Becca

Taking on a completely different genre from her flagship, The Sparrow, A Thread of Grace is set in the Holocaust. Improbably enough, Doria Russell manages to make a Thread of Grace stand apart from the myriad of books that had previously been written in the setting. She brings her signature touches of a gift for character development and a canny ability to make her reader see every side of an issue, with heavy helping of moral greyness and questionable means to get to still questionable ends.
Doria Russell will long be remembered as one of the epic novelists of our time.

Well, that was a disappointment. The mystery, such as it is, is boring and trivially resolved in the last two pages, after numerous red herrings, none of which are really ever resolved.The characters are boring – Isabel Dalhousie is an elderly, rich Scottish woman who, despite frequently judging everyone else for being layabouts, seems to do nothing to occupy her time except judge others, nose into other people's business and obsess about the sex life of people half her age.The schtick of the book is ostensibly the philosophy, but this is no [b:Sophie's World 10959 Sophie's World (Paperback) Jostein Gaarder http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21A6T5PH7YL.SL75.jpg 4432325]. Philosophy is mentioned in passing, over-simplified and only in the most trite way. There's very little redeemable here.

This was a lovely exploration of the immigrant narrative rewritten through the eyes of mythical creatures. The Jewish immigrants in NYC bring a golem, stalwart, stoic and short-lived. The Syrians ring a jinni, tempestuous, emotional and millenia old. The golem is masterless and wishes for a master, while the jinni is enslaved and wants to be free. They fight crime! Okay, not literally, but they do defeat an evil rabbi and exorcise an ice cream vendor. It's delightful and speculative fiction at its best: using the metaphor of the supernatural to explore the bounds of our wordl

Wow, this book was frustrating. Under the guise of writing about her mother, Alison Bechdel mostly explored A) her own insecurity and B) pyschoanalysis. So much psychoanalysis. Mostly Winnicott. So, I mean, on the one hand, psychoanalysis is a widely debunked borderline pseudo-science. And on the other hand, it seems to have loaned Alison Bechdel a lot of insight. Maybe not so much personal growth in that she's still writing books “about her mother” about psychoanalysis, including transcribed passages of her life that she was explicitly told not to write down by her psychoanalysis (including transcribing that she's not supposed to be writing them down.) But I have a lot of insight into the inner life of Alison Bechdel now?

This memoir is harsh, honestly. Not really so much on Alison Bechdel's mother, who comes off feeling pretty distant for an ostensible focal point, but on Alison herself, who pulls no punches in depicting her insecurity, fear of commitment and transference to psychiatrists. It was pretty uncomfortable reading.

I wasn't sure whether Kelly Link's magic would work in long (or ultra) long form, but I found this wildly successful while being true to the genre that is unique to Link. Rather than read a Link book linearly or narratively, you have to pay attention to the puzzle of how you feel when characters talk about coins or doors or rabbits or wolves or structural racism and follow that feeling to figure out what's actually happening.

Perhaps as a necessary concession (although a move I found kind of disappointing), Link places three info-dump chapters roughly evenly throughout the book to literally catchup anyone for whom creepy vibes are insufficient explanation. Each of these follow an exposition that takes the narrative in an expansive dimension, opening up the story from the part that proceeded it. I found the first two thirds of the book wildly successful proceeding in this way, and the back third a little too conventional, while still quite good.

Overall, the book reminded me a lot of the best of Dianna Wynne Jones, where you start to believe that anyone could secretly be anyone else, while also being Loki and while you're unlikely to guess right, you're rewarded for being skeptical about fixed identity.

I also found the book thematically successful as well as tonally so. The major themes of the book: the structures that we take for granted even when they don't work for us, and the magically mundanity of love of all forms were deeply seeded throughout the book without being overpowering. A lot of the negative reviews weren't prepared for the balance between epic plot and quiet meditations on the power of relationships and identity and change, but that's what made the book so worth it for me.

