been able to implement the Kazdin ABCs I’ve had much more success in changing unwanted behavior. I’d really recommend this to any and all parents.

My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor is a revealing and instructive memoir from one of our Supreme Court Justices. She details her life with precision and insight up until her appointment as a District Court judge in 1992; the rest of her life and career will presumably have to wait until her retirement. I was especially interested in finding out more about her life because my kids attend a Spanish immersion elementary school named after her. There are many interesting details to her early life growing up poor in a housing project in the Bronx. Her alcoholic father died when she was young, so she and her brother had to assume a lot of responsibility in their household with only their mother to raise them. Especially humanizing is her diagnosis of type 1 diabetes at age seven that she has had to manage for the rest of her life. That diagnosis led her to give up dreams of growing up and becoming a detective and instead focus on training to be a lawyer. She knew from an early age what she wanted to do in life. One of the overriding themes of her memoir is that of empathy. In a pivotal passage, Sotomayor explains how she understood the importance of empathy through two events and by reading Lord of the Flies. In the classic book, a group of boys have to fend for themselves on an island by themselves. Their survival is precarious, and they must work together in order to make it through. Sotomayor notices the same precariousness in her own life. She notices a police officer extorting a street fruit vendor for two bags of fruit. She also witnesses her own aunt making prank calls to random women, pretending that she was having affairs with their husbands. Putting it all together, she declares, “I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view” (123). Her story continues as she details how hard she worked to make it through Princeton and Yale Law School, despite “limits of class and cultural background” (171). It’s an inspiring book, and she doesn’t refrain from talking about mistakes she has made such as her brief marriage to her high school sweetheart. This is a memoir I’d recommend reading.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, nature, science

Book Reviews, June 2016

June was a good month of reading. I read four fantastic and varied books. I’d recommend all of them highly! Check them out!

thunder and lightning image

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss is an extraordinary art book about the science and stories of weather. Melding her skills as an artist with her ability to present research in an interesting way, Redniss has created a unique and fascinating book. Chapters range from the history of lighthouses and fog off Cape Spear in Newfoundland to the shipping of ice from New England to warmer climes all over the world to forest fires in Australia and the American West to the science of weather prognostication especially as practiced by the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Redniss does it all: she created her own font for the text. The prints that accompanied the stories and interviews were made either by copper plate photogravure or photopolymer process. The art is impressive and draws attention before even reading the words. It’s hard to categorize a book as beautiful and interesting as this one. It’s not merely a science book, though it is that, too. In the chapter on wind, there’s the story of Diana Nyad, an endurance swimmer attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida but needing a period with little wind so the waves wouldn’t be too large. Interspersed in her story are pages with types of winds or mythology and an interlude on the attempt to introduce wind at Mecca during the hajj when millions of Muslims gather for pilgrimage because the site has been so built up to accommodate all of the visitors and cuts off the natural flow of wind. It’s a one of a kind book. I’d highly recommend it.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is a visceral novel about slavery in America. It’s 1976, and the narrator Dana, an African American, is somehow transported back to antebellum Maryland where she is confronted with a drowning white child. She travels back and forth, seemingly at whim, until she realizes that she is connected to the child. It’s dangerous for her when she is in 1800s, even though she is herself not a slave, she has no rights that anyone needs to uphold. Her education and knowledge of history is a two-edged sword: sometimes she can use it to her advantage and other times it makes the whites of the time, and the slaves too, fearful of her. While it is a science fiction story because of the time travel element, it doesn’t focus on the particulars of how it is happening. The story takes the jumps in time as a given. One of the strengths of this device is that it puts our modern sensibilities back into the past so that we can better imagine what life was like for slaves and their owners. It’s so easy for me as a white person today to think that I would have of course been an abolitionist if I had lived back then. But what if I had lived in the south where slavery was an institution interwoven into the fabric of everyday life? What if my own family had owned slaves? Would I have really held beliefs that would be to the detriment of my own welfare? It’s a tough question. The book makes us consider that it was the times that made the person. In describing the slave owner, Dana says this, “He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). And she describes many monstrous things that he does. It’s enough to make us weep. It’s an extremely powerful book and I highly recommend it.

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The Sandman: Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J.H. Williams III, is a lovely prequel to an essential comics story. First, let me say, that prequels are tricky and often doomed to fail. When a story begins in the middle of events, it can be difficult to go back and tell the earlier backstory in a compelling way. But Gaiman has done it beautifully. When the original Sandman story began, he is imprisoned by a secret society for 72 years after being weakened by some adventure. Overture tells the story of that adventure when Morpheus (the embodiment of Dream) travels across the universe in order to save it from destruction that he himself inadvertently caused. Throughout the story, Gaiman weaves elements and characters from the original story in new and interesting ways that add to the mythos instead of merely explaining origins or anything mundane as that. I was enjoying the story for the first few issues, happy to be back in the world of Sandman, but I wasn’t astounded either. But upon finishing it, I can say that Gaiman sticks the landing and elevates the entire story, making it a truly worthy prequel. Though it takes place chronologically before the main Sandman story, I think it still best to read it afterwards. This was a deluxe edition, so it included a lot of supplementary material in the back. Remarkably, I found it pretty illuminating, at least more than I usually do with material like this. The artist, colorist, and letterer all explain their craft and artistic decision making process in a way that helped me understand better the collaborative process of making a comic. J.H. Williams III’s artwork in particular is gorgeous and makes the book stunning. If you like Sandman, definitely check this out. If you haven’t read the original ten collected volumes of Sandman, get on it!

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a beautiful novel spanning several generations of two families on and off the reservation in North Dakota. Through a series of interconnected stories that span at least 50 years, Erdrich introduces the reader to marvelous characters who remain alive long after closing the book. A few of the stories are told by a third person narrator, but most of them are narrated by the characters themselves, so we get to see how they see events, often the same events from multiple perspectives. It’s a wonderful way to show the intricate nature of perspective. One of the voices is Lipsha Morrissey, a young boy taken in by the Kashpaws, possibly his relatives, though the mystery of his ancestry is one that he tries to untangle. His is a humorous and earnest voice. He describes another woman who his grandfather had a love affair with: “There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there” (243). The unwitting joke is that instead of naming the bird he has used the Greek word for advocate, usually meaning the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. Earlier in his story, he had described his grandmother’s memory as “like them video games that don’t forget your score. One reason she remembers so many details about the trouble I gave her in early life is so she can flash back her total when she needs to” (240). Lipsha is only one of the many fully realized people that we empathize with and come to understand. Many others love, grieve, connive, cope, and live. It’s a world of characters that Erdrich returned to for a number of other books, but this is the first. In fact, it’s her first novel, which is amazing. It’s such a great book. I read the 1993 expanded edition, which includes more stories than either the 1984 original or the more recent 2009 revision. But it’s hard to see how one can go wrong with any version of the book (one of the stories taken out of the 2009 version appears in the backmatter, so it isn’t wholly lost).

