( Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves )

Sooooo behind on book reviews. These are substantially from my summer's flurry of book purchases concerning Scotland and Iceland, or by authors from the same.

( School of the Moon: the Highland Cattle-Raiding Tradition )

After hearing or reading that Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain" was an answer to "Atlas Shrugged", I picked it up. I found it just about as convincing as "Atlas Shrugged", in that I seriously questioned the thinking of just about every character at some point. ("Argh, no, don't do that!" Heh.) But it was meta-interesting to me because they're ( Read more... )

( The Crown Conspiracy/The Rose and the Thorn )

On the recommendation of my local history book friend, I have just finished two of his. One is a meditation on clear thinking and cognitive bias, the other is a story about preparedness. The former: John Kelly's "The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time". I was expecting something ( Read more... )

So very behind on book reviews that I'm clumping them together by topic. All the poetry is next, though Martha Graham's autobiography below (which I *loved*) could really have gone in either warriors or poets.

( Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger )

I was wandering through a bookstore today and discovered that there is a book titled "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories". Of course I bought it. How can you not, with a title like that? <3 Russian literature. Also, dear fellow readers of "Anna Karenina", I am mostly done. How are y' ( Read more... )

( The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don't )

One of the reasons I love in-person indie bookstores is that I find books that I didn't know I wanted to read. Malalai Joya's "A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice" is one of them. In the first couple chapters, she discusses her upbringing in the refugee camps in Pakistan, and her attendance of ( Read more... )

( Ranger Confidential )