There were a lot of books this could have been and I think my opinion of it suffered from having heard so much about it and wanting it to have been those other books. I wanted this to be a book about the unreliable memory of childhood and how age gives a mundane tint and banal explanations for the remembered magic, both awesome and awful. I wanted this to be a book about the adult that we become and how that holds up to the children that we were and the continuous source of identity.

Instead, it's a modern fairy tale. I love modern fairy tales and this is a great one, but I can't forgive it for not being the book I wanted it to be.

I have heard SO much about this book. And it was fine – definitely everything promised: a sweet romance between two non-conventional leads, which brought diversity to the world of YA realistic romance. But the biggest problem I always have with Rowell books is the romance – it's too sappy, too sudden, too forced – and this book is mostly romance. (Also, Eleanor's abusive family, which is very sad and a little over the top.) So, a good book, but not for me.

One of the central tragedies of adulthood is that virtually no one reaches the childhood potential promised to them. There's simply only a handful of spots to truly be a protagonist in the national narrative. It was a blow to me to learn that I could become a great physician and a pretty decent scientist, but that it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever be known outside of my field. And it's particularly hard because once you make it to a field, you get to rub shoulders with the true giants and feel how little you are.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Nora Elridge. Looking at her life in her 30's and realizing that while she's a great teacher and an OK artist, she'll never make a name for herself and other people will always be better and more famous than her. And Nora sacrifices being the protagonist in her own, tiny little story, for being part of something grander. To pretend that this is a novel narrative would be foolish – and indeed, Messud acknowledges that by directly quoting the famous Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (“No, am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do...”) – but it's such a central narrative to humanity that I think it's worth revisiting.

What makes Messud's take on this tale particularly noteworthy are two things: 1) Messud's command of the English language, which is simply incomparable. She never weighs the story down with prose, but each sentence is precise and beautiful. And 2) telling this narrative from a female lens.

I've learned that women are being asked to do too much, so even when I feel like I'm doing a good job at work, I feel like I'm not being the protagonist in my parenting story (since parenting is supposed to be a narrative of lovingly hand-crafted...everything, every moment); when I feel like I'm doing a good job parenting, I feel like I'm not being the protagonist in the canonical scientist story, where science is in all-consuming passion; and when I'm doing either, I feel like I'm losing the plot of the story of being a part of a community of friends and neighbors, or being a leftist who has time during business hours to call my senators or being a book hobbyist, or or or. And yet, I find very few books that resonate with this tension the way that The Woman Upstairs does.

I also think that reading the reviews for this book on goodreads is a pretty incisive tale on why this book is needed: women who don't make it to becoming the protagonist are expected to be Nice above all things. That, in fact, is Messud's point: women have to either be a central protagonist, or they have to be the Woman Upstairs, who follows gender norms, and is nice and helpful and has no personality or drive. It's biting and true. And yet, many reviewers here seem to fault Nora Elridge for not constraining herself to that role – quite exemplary of how this is a conversation that needs to happen.

I had some extreme ambivalence about this book. Ultimately, it is an extremely ambitious book with a broad scope, aiming to be one of the major pieces of gender and sex literature for several groups, including biologists, educators, trans, intersex/people with differences in sexual development and genderqueer individuals, queer groups debating whether to include trans issues, politicians and doctors. So the fact that it was a little weak on some of these fronts was to be expected and cannot be said to detract from the overall groundbreaking nature of the book.

The book is organized into three parts: gender, sex and sexual orientation in animal organisms; gender, sex and sexual orientation in people, and finally, the history of gender variation in human societies.