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Book Reviews, April 2016

I bought a stack of books at the annual library sale and got started on reading some of them in April. I couldn’t help rereading an old favorite in the hopes that I would find it just as enthralling again. (Spoiler alert: I did.) I also read another funny science book by Mary Roach and a more serious picture book of extinct species. To round out the month, I read a superhero origin story and a Newbery Honor winning kids’ classic.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach is a funny and interesting book on what happens after we die. Years ago I read and enjoyed her first book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, but I hesitated in reading the follow-up on the afterlife because I wasn’t all that interested in the topic, or at least what I had assumed would be her take on it. I needn’t have worried. Roach makes almost anything interesting with her lively and humorous writing. I rediscovered her last year when I read her book on the digestive system, and I then decided that I would happily read any of her books. I especially liked the early chapter on souls and the hunt for them in the body. I also learned about the dubious study that supposedly found that the soul weighs 21 grams. There were many other good bits: the hunt for reincarnated souls, testing the effectiveness of mediums, and the search for ghosts. One particular story involved a farmer, with the help of his father’s ghost, finding a new will that changed the entire family’s inheritance. I won’t give away what Roach’s investigation into the matter finds. Overall it was a very enjoyable read, but I would probably recommend one of Roach’s other books first.

The Shadow Hero, written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by Sonny Liew, is a fun origin story about a mysterious and short-lived Golden Age superhero named the Green Turtle. As explained in an afterword, the original Green Turtle only lasted five issues in 1944. He fought in China against the Japanese, but curiously it wasn’t ever known if he himself was Chinese or not (rumor was that his creator Chu Hing wanted him to be Chinese). His face was never shown; he was mostly drawn from the back or when he was in profile or was facing the reader, he had his face covered in some way (i.e. with his arm or obscured by another character). In fact, the publisher had him colored a garish pink, possibly to accentuate his Caucasian skin as a Chinese superhero might not sell. Another recurring element to those stories was that Green Turtle was always on the verge of telling Burma Boy, his sidekick, his secret origins, but never gets around to it as he is always interrupted. So in steps Yang, 70 years later, to write an origin for Green Turtle, possibly the first Asian American superhero. The story takes place in Chinatown in a stand in for the Bay area, where gangs thrive. Young Hank helps his father tend the grocery store while his mother wishes better things for all of them. After she is saved by a superhero, she pushes Hank to become a superhero, too, even though he doesn’t have superpowers. It’s a fun tale about identity and heritage that plays on many of the conventions of the superhero origin. A brief warning for younger readers: the story includes stereotyped language about Asian Americans to place it into historical context. It doesn’t condone the language, but rather shows how the stereotypes are wrong. If you like superhero origin stories, definitely check this one out.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is a thoroughly engrossing literary thriller. Playing with the historical Vlad the Impaler and Bram Stoker’s character Dracula, the novel follows the investigations of an unnamed narrator, her father, his mentor, and other historians as they try to unravel the mystery of what exactly happened to Dracula and where he is buried. It all starts when the narrator finds a letter in her father’s library, tucked away in a strange book. The letter starts, “My dear and unfortunate successor…” and the book is an ancient volume with totally blank pages except for a woodcut image of a dragon at the very center of the book. I think I loved this book because much of the action takes place in libraries as the characters conduct research with old documents and letters. Much of the story is related in letters, an obvious homage to Bram Stoker’s famous novel. It’s not a particularly deep novel, and the characters are not fully formed, but for a suspenseful thriller, I can hardly imagine a more successful novel. I read the book over ten years ago when it first came out and I really liked it then. I forgot much of the action since then, so I picked it up again hoping to have a similar experience. Part of me worried it wouldn’t hold up. I needn’t have fretted. I loved it all over again.

A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals with text by Tim Flannery and illustrations by Peter Schouten is a sobering look at the effects of humanity on the animal kingdom. The book includes 103 species (mammal, bird, or reptile) that have gone extinct since the year 1500, most of them in the past 150 years. Peter Schouten’s illustrations are beautiful and naturalistic. I was reminded of the Audubon calendars we had in our house growing up. It was rather haunting to see animal after animal that is gone forever. Some of the species are familiar, even famous for their extinction: the gigantic moas of New Zealand, the Dodo of Mauritius, the Great Auk in the North Atlantic, the Passenger Pigeon of North America, and the Thylacine (aka the Tasmanian Tiger). I didn’t know about Steller’s Sea Cow, a gigantic relative of dugongs and manatees. It was the largest mammal (besides whales) to live in modern times, at up to 30 feet long and weighing approximately 10 tons. They were all hunted until there were none left by 1768. The text by Tim Flannery, an introduction and commentary on each species to accompany the artwork, is informative on what was known about each species and its demise. Sometimes a bird would be hunted for food by humans. Such was the fate of the Rail (a kind of bird) on Wake Island during World War II—during hostilities between the Japanese and American forces, the Japanese soldiers faced starvation and ate the birds to survive. More often the reason for extinction was the introduction of some other invasive species that disrupted the life cycle. Black rats might eat the eggs, for example, of some other island bird. The rats came to shore from aboard the ships that explored the South Pacific and other faraway once diverse habitats. Sometimes people destroyed the habitat for these animals, usually for agricultural reasons. Flannery also notes that a few species went extinct when naturalists gathered the last few remaining specimens for natural history museums. Our knowledge of the species came at the expense of their extinction, a truly bittersweet result. This book is a good complement to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, showing example after example of humanity’s devastation of the natural world.

The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder is another classic of kids’ lit that I managed to miss when I was growing up. I thought maybe I had read it because I have some vague memory of a book I randomly picked up at the library that had to do with kids and some Egyptian mystery, but then I forgot the title and could never find the book again when I went to look for it. I don’t think it was the same book, but regardless, The Egypt Game is a good book for elementary age kids to read. It has a lot to say about friendships, imagination, and figuring out how to deal with disappointment. The initial main characters are April and Melanie. April has recently moved in with her grandmother, who herself has recently moved into a new two bedroom apartment so she would have enough room for April and herself. Melanie lives one floor down from April, and they become friends because of a shared interest in Egyptian history. They start to imagine that they themselves are living in ancient Egypt with its gods and ceremonies, priests/priestesses and pharaohs. The game is a secret they play in a fenced storage lot behind a junk shop, but they eventually end up inviting others to join them. I’m looking forward to the day my kids are old enough to read it so I can talk to them about their own Egypt games.

book reviews, comics, history, literature, science

Book Reviews, February 2016

February’s reviews start off with three (!) comic books of varying quality. I read lots of comics, mostly from the library, but I don’t always review them. One reason is that because of the serial nature of much of comics storytelling, I don’t want to comment on and/or recommend a volume that is in the middle of a story. But I’ve decided to try reviewing more of the comics that I read so that anyone interested in the medium can possibly find something new to read. Or maybe I’ll make something sound so good I’ll convince someone to try their very first comic. It’s worth a shot. But it’s not all comics this month. There’s also a novel by a Nobel prize winning author and science writing from a New Yorker staff writer.

