Nonfiction
Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of a Juvenile Court: The problem with giving up on other people, as Octavia Butler points out, is that they don't just go away. Humes tracks a number of kids as they spend a year in LA's juvenile justice system and, randomly, receive justice, contempt or mercy; how they turn out is only loosely correlated with how the system treats them. Humes is good at telling individual stories as he shows how the overwhelming crush of people prevents the system from making any sense of those stories. He's not a big fan of giving kids the same procedural rights and protections as adults, but he gives some attention to the costs of informality as well, the way mistakes and misconceptions can lead the system to mistreat a kid. The problem, of course, is that with resources stretched beyond the breaking point, the formal protections (right to attorneys, right to a hearing, etc.) don't work for kids, so we end up with an inefficient and informal system. There's not much hope here, except in the idea that 2/3rds of kids who enter the system straighten out on their own regardless of what the justice system does. He argues for a resource-intensive program focusing on the sixteen percent of kids who become repeat offenders, starting when they commit petty offenses the system currently ignores as not important compared to the murders and armed robberies happening right now. Like western civilization, it sounds like a good idea.
Natalie Angier, The Beauty of the Beastly: A collection of columns on various pop science topics from the New York Times writer, this slender volume would have benefited immensely from a serious bibliography in the back. Otherwise, it's a glancing introduction to some recent topics in biology, often with a focus on sexual selection.
David S. Ariel, What Do Jews Believe?: This is an interesting overview of Jewish thought through the ages about the Big Topics, like the nature of deity and the Jewish people's relationship thereto. It gets a little dry at times, but might be of interest to someone looking for a historical overview of the variety of Jewish perspectives, focusing mainly but not exclusively on religious Jewish thinkers.
Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation: Another book from Grandin, possibly autism's most celebrated author. Grandin believes her autism gives us insight into how animals think (though she does emphasize that autistic human brains are malfunctioning when they do things that animal brains do normally). She has interesting perspectives on dogs in particular - she hates breeding for specific physical traits, insisting that it will reliably produce neurological problems. And she analyzes dog training in ways that will never be useful to me but might well be of interest to dog owners.
Michael Perry, Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time: Perry, a writer, returned to his tiny Wisconsin hometown and began work as a firefighter and EMT. He tells a great story, balancing folksiness with awareness that his status as a "writer" makes him think differently than his neighbors, and gives a strong sense of the triumphs and the tragedies he's witnessed in his outings with the other volunteer firefighters.
Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: Krakauer is interested in people who go to extremes, which is what gave us Into Thin Air (which left me with not much but contempt for Everest-climbers). Here he tackles religious extremists, specifically Mormon extremists who think the church lost its way when it rejected polygamy. Krakauer wraps the story of a particular double murder in 1984 in a history of Joseph Smith and later Mormon prophets, usually ones who left the mainstream church when they received personal revelations leading them to fundamentalism. Krakauer seems to think that Mormonism is highly vulnerable to fundamentalism because adherents can easily come to believe that they, like Joseph Smith, are receiving direct revelations that override any secular obligation; I'm not so sure how different that makes Mormonism - and Krakauer doesn't explicitly say Mormons are different, so I may be overreading. It's an interesting history, though not particularly well-organized; if I ever teach the Religion Clauses again, I will definitely assign the book because of the questions it raises about government-religious entanglement, from polygamists' children collecting welfare and local governments run for the benefit of local sects to governments setting out to destroy a sect that makes others nervous.
Natalie Angier, The Beauty of the Beastly: A collection of columns on various pop science topics from the New York Times writer, this slender volume would have benefited immensely from a serious bibliography in the back. Otherwise, it's a glancing introduction to some recent topics in biology, often with a focus on sexual selection.
David S. Ariel, What Do Jews Believe?: This is an interesting overview of Jewish thought through the ages about the Big Topics, like the nature of deity and the Jewish people's relationship thereto. It gets a little dry at times, but might be of interest to someone looking for a historical overview of the variety of Jewish perspectives, focusing mainly but not exclusively on religious Jewish thinkers.
Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation: Another book from Grandin, possibly autism's most celebrated author. Grandin believes her autism gives us insight into how animals think (though she does emphasize that autistic human brains are malfunctioning when they do things that animal brains do normally). She has interesting perspectives on dogs in particular - she hates breeding for specific physical traits, insisting that it will reliably produce neurological problems. And she analyzes dog training in ways that will never be useful to me but might well be of interest to dog owners.
Michael Perry, Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time: Perry, a writer, returned to his tiny Wisconsin hometown and began work as a firefighter and EMT. He tells a great story, balancing folksiness with awareness that his status as a "writer" makes him think differently than his neighbors, and gives a strong sense of the triumphs and the tragedies he's witnessed in his outings with the other volunteer firefighters.
Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: Krakauer is interested in people who go to extremes, which is what gave us Into Thin Air (which left me with not much but contempt for Everest-climbers). Here he tackles religious extremists, specifically Mormon extremists who think the church lost its way when it rejected polygamy. Krakauer wraps the story of a particular double murder in 1984 in a history of Joseph Smith and later Mormon prophets, usually ones who left the mainstream church when they received personal revelations leading them to fundamentalism. Krakauer seems to think that Mormonism is highly vulnerable to fundamentalism because adherents can easily come to believe that they, like Joseph Smith, are receiving direct revelations that override any secular obligation; I'm not so sure how different that makes Mormonism - and Krakauer doesn't explicitly say Mormons are different, so I may be overreading. It's an interesting history, though not particularly well-organized; if I ever teach the Religion Clauses again, I will definitely assign the book because of the questions it raises about government-religious entanglement, from polygamists' children collecting welfare and local governments run for the benefit of local sects to governments setting out to destroy a sect that makes others nervous.