Not surprisingly, given that Dr. Roughgarden is an organismal biologist, the first part is by far the strongest. And it's not just strong relative to the rest of the book, it is truly a superlative work. It explores first the biologic definition of sex and speculates about species in which there could be more than two sexes on the basis of diversity of gamete size in several known species. She then goes on to discuss hemaphroditism (sequential and simultaneous.) I didn't find much of this novel, probably because I consider myself somewhat of an amateur ichthyologist, and most of these early examples involved reef creatures I was already familiar with, but Roughgarden still presents it in a way that it is compelling and flows well with the earlier portion of the book on sex. The absolute best part of the book is about gender in animal species: Roughgarden explores several species (mainly birds, lizards, fish and insects, initially) looking at the diversity of gender roles and family structures that exist in different species. She speculates as to the evolutionary advantages of having a diversity of gender roles, in that it allows for rapid response to shifting environmental factors, and argues that it provides an increased chance of offspring survival in other cases. Finally, looking at mostly primates, Roughgarden discusses same sex relationships in the animal kingdom, again arguing that same sex relationships fill an evolutionary niche, by helping negotiate alliances that increase the chance of offspring survival. Importantly, in all of this, Roughgarden is very clear that exploration of gender, sex and sexual orientation variance in animals is important for our understanding of diversity, but she does NOT argue that LGBT people should be supported BECAUSE of the occurrence of parallel traits in animals, but rather just because it's moral to support them. She explicitly states that much of animal behavior should not be accepted in humans and much of human behavior that is valuable is not found in animals. I think warning people of how easy the naturalistic fallacy would be here and actively discouraging her readers from failing for it was both courageous and intellectually honest.

So ultimately, I have only two gripes with this entire first part, and both are completely semantic. One is that she continually refers to her idea of the “genial gene” (genetic traits that have evolved to encourage interorganism cooperation so as to encourage survival of offspring and thereby increase individual reproductive fitness) as being in conflict with the Dawkinsian idea of the “selfish gene” (genes evolve to increase survival of themselves.) These are not at all in conflict. They are both consistent with evolutionary biology as it is currently understood and the “selfish gene” hypothesis supports the evolution of genetic traits that are “altruistic” in behavior if that supports the expansion of the gene in the population. The second is that Roughgarden insists on referring to genetic diversity as a “genetic rainbow.” In the middle of a narrative that is otherwise talking about gametes, alleles, and other complex biologic topics, all of a sudden using “rainbow” as a scientific noun is jarring and undermines Roughgarden's credibility. I know that she wanted to increase readability, but honestly, anyone who gets through this first section has the reading comprehension to understand the word “diversity.”

The next two parts are rockier. I had the hardest problem with the middle part, in which Roughgarden makes several diversions. One is to criticize American medicine for overpathologizing people especially with genetic conditions. She makes an argument that if a trait has a certain population frequency, it must not be that pathologic. This argument is technically true: for a given allele frequency, there is a bound on the effect on reproductive fitness, given a limited de novo rate of mutation. However, this argument ignores the possibility of heterozygote advantage, given that many (most?) of the conditions that she argues therefore must be beneficial or neutral are autosomal recessive. In addition, the discussion of reproductive fitness is not a value judgement – one of the conditions that she agrees must be the most deleterious to reproductive fitness, complete androgen insensitivity, is a condition that I would strongly argue should not be pathologized: people (usually women) with complete AIS require the use of advanced reproductive technology to have biologically gonads, because they have sperm-producing gonads, female genitalia and usually identify as women. That's a huge reproductive hit, but an otherwise normal person. On the other hand, she argues that salt-wasting congenital adrenal hyperplasia is overpathologized, and as a medical geneticist, I'm going to defend my right to pathologize genetic conditions that kill infants. She then extends herself to genetic conditions in general (not just differences in sexual development) and generalizes that the risks of genetic engineering, as well as the ethical risks of selective reproductive technology outweigh any benefit to treating these patients, whom she claims are overpathologized. Again, I'm sensitive, because this is my job, which I have a doctorate and extensive postdoctorate training in, but I see children die because of their “genetic trait, which is not necessarily a disease” and it is extremely sad. I have helped couples select embryos that do not carry the genetic condition that their sibling died of and I'm not sorry.
Dr. Roughgarden recommends at the end that the FDA certify whether a condition is a disease before a doctor can treat it, and I think this argument really showcases ignorance of the medical bureaucracy and the issues involved: FDA approval is an extremely slow process, even now, sticking to Food and Drugs, which there are clear processes for. The number of just human genetic diseases is in the thousands. She herself uses examples of allelic conditions where at one end there is clear disease and the other end is more a variant of normal (such as AIS and CAH above.) I daily see patients with alleles that have never before been reported. If I needed FDA approval to see a patient in my clinic based on their individual allele, it would probably take a decade for each patient to be approved! I wish that Dr. Roughgarden had been given an opportunity to attend a medical genetics clinic. I think modern medical geneticist are by and large thoughtful and avoid unnecessary pathologizing. I suspect that this is simply a case where Dr. Roughgarden, brilliant as she clearly is from the first chapter, is not as up to date on medical genetics. To be clear: I agree with her completely that patients with DSDs were historically overpathologized and were victimized by poorly considered operative strategies, and I understand that given her expertise in gender and sex she would be suspicious of the rest of the field.