Batgirl Volume 1: Batgirl of Burnside, written by Cameron Stewart and Brenden Fletcher and illustrated by Babs Tarr, is a smart, fresh take on an old character. This volume collects individual comics #35-40 of the series, but it begins a new start for Batgirl with a new creative team and a new outlook for the character. Batgirl is Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Jim Gordon of the Gotham City Police Department, but she hasn’t always been Batgirl. She was the original, but after the Joker shot her in the classic Killing Joke storyline, she became a paraplegic and became Oracle, a whiz at computers who provided assistance to other superheroes such as Batman and Black Canary. Others took up the mantle of Batgirl in the meantime. When DC Comics relaunched all of their comics a few years ago in an event called New 52, they decided to have Barbara the beneficiary of an experimental surgery that restored her ability to walk, a controversial decision because many found Oracle to be an inspirational hero with a disability. This latest version of the character is starting over at college in Burnside, a borough of Gotham. She is still a super genius with computers, which comes in handy against the villains she faces who use social media and celebrity to further their aims. I appreciated that with this incarnation, the creators revamped her costume into something practical. All too often, women superheroes have had costumes that were about the male gaze and not about the character herself. This Barbara wears a leather coat instead of spandex and boots instead of heels in a chic DIY look. Though not wowed, I enjoyed this new beginning, and I’ll probably read the next installment from the library when it arrives.

Magneto Volume 1: Infamous, written by Cullen Bunn and illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Javier Fernandez, is the beginning of a chilling and brilliant anti-hero story. If you’ve read X-Men comics or seen the films, you know that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor: this collection includes a flashback to the Warsaw ghetto. He’s determined to prevent another genocide, the extinction of mutants. This version of Magneto is very much like the one at the beginning of X-Men: First Class. Instead of killing former Nazis, though, he is working alone to take out threats to mutant-kind. In the tradition of other anti-heroes, Magneto’s actions repulse the reader, but still his motivations are understandable and ultimately we end up sympathizing with him. Volume 1 collects the first six issues of the story, and I’m looking forward to continuing.

Black Science Volume 1: How to Fall Forever, written by Rick Remender with artists Matteo Scalera and Dean White, is a pulpy sci-fi comic that unfortunately falls into the traps of its forebears. It’s published by Image Comics, which is home to a host of creator-owned comics series that are inventive and interesting (such as Saga and Wytches). The premise is solid: it’s an adventure story featuring a device that allows travel to alternate timelines within what the story calls the Eververse (basically all of the infinite possible universes). The cast of characters include the team of inventors who built the device, the two children of the team leader, the financial backer of the project and his partner, and a security guard. After an accident, the group gets stuck jumping from place to place, unstuck in time, with no apparent way to get back. I thought it could be fun, and it sometimes is. But I was extremely bothered by the portrayal of Native Americans in one of the alternate worlds. In that particular world, the indigenous people of North America are visited by some other group of spacetime travelers and they gain use of the device. They use it to find superior technology with which they first fight back against white invaders first defensively and then offensively as a sort of inverse Manifest Destiny. I get that Remender wanted to show the evil of the device. But it’s an alternate reality so he could have made the Native American tribes superior in the first place without outside help (the device works as a deus ex machina). Besides this, the portrayal of the tribes is that they are barbaric in spite of their advanced technology. In their first appearance, they are massacring German soldiers, who appear to be in World War I uniforms and defending trenches. In their next appearance, an indigenous soldier is vividly scalping an enemy soldier. The stereotype has been set, and unfortunately the characterization never gets much better even as we get to know one. The team leader sustains an injury so they need the help of a shaman to heal him, so they kidnap one. He effectively joins the group. Why he bothers to help them and go along after they have left his timeline is not made clear. Nearly every other character has clear backstory and motivation, but his reasoning is mysterious. Eventually in volume 2 of the series we do discover the backstory of his world that I already described, and we learn that he has a family; in fact, he is a grandfather, but it’s not much to humanize him. He’s still paper thin as a character; he’s mostly used as someone who has powerful technology to heal and to fight, not as a person. All in all, it’s an extremely disappointing portrayal of Native Americans. It could have been interesting and forceful (i.e. a world where Native Americans came out on top has potential as a premise), but the execution was abysmal. It played into all of the worst tendencies of the pulp tradition from which it came by playing to stereotypes. If you enjoy swashbuckling fantasy or sci-fi, look elsewhere. Black Science isn’t worth your time.

Sula by Toni Morrison is a really great novel. It tells the story of two friends, Sula and Nel, who grow up in a small, segregated Ohio town. In brief chapters the story flows as the two girls share life together and then separate when Sula leaves town to live freely. Nel stays and settles down until the day Sula comes back and shakes things up again. I’ve kept this incomplete summary rather vague so as not to give away any particular details for anyone who hates spoilers. I was pleasantly surprised at how straight forward and easy the narration was to read. I began the book worried that it would be too “literary,” which by itself is not a fault and which I often love about books. I love many difficult literary books. But I’ve found that it’s harder for me to give those kinds of books the attention and concentration required these last few years now that I have kids. I’m more easily distracted. So I loved that I could follow the story in Sula, and it was still a deep and rich book even if not as difficult as I expected. An impressive achievement. I’d highly recommend this novel. Now for a little anecdote. I was reading this at the dentist, and one of the assistants/hygienists asked me what I was reading. I told her the title and then said that it was by Toni Morrison. She stared at me blankly. I was momentarily surprised that she wouldn’t have heard of the Nobel Prize winning author, but then I began to think why would she necessarily know Morrison? Would she know the names of other famous authors who have won the Nobel like Alice Munro and Saul Bellow? Why would I assume people outside of my set of friends would know who these people are? Half of all American adults read four or fewer books in a year.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is a sobering look at the effects humans are having on life on this planet. There have been five major extinction events in Earth’s history, and we are currently living during the sixth. Previous extinction events have been caused by catastrophes like asteroid impacts. Not so for the sixth extinction, which we are currently witnessing. Human behavior, whether greedy or careless, has caused the extinction of untold numbers of species. In chapter after chapter, Kolbert details how species or larger groups have gone extinct or been threatened because of humans. The megafauna (such as mastodons, mammoths, and sabretooth cats) died out soon after contact with humans, possibly from overhunting. Large land animals to this day do poorly when in close proximity to humans because they reproduce so slowly and cannot make up for any population losses. Other chapters deal with the killing off of auks (similar to a penguin) or the Sumatran rhinoceros, which is not yet extinct but barely holding on (in fact, the rhino Suci who is highlighted in book died at the Cincinnati Zoo soon after the book came out). Still other chapters deal with how humans have made such an impact on different species. Habitat destruction, especially in diverse environments like rainforests, has led to untold numbers of extinctions of insects and larger animals in the foodchain. Ocean acidification, caused by global warming, is killing off corals and the many species which rely on coral reefs to survive. Humans also transplant species around the globe, sometimes unwittingly, which can cause all sorts of unintended consequences. The book opens with the fungus that is killing off many frogs and other amphibians. All sorts of invasive species are able to thrive in new environments when they have no natural predators. They disrupt their new ecosystem, outcompeting and/or killing the native species they encounter. The final pages offer up the possibilities of all of the mayhem humans have caused: either we will also succumb to the vast disruptions we have wrought to the planet or we will through our ingenuity overcome the looming disaster. It’s a bleak picture. Despite how depressing it can be, I still would highly recommend this book. Kolbert is a fantastic writer (the book won a Pulitzer Prize), and it’s important to think through the implications of human interaction with nature.

book reviews, comics, criminal justice, faith, history, literature, medicine, poetry, politics, science

Best Books I Read in 2015

I read a lot of great books in 2015, and I would recommend many of them to interested readers. But I thought it might be helpful to narrow it down to a smaller list of titles for a year end wrap up. So here are the five books I would most recommend to anyone, followed by ten more that were also great (and I feel bad leaving off books I liked by Anne Lamott, Patrick Hicks, Marilynne Robinson, and Brian Turner, among others—it was a good year of reading). I’ve put them in the order that I read them with a brief quote from my original reviews (and a link to the review if you want to see more). First, the top five.

Complications (Atul Gawande)

“a phenomenal book of medical stories and explorations of the human experience at a most vulnerable time. The book’s greatest strength is its stories.”

The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)

“a devastating critique of American society. Alexander argues, persuasively I feel, that upon the end of Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s, instead of ushering in a time of equal opportunity, America erected a new racial caste system based on mass incarceration (via the War on Drugs) with devastating effect on African Americans. Her argument is a complex one, requiring diving into history, law, and social science research.”

Get in Trouble (Kelly Link)

a book so good I reviewed it twice!

“It hit the right tone between reality and fantasy that got under my skin so I didn’t know what to believe.” (blog review)

“It’s this quality of the fantastic, when in the best hands like Link’s, that helps the reader to get out of the ordinary world and see something different, all while shedding light on some part of the ordinary that we often overlook. Plus, it’s fun.” (Rock &Sling review)

Hiroshima (John Hersey)

“And though this is a survival story, we see death everywhere. It’s important to reckon with this, look at the death and destruction square in the face. As an American, this is my legacy: America is the only country to have used atomic weapons.”

Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)

“a flat-out incredible book. Through the stories of prisoners young and old, innocent and guilty, whom he has represented as an attorney through the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson shows the many ways that the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed and often leads to unjust outcomes.”

And the runners-up

Gulp (Mary Roach)

“the perfect bathroom book, and I mean that in the best way possible. The book is fascinating and funny, and the subject matter is often fecal.”

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

“The book is satisfying but not overlong, and still I wished I could spend more time with these delightfully eccentric sisters. I’d recommend this novel to anyone who likes a slightly twisted and dark story.”

God and the Gay Christian (Matthew Vines)

“Vines presents a well-organized and detailed argument that the church should affirm LGBT individuals and marriage between same sex partners that is monogamous and committed. And it fulfills the promise of its subtitle: it is a biblical argument.”

Carver: A Life in Poems (Marilyn Nelson)

“In many ways, I thought it read better than a traditional biography would have.”

Searching for Sunday (Rachel Held Evans)

“a mix of memoir and a meditation on church. The book is structured around the seven sacraments (baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage), which helps hold the fragmentary nature of the chapters together.”

Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

“Coates’s writing is an inspiration for me. He is a writer that I admire for many reasons: love of language, curiosity of self and the world, and deep humility.”

Neurotribes (Steve Silberman)

“a comprehensive and important history of autism […] it gives a multi-faceted perspective to an often misunderstood condition”

Davita’s Harp (Chaim Potok)

“another beautiful and moving novel by this author. Like the others I’ve read, it’s a coming of age story about a young, smart, Jewish kid; unlike the others I’ve read, this one is about a girl, and that makes all the difference.”

Killing and Dying (Adrian Tomine)

“is an impressive short story collection in comics. I would put it next to any collection of stories in prose out this year and be confident it would hold its own, it’s that good.”

March, Book One (John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell)

“This is one instance where I think the medium of comics is especially effective at conveying the power of the story while also helping the reader see the larger context. The scenes of violence are particularly potent to help the reader see both the resistance the protesters faced and the way the strategy of nonviolence worked in the face of violent resistance.”

I hope 2016 brings at least as many good books my way!

book reviews, comics, criminal justice, faith, history, literature, medicine, politics, psychology, science

Book Reviews, November 2015

November’s books are a varied lot, but they were all pretty great (with one notable exception–I’m looking at you, Luke Skywalker). You might find something you like.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman is a comprehensive and important history of autism. He details how two researchers, Hans Asperger in Austria and Leo Kanner in Baltimore, both discovered autism around the same time in the late 1930s, but came to radically different conclusions based on their observations. Kanner viewed autism as a rare condition with a strict set of “fascinating peculiarities.” Asperger, working under the shadow of the Third Reich, however saw it as “not at all rare” and as a continuum, but his work remained untranslated from the German for decades. It wasn’t until Asperger’s views were rediscovered and disseminated in the 1980s by like-minded psychologists such as Lorna Wing and Uta Frith that views began to shift. In the meantime, Kanner’s narrow view of autism meant that few got a diagnosis and the help that they needed, and of those that did, he proposed theories (popularized by Bruno Bettelheim) that parents were to blame, especially “refrigerator mothers.” The continuum model, or spectrum as it is now called, finally took hold in the DSM-III-R of 1987. One of Silberman’s chapters details the fascinating history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as it relates to autism, and how with the inclusion of Asperger’s syndrome in DSM-IV in1994, the way was paved for many more individuals to get a diagnosis. It is this new understanding of autism that has led to the “epidemic” of diagnoses in the last 20-30 years. Autism has always been there, but now there is a label to attach to it. Silberman slaps down the study by Andrew Wakefield that supposedly showed a link between vaccines and autism, showing how the study was seriously flawed in many respects and was later retracted by the journal that originally published it. There were many other chapters that focused on different aspects of autism besides the clinical and diagnostic side. One focused on the impact of the film Rain Man, which was a favorite of mine in high school (not sure how it holds up as it’s been a long time since I saw it). Another detailed the connections between autism and ham radio and science fiction fandom. Others chronicled how families cope with autism and how the autism community has begun to define itself. Overall, it gives a multi-faceted perspective to an often misunderstood condition. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in autism.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson is a flat-out incredible book. Through the stories of prisoners young and old, innocent and guilty, whom he has represented as an attorney through the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson shows the many ways that the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed and often leads to unjust outcomes. The main narrative concerns Walter McMillian, a man wrongly sent to death row in Alabama for a murder he had nothing to do with. The twists and turns in the case as they try to appeal his conviction against a hostile prosecutor and law enforcement officers and indifferent courts read like a John Grisham novel (Grisham himself gives the book a positive blurb). I could barely put it down. The structure of the book aided this quality: he interspersed the chapters on the McMillian case with chapters on other topics including juveniles tried as adults, mothers in prison, and the mentally ill, so the reader can’t stop. The stories are forceful and worthy of indignation. Ultimately, Stevenson has compiled a moral argument for criminal justice reform that is a perfect complement to books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Adam Benforado’s Unfair (both of which I reviewed in May and mentioned before). He provides the emotional heart of the argument in the stories of the imprisoned that the others make in detailed analysis of case law or social science research. What is the point of our criminal justice system anyway? Stevenson points out how inhumane it has become as we have overseen the era of mass incarceration: “We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken” (290). I can’t recommend this book enough.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson is an important book of essays dealing with big topics like democracy, human nature, and the difficulty of history. It’s not nearly as daunting as that sounds, but it is a bit daunting. First, she knows a lot about history and literature. Second, she doesn’t write down to her audience. It’s not that she is showing off, but she packs so much into her analyses and probing that it sometimes does take a moment to soak it all in. Robinson has a style that meanders in a pleasant way, touching on matters that don’t always appear at first to be on topic, but that she brings around to great effect. There are many passages I marked because they were so powerful. For example, when talking about the Homestead Act, she points out that “housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental” (93). Or when discussing a number of books that attempt to debunk the Bible, especially the Old Testament for its violence, she proceeds to show how the Torah is heavily interested in the care of the poor, listing many laws that command making provision for those in need. It’s a rich book, well worth the time and worth rereading. I had the opportunity to meet Robinson once at a wine and cheese gathering before a reading. She read from her then forthcoming novel Gilead, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. At the time, I had only read one of her books, a different book of essays, but when I had a chance to shake her hand, I told her that I thought she wrote beautifully and that I planned on reading everything that she had written. I’m still working on that project, and I’m the better for it.