I liked other parts of this chapter: Dr. Roughgarden thoroughly debunks the idea that there are substantial gender differences in humans. She then reviews the gender differences that have been reported and puts them into context for the reader. I wished she would have gone even further into rejecting the idea that there is scientific scaffolding for meaningful gender dimorphism in humans, but she does discuss this a little in part three, where she explores several cultures that have had a third gender as a category for either people with DSDs or people who are trans. This part is a little rocky, because at times, she imposes her categories on the narratives of the people she is summarizing. Although she is careful, she sometimes uses pronouns or nouns that are gendered differently than what the person used, claiming that the person would have identified as fe/male had that society allowed it. On the whole, I found it relatively interesting to look at the historic and geographic span that gender variation has occupied and encouraging to look at societies that were largely accepting of gender variation.

Oh, Fangirl. I almost hate to write this review.

Here's the thing: the first third of this book is absolutely swoon-worthy. I loved Cath's entry into college. So much resonated so well: The slow development of a friend, then a couple friends, then a whole social world. Her fear of the cafeteria. The way that casual acquaintances such as that-friend-of-my-roomate can insidiously become close friends. The way that casual acquaintances can become all of a sudden close friends through platonic one-night stands. The juggling of the academic expectations with all of the other life expectations that blossom in college. All of these things Rowell depicts so well and the nostalgia was so strong and so sweet. My only criticism of this first third was that to be true to my experience, I would have loved to see fandom depicted in Cath's real life: my undergrad timeline with regard to Harry Potter was slightly different than Cath's with Simon Snow (Order of the Phoenix came out between my sophomore and junior years, Half-blood Prince the summer after undergrad and Deathly Hallows on my first call of medical school) but nonetheless, being a Harry Potter fan and an all around geek was a major part of my in-person social life in undergrad. Despite this small criticism, though, I was a major fan(girl) of the first third – easily one of the best college-life books I've ever read.

Then, everything changed – yucky romance plot! To be fair, I adore epic platonic stories; I crave platonic relationships in literature; I'm basically the inverse of a shipper in that I was deeply, personally invested in the platonic relationship between Cath and Levi. Deep, important platonic relationships between (straight) men and women are almost never depicted in literature, so when they are and they're positive, I horde them. Therefore, I wanted to cry when Rowell put them together, and my love for Fangirl never recovered. After my adoration for and identification with the Cath of the first third, I literally felt personally betrayed by their relationship. And when I recovered from that emotional reaction, I still felt that the last two thirds was lacking the magic of the first.

-Reagan is basically the best character ever. Nuanced, assertive, abrasive but caring – basically the person I wish had been my undergrad roommate. She is virtually absent after her reaction to Cath and Levi getting together
-Levy is just not that interesting as a romantic interest. He's too perfect and featureless.
-Wren frustrates the heck out of me. Not the character, but her depiction. It is so shallow – she reads like an Afterschool Special on the risks of drinking. Not interested!


I did like the Simon Snow bits, and I really enjoyed the snippets of Carry On, Simon. I love the technique of snippets of a book within a book, left for the reader to fill in the details. Also, after some discussion with Jon, I liked the way that Cath's major writing assignment was dropped for hundreds of pages to jump in again and punch her in the face – my anxiety about its absence was a pretty visceral recollection of what having a major assignment like that was like in my own life. Probably not a pleasant writing technique, though.

I can't help but recommend this to people – the first third was so freaking good, but don't be me! Stop at page 150 and imagine how amazing the rest could be.

The term “scope creep” may as well have been invented for this book. The core concept is fascinating: Luke Dittrich, the grandson of Dr. William Scoville, the neurosurgeon who performed the temporal lobotomy on patient H.M., who inspired the movie Memento writes a book about all of that. The problem seems to be that Dittrich couldn't decide which book to write.

Therefore, he includes fascinating bits like the admission of his own grandmother – Scoville's wife – to the inpatient psychiatric facility were Scoville performed lobotomies. He departs into memoir at times. He explores the entire history of frontal lobotomy (at some length) and digresses into this history of psychiatry. These subjects come with no form of organization and many of them don't really reach a satisfying conclusion as they get discarded for something else. I found myself anxious to finish but disinterested in actually picking up the book. Frustratingly, Dittrich concludes the book with a brief synopsis of the ways that H.M.'s brain was anatomically different than expected – a fascinating topic that he left basically untouched.

Also, usually an author's closeness to a subject makes it an ideal topic, but in this case I felt very uncomfortable with Dittrich's relationships to the scientists in this story. He is profoundly unhappy with his grandfather's work, calling his surgery on H.M. unforgivable and rash despite quoting experts who disagree. I think that there's a lot more nuance to performing a surgery on a patient with intractable epilepsy before the invention of modern antiepileptics. Similarly, Dittrich's mother's best friend, the psychiatrist who had scientific custody of H.M. in his later life, is painted as a territorial and vindictive villain.

The parts that are there, that are reflective and that are relevant are fascinating. So, three stars for content and concept.

I'm not really sure for whom Seife wrote this book. The majority of people who like math and/or statistics will already be very aware of most of the statistical concepts that Seife introduces in his book: significant digits, the importance of looking closely at how axes are labelled, appropriate population sampling and correlation vs. causation. And the people who don't like math won't voluntarily read a book on math. So that leaves...I don't know: people who like math but are bad at it? Middle-schoolers? And unfortunately, this book won't work great for those people either, because rather than using the actual names for the mathematical concepts, like I did, Seife makes up terms so that if this is your first exposure to the concepts, you won't actually be able to communicate about them or google more about them. I think my turning point with Seife was in an appendix about the difference between sensitivity and positive predictive value, where I was originally annoyed that he didn't name-check Bayes and then realized that he also didn't mention sensitivity or positive predictive value in the entire appendix even once! This appendix was literally about how just knowing the sensitivity of a test without knowing the prevalence of disease results in not being able to predict the positive predictive value and he didn't use the names for a single one of those concepts.

I found the latter half of the book more interesting: Seife largely moves away from mathematical concepts and investigates political hijinks, such as the Franken election, Bush v. Gore and gerrymandering. It doesn't really add to numeracy, nor have that many striking examples of “proofiness,” (except that humans can't count numbers to 6 digits worth of significant figures, which hopefully most people intuitively know) but it is interesting.

Overall, it's not a bad book. I might give it to a child who was interested in math, but I don't think most adults will enjoy it very much.

Much of what I have to say about Redshirts has been already said, and better, by other reviewers: the core of the novel is a fun, scifi-ish, meta-ish romp that is of decent quality, whereas the novel really comes into its own in the three codas, which are each beautiful and existential meditations.
I have only two complaints: Scalzi tags his conversations way too much (“she said”) and it particularly bugs when listening to the audiobook. Wheaton, who is an exceptional narrator – full of verve and hitting exactly the right cynical tone – uses exactly the same cadence for every tag and it almost sounds rhythmic in this way that is very distracting. The second complaint is that the conceit of the books was well known a priori, and yet the majority of the book is spent leading the reader to it and describing it – I would have rather spent more time with the characters – and more fun, satirical romps through SciFiVerse.