My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner is a startling and poetic memoir of an Iraq War veteran. The book is divided into short, numbered sections, and it’s not surprising that some of them read like brief poems since Turner has written two well received books of poetry before this memoir. To give an idea of what I’m talking about here’s the closing paragraph of an early section where he describes his time in Bosnia, where he was also deployed: “Fires burned in Mostar and Visegrad, Gradacac, Gorazde and Sarajevo. Season by season, the dead sank deeper into the soil—each enduring the severe and exacting labor of leaves and rain and sun in their compression of mineral and stone, there within the worm-driven kingdom of hunger, phyla of the blind.” (32)A later section about a house raid in Iraq begins with “The soldiers enter the house” and repeats the phrase like a refrain over and over, each time with a different description of how they enter the house (e.g. “with shouting and curses and muzzle flash” or “with the flag of their nation sewn onto the sleeves of their uniforms”) (The entire section can be read at this link; I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it; it’s worth your time). I had the opportunity to hear Turner give a reading last month, and he chose this passage from the book. It’s the centerpiece to the book, a moving description that humanizes the soldiers bursting into the home as well as the Iraqis who are disrupted and traumatized. The fragmentary nature of the narrative allows Turner to play around with memory and time. Memory often works likes this, brief glimpses of the past disconnected from what came before, a moment captured, but then sometimes intertwined with an image or a person or a feeling to some other moment, leading to another glimpse. One of the themes of the book is the legacy that Turner feels as he tries to explain why he joined the Army. He recounts the war experiences of many relatives, including his father and grandfather, and the bonds that are forged by that experience and how it never leaves a person. In fact, another part of the book explores how anyone can come back from a war zone and try to re-integrate into civilian life. He describes himself as two persons, one Sgt. Turner who, although dead, still watches the other, civilian Brian Turner, from the cameras of a drone. It’s a remarkably potent image of the nature of identity integration and the trauma of war as it is carried out in the 21^st century. I began reading the book on Veteran’s Day because I felt that I need to grapple with the experiences of our soldiers and the costs of our country’s decisions to go to war, even when I didn’t agree with the reasons for going to war. Those men and women went on my behalf whether I asked them to or not. Turner’s story is only one soldier’s story, but it’s worth knowing when it’s told this well. [Here’s a great interview with Turner as well]

Star Wars: Skywalker Strikes, written by Jason Aaron with artist John Cassaday, is essentially a placeholder comic, not really worth the time. I was pretty disappointed at how predictable it all was: the first arc especially is simply another small band of heroes infiltrating an enemy base. Set between the first two movies (Episode IV: A New Hope and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back), it is very constrained in what it can do in terms of story and character development. These first six issues of the comic feature only familiar characters from the movies (with one notable exception at the very end of the collection). For what it is, a retread of familiar characters in familiar situations, it actually is well done. Aaron has the voices of the characters down, and the art by Cassaday is top notch, reproducing the facial expressions of the actors with real skill. But I expected much more from these two creators who have written or provided art for some of my favorite comics (e.g. Aaron’s writing on Scalped and Cassaday’s art for Planetary and Astonishing X-Men). I wouldn’t recommend reading it unless you absolutely cannot wait until the new Star Wars movies come out, and you can read it for free (like I did, from the library).

Davita’s Harp by Chaim Potok is another beautiful and moving novel by this author. Like the others I’ve read, it’s a coming of age story about a young, smart, Jewish kid; unlike the others I’ve read, this one is about a girl, and that makes all the difference. Davita’s Harp is the only one of Potok’s novels with a female protagonist. Davita herself tells the story of her childhood, growing up in New York City during the Great Depression. Her mother is a Jewish immigrant, but not religiously observant, and her father is from New England privilege, but has renounced the wealth that he came from. They are Communists (when that wasn’t quite as unfashionable as it would be today) with hopes and beliefs about making the world a better place. Her father is a journalist who travels a lot to cover strikes and other important events, eventually traveling to Europe to cover the Spanish civil war in 1937. Her mother is a social worker and very active in the party. Davita never quite understands her parents and their beliefs, but she loves them dearly and respects their desire to make the world better. She wants to understand how they changed so profoundly: her mother had been brought up in a Hasidic family (a very strict Jewish sect) but had lost her faith, and her father had renounced capitalism and his wealthy heritage because of some event in his past. It’s all quite mysterious to Davita. As she grows, she learns more about her parents and about her place in the world, both as a girl and the daughter of Communists. There’s a lot of connections to the history of the period, to Jewish identity, and even to characters from other Potok novels, though it’s not necessary to read the other books to find pleasure in this one. I enjoyed this one thoroughly, and I’m glad that it wasn’t another story about fathers and sons like so many of his others (though I liked those a lot, too).

book reviews, comics, faith, history, literature, poetry, politics, science

Book Reviews, October 2015

I’m trying something new with October’s batch of book reviews. The first review is twice as long as usual so that I could go into more depth on the important history of voting rights in America. I think I’ll try doing this again when the subject warrants it. As for the rest, it’s more poetry, science, and faith stuff, which is pretty typical for me. [edit: I’ve added another review at the bottom of a scary comic book I read on Halloween but didn’t have time to review until a few days later]