So, I was billed that a “teenager” found an old “How to Be Popular” book and decided to implement it for a year and see what happens. I think only middle schoolers consider 13 year olds to be teenagers. I think this book would have felt quite different if written even by a 14 year old, but the maturity gap between middle school and high school looms large, and I found this too juvenile to appeal to an adult audience. In addition, I found myself really judging the amount of makeup, attempted dating and dieting that occurred. To be fair, I judge the relationship of adult women and makeup, dieting and weird interactions with men, but I simply don't think middle school is the right age for these things.

I also felt really disheartened by the throw-away comment at the end that in her pursuit of popularity, Maya found herself distanced from her actual close friends. She seems overjoyed that she now has lots of friendly acquaintances, but I felt really sad for her. As someone who's been on both sides: a few really close friends, and a lot of friendly acquaintances (the key to being popular in my current life is having an adorable small child, and I succeeded!), it's the few close friends that are worth the long time investment.

So, juvenile book or old-fashioned fuddy-duddy reader? You decide.

I try not to read books when I find their central thesis a foregone conclusion, but this was good, even if it felt very self-indulgent. It is hard to love vaccines more than I already did, but Dr. Offit also reviews the history of the anti-vaccine movement, which is fascinating. He also gave answers to my husband's perpetual question of: “how do I enlighten parents who want to use the Dr. Sears' schedule?”

The most laudable thing that can be said about Crashers is that it's fun. And it definitely is that – lazy brain candy on a Saturday afternoon/Law and Order marathon sort of fun. It's fast-paced romp, with lots of action, a plot-twist or two and lots of beautiful, charismatic characters.

And that's where the praise ends. This reads like a script for a summer movie or a CSI “Special Episode.” It is filled with an appropriately diverse cast (for some, unknown, reason the ethnic background of even the most trivial of characters is given. While the supporting cast contains a Korean man, three African Americans, a Brit, an Israeli, a handful of Irish men, an Arab American and an Asian American, the main cast is white – very TV.) More time is spent describing how beautiful, handsome, rugged and sexy each character is than really giving any personality, which makes it difficult to tell who's talking without dialogue tags.

The action is really designed to be cinematic. I had a lot of fun picturing in my head how the scenes would look, but there aren't really any twists to engage the imagination of the reader.

But, where the Crashers really falls down is the writing. As I said, the plot is fun, the characters are pretty, there's lots of action, overall it would be about as enjoyable as a weak Dan Brown novel, if not for the terrible writing. To be fair, I received an advance copy, which I assume (from the number of typos) is still undergoing some editing. That being said, the dangling participles, heavy handed dialogue-tagging and awkward exposition and narration were so distracting that finishing the book was a chore that I completed because I got the book from First Reads. Had I bought the book, I probably would have given up on it.

Naomi Klein has a very incisive view of the current world - the strengths and weaknesses of both the left and right, and why people slip between the cracks and land in the Mirror World full of its own set of truths and news and facts that reflect, but don't agree with the views and values of the consensus reality. I like her dawning compassion about the way that the left can be too rigid and not reflective enough, and that closing people out creates conditions for this mirroring. Usually books around a theme bend reality to fit the theme, but Klein found a lot of very honest ways in which doppelgangers apply to our current reality.

There are no firm conclusions, but the raw honesty, the uncertainty, the struggling with how complicated things are – I think that's the point. In particular, her handling of Israel and Zionism is beautifully nuanced

I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one – Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me.

The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book was actually quite good. I usually am terrified of books invoking evolutionary concepts because it's just so poorly done in most popular literature, but Pollan has a very good grasp on genetics; often he first offers an anthropomorphized or simplified hypothesis about why a trait such as sweetness evolved and then goes deeper to explore how that would actually be a competitive advantage for a plant carrying a specific gene.