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman is a vital look at the history of the Voting Rights Act from its passage in 1965 until today. It traces the many challenges to the law, the Supreme Court decisions that defined how the law could be interpreted, and ultimately how the law has been rendered mostly toothless by the recent Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013. It’s easy to think that when constitutional amendments or major legislative victories pass that they have solved the problems, but it’s not like those who were on the losing side of the argument suddenly give up at that point. The 15^th amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited all levels of government from denying the vote to any citizen based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the south passed numerous Jim Crow laws that essentially denied the vote to African Americans through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and the like. For nearly one hundred years, the constitution was not enforced. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 with bipartisan support and signed by Lyndon B. Johnson after the dramatic march from Selma to Montgomery illustrated the extreme lengths that the state of Alabama was willing to go to deny the vote to blacks (the recent film Selma does a fantastic job showing the efforts of civil rights protesters). But again, those who lost the battle of the VRA did not give up the war against minority voting. For instance, say a city had 60% white people and 40% black people and had heretofore always elected a white city council by suppressing the black vote. But now that blacks could register to vote because of the VRA, they had the opportunity to elect, say, two black city council members because two of these hypothetical districts were majority black. In such a case, many cities switched from having district voting to citywide at-large voting so they could continue voting in an all white city council. This type of effort to dilute or further suppress the black vote continued to happen in the southern counties covered by the VRA after it was passed. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan courted southern states by promising to water down the VRA in what has been termed the southern strategy. Reagan even went so far as to fill the Justice Department with lawyers who were not eager to enforce the VRA, including some who were outright hostile towards the law such as future Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Other methods of suppressing minority voting include voter roll purges (where voters are removed from the registration list in an effort to update the rolls, but often leads to errors where lawfully registered voters are removed for no good reason) and voter ID laws (promoted to prevent in person voter fraud, a problem that does not in fact exist, but which hurts minority, student, and elderly voters who may not have the required identifications). In the 2000 election, the Florida recount made famous the confusing butterfly ballots and hanging chads that made it difficult to determine who received more votes in the presidential election. What got less attention was the voter roll purge that took place before the election. Florida purged the names of ex-felons (because by law in FL they did not have the right to vote), but they did so even if the names were a 70% match. That means that even if voters had a different middle initial or suffix or even their race or sex data didn’t match, they might be purged. The company that did the work for FL later went through the names again using stricter criteria and found 12,000 names that shouldn’t have been purged. Some of those people definitely tried to vote but were not able to because when they showed up at the polls, they were turned away since they were no longer registered based on mistakenly being identified as a felon. More recently, Indiana’s 2008 voter ID law was found constitutional despite zero instances of in person voter fraud in the state. After the Shelby County decision in 2013, which struck down section 4 of the VRA, numerous states that had been under the VRA rushed to try and pass voter ID laws. Section 4 of the VRA used a formula to stipulate which counties in the country would be subject to preclearance by the Justice Department of changes in election laws. With no formula, the preclearance portion of Section 5 was rendered inert. The Republican controlled Congress, despite overwhelmingly reauthorizing the VRA in 2006, has made no effort to rewrite the formula since the Shelby decision in 2013. In general, Republicans do not come out looking great in this book based on their actions, with a few exceptions like Everett Dirksen, Bob Dole, and James Sensenbrenner, who respectively each played a role in passing the VRA and renewing it in 1982 and 2006. However, I did not care for the few times Berman took cheap shots at Republicans based on irrelevant details or issues not involved in voting rights (e.g. mentioning that John Ashcroft spent taxpayer money to cover a statue of Lady Liberty at an event or insinuating that Hans von Spakovsky has a sinister sounding name). It didn’t happen often, but it hurts his credibility in telling the vital history of voting rights in America.

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements by Sam Kean is a fascinating tour through the elements. True to its title, Kean’s book includes interesting stories and anecdotes for every entry on the periodic table, from the probable zinc mixed with King Midas’s bronze (itself an alloy of tin and copper) that made it a much shinier brass and perhaps mistaken for gold to the effects of lithium on the brain of a poet like Robert Lowell (e.g. resetting the circadian rhythm). Kean goes out of his way to include humor and arcane tidbits as he tells his stories. It’s partly a history of science, but it also touches on other historical events when an element plays a prominent role. I never took a chemistry class in high school or college, so I feel a little behind in my scientific understanding, but this is the kind of book that goes down easy. It’s science for the rest of us. I found myself dipping into the book frequently, and having a hard time putting it down as each new story sounded alluring. I’d recommend this grab bag of chemistry to anyone who finds science interesting. My only (admittedly minor) complaint is that there isn’t really an overall theme or point to the book beyond being a delightful collection of diverse stories about or related to the elements. The title of the book refers to gallium, a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees, so that a teaspoon made of gallium would literally melt in a hot beverage as a nerdy prank. Oh, science!

Transformations by Anne Sexton is an off-kilter poetry collection retelling familiar fairy tales. The stories from Grimm may be familiar, but the tone and the telling are decidedly fresh and exciting. Take the scene in “Cinderella,” where the sisters are trying on the slipper:The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They don’t just heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.But it’s not long before the lovely image of the letter and envelope are undercut by Cinderella and the prince living happily ever after “like two dolls in a museum case” with “their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.” (read the whole poem here) Many other tales such as “Rapunzel,” “Snow White,” and “The Frog Prince” get the same sardonic treatment. I especially enjoyed some of the tales that I wasn’t already familiar with like “One-eye, Two-eyes, Three-eyes.” It’s a deeply weird meditation on parenthood and disability in which three sisters each have a different number of eyes. The odd-eyed sisters are favored by their mother, and the normal two-eyed girl is an outcast. Of course, in the usual manner, that means she will come out on top through magic and the love of a knight. But Sexton frames the tale with the deeply conflicted thoughts of parents dealing with children with disabilities. Parents can see their child as a gift from God, a cosmic mistake, a cause for martyrdom, or a millstone around the neck. The tale ends with Two-Eyes taking in her sisters out of pity and because they are like magic talismans. She can’t help but have them. It’s a poem that I’ll be returning to again and again out of sheer fascination. I’d recommend this book for anyone who likes fairy tales.

The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus by Robin Meyers is a provocative look at church. The main problem with the church, as Meyers sees it, is that it has been co-opted by Empire (first the Roman Empire under Constantine, today the American church by the government and/or political parties). He outlines ways in which the church should disentangle from Empire and get back to its roots as a countercultural force. Meyers envisions followers of Jesus from all denominations and theological beliefs coming together to live the faith that we profess. To him, faith is not a list of beliefs, but radically embodied trust, or “an orientation toward the mystery of God [… b]ecause we trust in spite of what we cannot know” (118). Another key element for Meyers is that the Underground Church he envisions is nonviolent: we are called to peace and to love our enemies. It’s something that has been lost from many Christian traditions outside of the Quakers, Mennonites, and Amish (and perhaps a few others). He has lots of other ideas about how the church can be true to its roots: by making communion an actual meal that is shared with not only the congregation but also with any who may be hungry and in need, by budgeting as much money for outreach as for keeping the lights on and staff paid, by standing up against injustice wherever it may be, and by taking care of God’s creation and not exploiting it out of greed and selfishness, among many others. I felt convicted by some of his exhortations. I really liked his sense of shared mission in living out unconditional love no matter what church background. For myself, I’ve found a home in the Episcopal church. But just recently my mom was telling me about the wonderful after school program for inner city kids that her evangelical church (the one I grew up in) has been running for close to 15 years. We may not see eye to eye on every bit of theology, but she and her church are showing the love of God to those kids. My only complaint about the book is that I wanted Meyers to provide more depth to some of his historical analyses. I appreciated what he did say about the early church and the time of Constantine, but I wanted more. I thought the idea of church being co-opted by Empire important so I wanted even more analysis. His book read more like extended sermons, though, which makes sense since he is a pastor. He comes from the United Church of Christ, so though he wants to find common ground with Christians of all stripes, it might be harder for those who are more conservative to overlook some of his more liberal statements. But I think it’s worth the effort in trying to find common ground with other Christians if we truly want to love God and our neighbors. [Disclosure: I received the book from the Carol Mann Agency via a Goodreads giveaway in the hopes that I would give it an honest review.]