I thought it was extremely interesting that most of the plants in the book were plants that don't “breed true” (i.e. have a sexual reproductive pattern resulting in genetically diverse offspring), such as apples and tulips, and how the extreme diversity that results within a single species of plant turns out to be a strong advantage. Pollen argues that this is particularly true as an artificial advantage because it makes plants adapt more quickly to human demands for cultivation. Interesting, but not completely convincing.

Anyway, I found the individual stories of each plant also interesting, in particular the story of the apple, how it was first used almost entirely for alcohol on the American frontier and the Johnny Appleseed story and the story of the tulip and the Dutch tulip mania. I was less convinced by the exploration of marijuana, which had a strong focus on why humans would evolve an endogenous cannabinoid pathway that I found overly speculative. Potatoes, the Irish potato famine and genetically-modified organisms was done in a less speculative manner and I thought Pollan explored the differences between the artificial selection already introduced in the book with GMOs in a very even-handed manner.

A fairly realistic voice for an autistic protagonist. I found it preferable to the other YA autism book I read at the same time ([b:Al Capone Does My Shirts 89716 Al Capone Does My Shirts Gennifer Choldenko https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309198452s/89716.jpg 2952174]), but not having read YA in a long time, parts seemed very superficial. In addition, the character sometimes seemed young or naive in a way that does not sync with my experience with high functioning individuals on the autism spectrum

The fact that I have now read all of the linguistic books written by Margalit Fox is a little sad. She is a complete master. In Talking Hands, Fox manages to ingratiate herself into a sign language linguistic group studying Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). Her depictions of Bedouin life in Al-Sayyid are, in and of themselves, worthy of a book. But Fox chooses to use alternate chapters to explore the history of signed languages and sign language linguistics. Her writing is never obtuse, but she manages to go more deeply into the subject than I thought possible in a book for the layreader. I had always known that ASL is a “true language” and “not English,” through working with Deaf activists, but I never really had insight into what that meant. Fox exhaustively presents the evidence that ASL is a language (and ABSL and ISL and dozens of other sign languages) and then expands into exploring the consistent phenotypes between sign languages (they all have three types of verbs: agreeing verbs, moving verbs and plain verbs! They all have symmetry in their movements if both hands are used. They all constrain hand shapes.)

She then takes the whole thing a step further to explain what the study of sign languages in general, and village signs in specific, mean to our understanding about language. She talks about Chomsky and the discovery of language as an innate human skill, that will inevitably develop. She talks about the maturation of language over time (did you know that different languages have variable numbers of colors identifiable? And that, for instance, if there are three color words they will always mean white, black and red?)

Fox is scientifically thorough and thoroughly entertaining. I learned so much from this book and enjoyed every minute.

In essence, Orenstein has written a memoir about what it is like to be someone like me: a conscientious, modern woman trying to raise a girl to be anything she wants to be, and not just a girl, not that there's anything wrong with girliness (with that last part being basically all one phrase.)
It's hard and Orenstein nails her depiction of the double whammy: first they extensively market pink, princessy, unempowered women to our girls, and then society tells us we're not allowed to complain, because if we complain we're dissing feminity, disempowering our girls and being all-around anti-feminist.

Orenstein doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, but it's nice to know that there are others out there who want to raise our girls to be able to choose to be anything that they want to be, rather than “choosing” to be anything that society presents them with. And that even the best mom has girls who go through the princess stage, but that if you talk them through it, they come through the other side and realize that they don't need to sit on their duff waiting for a prince to save them and that there is more to the world than consumerism and aesthetics. Or at least Orenstein's daughter came out the other side – mine is still young enough that I cover her ears when people call her “princess.”