Wytches Volume 1, written by Scott Snyder and penciled by Jock, is a pretty terrifying horror comic book. Primarily, it’s the story of a family who has moved to a small town in New England in an attempt to start over. The mother is still recovering from an accident that confines her to a wheelchair, the father needs time and space to work, and their daughter Sailor is trying to start over after a terrible confrontation with a bully in her old town. But the past cannot be outrun. And there is something evil in the woods, something old that preys on human greed and selfishness. These aren’t the witches of Oz or Macbeth, but something more primal and awful. But it’s not just a story of confronting evil, but a story of confronting limits, the limits of a parent in protecting a child, or the limits of a teenager’s control of anxiety. The story is well paced, divided as it is in six parts (originally it was published in single issue comic books, each with an effective cliffhanger). It was hard to put down. Also, I was glad I read it during the day so I didn’t have to think about the scary parts in the dark. The artwork by Jock has two modes: during daylight it is fairly realistic, but when it is dark or there are supernatural elements, the artwork becomes more jagged and exaggerated, like it is more about the sensation of the characters or setting rather than their literal presentation. The art is a perfect match for Snyder’s story. The book also contains some extra material at the end that allows the reader to see some of the process of the artwork from penciling to the finished product. From this material it becomes clear that the colorist Matt Hollingsworth is also a vital member of the team to make this story work. Though Wytches is an ongoing work, this first volume can be read as a standalone story with a clear climax and ending to this part of the story. Having said that, I’ll be eager to find out where it goes next. I’d recommend this to anyone who likes scary stories.

book reviews, criminal justice, faith, history, literature, politics, psychology, science

Book Reviews, May 2015

The May installment of mini book reviews has the two books I referenced in my last post about criminal justice, as well as two very different novels set during World War II, and another book on creation and evolution because I can’t stop reading about the topic.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is a devastating critique of American society. Alexander argues, persuasively I feel, that upon the end of Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s, instead of ushering in a time of equal opportunity, America erected a new racial caste system based on mass incarceration (via the War on Drugs) with devastating effect on African Americans. Her argument is a complex one, requiring diving into history, law, and social science research. It started with calls for a return to “law and order” during the tumultuous 1960s, then with Nixon calling for a “war on drugs” that didn’t really come to fruition until Reagan’s administration. Reagan truly initiated the Drug War early in his time in office by dramatically increasing anti-drug budgets. Interestingly, at the time he called for a War on Drugs in October of 1982, only 2% of the country thought drugs were the most important issue facing the country. Things didn’t get better under Clinton in the 1990s. He enacted many “tough on crime” policies such as 3-strike life sentences for certain crimes. His administration cut public housing at the same time it was increasing money for corrections. In Alexander’s telling, no one is blameless for the current predicament of mass incarceration. After detailing the history, Alexander shows how police have virtually no legal restraints in carrying out the drug war. Because there are few, if any constraints, the seemingly race neutral drug war ends up targeting and incarcerating people of color disproportionately, especially in light of the fact that whites and people of color use drugs at similar rates. Even after someone has served a sentence for a drug crime, the system isn’t done with them yet. Policies that control ex-prisoners make it difficult to truly re-integrate into society, often leading to second class status or, even worse, recidivism. In order to end mass incarceration as a caste system, it is not enough to point out that drug use is a public health problem and not a criminal one. Alexander argues that the racial component of mass incarceration has to be confronted head on. If it is not, then even if mass incarceration is ended, another racialized caste system will emerge just as Jim Crow followed slavery, and mass incarceration followed Jim Crow. I would highly recommend this book.
Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice by Adam Benforado is a critical examination of the American criminal justice system. And it is vitally important that we look at it. Benforado details the many, many ways that the criminal justice system does not, in fact, deliver justice. The structure of the book, from investigation to adjudication to punishment, allows him to show how things can go wrong each step of the way. Along the way he points out the relevant social science research that helps to explain how these mistakes can be made. For instance, some innocent people confess to crimes that they didn’t commit in order to make a grueling interrogation stop. Or they might take a plea deal if they’re led to believe that a trial will not show their innocence. Astoundingly, over 90 percent of those charged with a crime and offered a plea take it without a trial. During a trial, it can be hard to determine guilt or innocence when prosecutors withhold evidence or a jury inaccurately rates a witness trustworthy or not. Or take an eyewitness’s evidence: people’s memories can be notoriously unreliable when looking at a lineup or recalling the circumstances of a crime. Memories can be easily corrupted or altered or even fabricated without the eyewitness realizing he or she is doing it. And the impartial judge who oversees the proceedings of a trial may not be as objective as we would like to believe. Of course everyone has biases, but it’s amazing how something like the time of day can affect someone. In studies, judges are more lenient earlier in the day, but they are much harsher before lunch or at the end of the day. How is that fair? When it comes to punishment, Benforado puts forth the scientific evidence that “it is a desire for retribution—not deterrence or incapacitation—that has the strongest influence” (191). This type of punishment leads to mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes laws, life without parole, and the death penalty, which don’t work to actually deter crime. Once in prison, it’s hard not to become “institutionalized” or broken as a person (whether by solitary confinement or the threat of rape and violence), so it’s not surprising that so many prisoners cannot re-integrate into society after serving time. Benforado offers a smattering of possible reforms big and small that could get us closer to true justice. One of the best suggestions, I thought, was the virtual courtroom. It would remove obvious problems like being “swayed by the attractiveness of a witness” (266) or thinking a nervous witness is lying when they are merely nervous at speaking in public (we are not good at detecting whether people are lying or not, though we think we are). My only real complaint with the book is that it sometimes reads too easily. Benforado presents historical cases or the social science research so smoothly and convincingly (similarly to Malcolm Gladwell) that I was almost entertained by the story he was telling or the research findings he was presenting, when I really should be outraged. It’s not that I wasn’t ultimately outraged, but maybe the pill should stick in the throat more rather than go down so easily. Despite that slight, and possibly idiosyncratic, complaint, I would highly recommend this book to everyone. [Disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof from the publisher via a goodreads.com giveaway in the hopes that I would give an honest review of the book.]
The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard by Patrick Hicks is a novel of witness and remembrance. It’s an unflinching account of the horrors of a Nazi extermination camp told in a documentary style. I’ll admit that I mistakenly thought it was going to be told more from the point of view of the title character (though the back cover and the blurbs are quite clear about the documentary nature of the story). A story told from the POV of the Commandant would have been contrary to the spirit of the novel. Rather, the narrator refers repeatedly to the absences and the missing, to the thousands killed on a daily basis, about which “traditional modes of storytelling fail us” because “the darkness itself is the story.” It’s powerful. And haunting. The fictional camp of Lubizec is modeled on real camps like Treblinka. In high school I read Jean-Francois Steiner’s account of Treblinka and the revolt by the prisoners there. Something similar happens in this novel, but the narrator reminds us that this is not an adventure story, it is rebellion against the killings. And though this is not a character study of the Commandant, it does in its own way try to humanize him by detailing his family life outside of the camp. He is truly a bifurcated individual, a loving father at home and a cold, unfeeling engineer of murder at the camp. His two selves seem impossible to reconcile. Near the end of the novel, he even refers to himself in the third person when trying to explain his actions during the war. I would highly recommend this book to everyone wanting to understand the Holocaust better. [Disclosure: I am acquaintances with Patrick Hicks; he teaches literature and writing at the same college where my wife teaches.]
City of Thieves by David Benioff is a marvelous adventure story set during World War II during the siege of Leningrad. The narrator, Lev Beniov (in the conceit of the novel this is the author’s grandfather telling him the story), along with Kolya, a deserter from the Army, must find a dozen eggs for an important Colonel, so that his daughter can have a wedding cake. The city is surrounded by the German army, and the people are starving during the winter months. It simultaneously has the quality of a fairy tale where the heroes have to accomplish an impossible task while also being a coming of age story for the 17 year old narrator. During their search, the two young men encounter the many brutalities of the war, but there is also a lot of humor in the story, especially the way Lev and Kolya interact. Kolya treats Lev like a younger brother whom he can teach about the ways of the world and women. Like any quest narrative, it hits the right notes with twists and obstacles to keep our heroes from their objective, while also subverting some of our expectations along the way. It was a very satisfying read. As it was primarily a guy book, I would recommend it as that, though noting that anyone could enjoy it.
Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett is a useful book on the topic of theistic evolution. The two authors (one a theologian, the other a scientist) offer a helpful guide to the landscape of Christian approaches to origins. They critique the young earth creationist and the intelligent design positions, but in the most fair and serious way I’ve ever seen. They treat those who hold those positions with the utmost respect as fellow Christians (it’s a marked contrast to books I’ve read by Karl Giberson and Kenneth Miller). Curiously, they don’t spend any time with old earth/progressive creationists. The best part of the book is where they detail the spectrum of beliefs in the theistic evolution camp. They analyze various thinkers in five areas: (1) deep time, (2) natural selection, (3) common descent, (4) divine action, and (5) theodicy (i.e. an attempt to answer why a good God would allow evil and suffering). Afterwards, they present their own model that avoids some of the pitfalls they see in the other positions. For example, most of the other thinkers used some version of the free will defense to answer how God could allow evil. The problem they see with a free will defense is that it requires God to relinquish interacting with creation, which then makes evolutionary processes random and purposeless. Most theists would like to avoid that conclusion. Their approach is novel, by contrast, but it too is rather unsatisfying. They view creation as both an initial point in time (creatio ex nihilo) as well as an ongoing process (creatio continua) that is not yet complete until it can be redeemed as a “new creation.” In their reading, the “very good” declaration of Genesis is from the standpoint of the new creation, looking back on the whole history of creation (seems like a stretch). They admit that they, like Job, don’t know why suffering and death are part of the creation at this time. So, it’s still a mystery. Regardless, the book is a handy reference for the various positions within theistic evolution. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the debate on creation and evolution.

book reviews, faith, medicine, personal, science

Book Reviews, February 2015

My second installment of mini book reviews as I endeavor to read more carefully and share recommendations for other readers.

Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande is a phenomenal book of medical stories and explorations of the human experience at a most vulnerable time. The book’s greatest strength is its stories. As a surgical resident, Gawande has the goods when it comes to interesting cases, and he’s a great teller of those stories. But it’s not merely stories. He explores important and compelling ideas like the necessity of doctors practicing on patients and the tangled decision-making in difficult cases. He owns up to the fact that doctors, even the very best ones, make mistakes. It’s unavoidable as long as humans are involved. There are three reasons that medicine is an “imperfect science”: ignorance, ineptitude, and fallibility. Gawande details advances in surgery (such as gastric bypass) and technology that show how the field is improving in the area of ignorance. There are some protocols in place to deal with inept doctors, but all too often bad doctors keep practicing until they do lots of harm, and he talks about these current limitations and how to improve. Lastly, he explores how fallibility is inevitable. There may be decisions that are never clear because the factors involved are too complex. Each patient and circumstance is unique. Almost as a bonus, he also spends time explaining interesting and perplexing phenomena such as pain, nausea, and blushing. The book was a Finalist for the National Book Award. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.
Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans is a memoir I could relate to. Though she wrote it while still in her late 20s, she felt compelled to chronicle and share her crisis of faith that led her to doubt much of what she used to believe. Evolution is the guiding theme of the stories she relates, both because of her changing faith and because she lives in Dayton, TN, home of the infamous Scopes trial (which I’ve written about once or twice, okay at least three times or more). She even attended Bryan College, named after William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism during the trial. Evans does a nice job summarizing the high points of the trial in one of the chapters. But the bulk of the book is her telling how she used to be a model evangelical Christian who knew all the right answers for arguing with skeptics until she herself became unsettled by the injustice of what she calls “the cosmic lottery.” It seemed unfair to her that so many people should be condemned to hell because they had never heard of Jesus, only to die horribly in a typhoon or of AIDS. She couldn’t accept the answers that she used to. Her crisis led her to rethink all of her assumptions and to be willing to throw away “false fundamentals,” her term for the beliefs that accrete onto the belief system of much of Christian teaching. She now believes that faith must adapt and that it is okay to have doubts and to say “I don’t know.” But she hasn’t lost her faith. It’s a story that I share in the broad outline, and it was comforting to read how she went through the crisis but retained her trust in Jesus. I’d recommend this book to anyone who has had similar doubts or a crisis of faith. [Note that the book, though first published in 2010, has since been rereleased under the title Faith Unraveled.]
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach is the perfect bathroom book, and I mean that in the best way possible. The book is fascinating and funny, and the subject matter is often fecal. Roach is an excellent science writer, guiding the reader through the digestive system from before the food enters the mouth to the other end of the line. It all goes down so easily (please excuse me, nearly every blurb for the book includes puns and wordplays nearly as bad), that it can feel almost fluffy at times. It’s not that Roach doesn’t include the research (the notes in the back show her thoroughness), it’s that she makes it so palatable (again, sorry) with her humorous stories and engrossing tidbits. I learned about the 19^th century man who had a hole in his stomach and how his doctor used him to learn about digestion, about the importance of bacterial composition of the colon, and about the amazing capacity of the colons of prisoners and other smugglers, among other oddities. Sometimes the book is a bit gross, but nothing made me sick to my stomach. Anyone who enjoys science or who wants to know more about the digestive system or who simply wants a smart laugh should check it out.

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Category Archives: science