The other part that really spoke to me was the idea that she explores relating achievement to appearance – it has definitely been true for me that the more I have been academically and professionally successful, the more I am expected to perform a stereotypical female gender role. I had previously thought that was only anecdotally true for me, having transitioned from the world of computer science, where I could perform whatever gender I wanted, into the extremely gendered world of medicine. However, Orenstein presents it as a global phenomenon: “‘We can excel in school, play sports, go to college...get jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands...“

This is Mary Roach at her best, with all of her classic points: a one-word, evocative, title a subject matter dancing just on the edge of the taboo line, dealt with in one part investigative journalism, one part completely unsquashable curiosity and one part a mix of stream-of-consciousness and “I just can't help but share” anecdotes.

Those who disliked Roach's previous works will hate Gulp, and those who liked her previous works will love it. The dislike largely stems from her highly present narration, and that is out in full force here. Doctors that she has known with hilariously apropos names, completely tangential stuff she found while doing research, boilerplate responses from Oster regarding an e-mail inquiry about their blenders being used for fecal transplate and much, much more abound in the frequent footnotes (average density seems to be about 1.5 footnotes/page.) New sections are usually introduced with commentary about what made Roach reach out to this particular person and how she feels on meeting them. The narration in fact is so present in Gulp, even compared to her previous works, that honestly, it skirts memoir territory. I consider that a win, your mileage may vary, as they say.

Meanwhile, Roach again makes the lowest of lowbrow topics palatable (sorry – couldn't resist!) if not downright classy. For a book with an entire chapter on flatulence, it's entertaining, funny and interesting even to those of us who wouldn't dream of laughing at a fart joke. You didn't know that you wanted to know why some animals eat their own feces, the history of gastrocutaneous fistulas, the science of the chemical composition of farts, or what human tasters think of cat food and why, but Roach's curiosity is contagious and she can make any subject matter fascinating.

It goes without saying that “popular statistics” book is mostly an oxymoron. On the one hand, statistics is largely a very dry field. On the other hand, those of us who do understand statistics (and even freaks, like my husband, who enjoy statistics), find any attempt at popular statistics largely too elementary to be interesting. Nate Silver doesn't just walk the fine line in the middle, he eliminates it and writes a completely novel statistic book that is appealing to both the mathematician and the math hater: this book fascinates.

Nate Silver focuses on the forecasting in areas that are difficult to predict: weather, climate, earthquakes, poker, politics, chess and sports. Each of these areas is individually interesting – I had never spent much time considering online poker, for instance, and the chapter focusing on poker is not just mathematically-focused, but also an expose on the world of online poker and the life and times (or at least the two year subset thereof) of Silver's 6-figure gambling career. In addition, his overall thesis, which seems to be that we should use Bayesian analysis to think probabilistically about the world and continually evaluate our probabilities both builds naturally and has far-reaching applications.

I feel like I have spent years of my life trying to explain to medical students (and more advanced physicians who should really know better) why every time a paper is published with a p<0.05 we can't totally disregard all prior medical knowledge and dive after the new information. Silver's easy explanation of Bayes' theorem nicely summarizes why this is true - that alone should make this a must-read for anyone in an academic field.

There seem to be two main camps on Meddling Kids: Those who find this satirical Scooby Doo/Cthulu mash-up deeply profound and those who found it twee, slow paced and with annoying characters.

I was neither – I thought the characters were likable enough and the action was well-paced. I didn't mind the portmanteaus or the spontaneous shifts into stage directions. If anything, I thought that these really highlighted the surrealist mix that Meddling Kids was trying to be and wished that this was a more frequent choice, rather than an occasional slip. Which kind of sums up how I felt about this book overall: I wanted it turned up to eleven. I really wanted Cantero to be fully satirical, referential and really stretch what these extreme genres could do and instead I mostly got Lovecraft, especially by the end of the book. There was a lot of Cthuluoid monsters and survival horror and not much of the Teen Sleuth conceits.

I think that there is something really cool there: as kids, we're scared of everything that goes bump in the night. Teenage skepticism shows that it is all just a Man in a Mask, but maturity shows that there are deeper, more existential horrors than what we'd even previously conceived. But those ideas aren't really explored.

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