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Hoorah, this is my kind of thread  .Stuff Matters: a cute and easy read about modern materials, told in an approachable anecdote-heavy way. It seems like it'd be a hard science kind of book, it's fluffy friendly science. You could give this book to anybody. I didn't necessarily learn that much, but I had a good time. I will say, aerogel goes back a lot longer than I thought. One of those "left on the shelf" things, feels like. My Dear Boy: a collection of gay (male) love letters from history, some from famous people and some from complete unknowns. Some are deeply romantic, others are mawkish, others are creepy as gently caress. King James I, what the hell. I like these kinds of stories, there's a lot there and a lot left to ponder. The Omnivore's Dilemma: Re-read this to see if it's still annoying. I think it is. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World: Really more the history of how chemistry went from academic dilly-dallying to a major industrial force. Mauve was the first synthetic dye, but it quickly led to many others being produced at massive scale. It looses steam as it goes on, but I think it's worthwhile. It's relatively short, but you can see the ties to the chemical industry today. Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T-Rex Ever Found: title seems self-explanatory, except it's not about the dinosaur skeleton, not really. It's about the unbelievable legal clusterfuck surrounding her discovery and eventual re-location to Chicago. Finding/mounting the skeleton is important, and it's covered in the book, but the meat of the story is that it fell into this obnoxious legal gray area and no one knew what would happen. Batavia's Graveyard: holy poo poo, the story of the Batavia is nuts. So nuts you'd think it was bullshit. I had no idea the Dutch East India company was so hosed, or that people were so hosed. The entire story is just "holy god drat" times infinity. Mutiny, murder, rape, supermurder, island kings, war, baby murder, etc. How could you even pack this much horror into one event? (I'm currently reading about the Medusa and that's actually less horrible.) Tulipmania: Exhaustively-researched book by the same guy who wrote Batavia's Graveyard (which is also exhaustively researched). This one is a lot shorter and pretty fun because it turns out that the Dutch tulip crisis had more in common with Beanie Babies than any massive economic meltdown. Shame to think that the most exemplary tulips, by the standards of the era, are gone. Fool's Gold: An excellent book about an actual economic meltdown. You know, in America, in the mid-00s. The Big Short: Everyone's read this, but I'll say I think it strives too hard for a narrative and to put people in specific "roles". I'd recommend Fool's Gold instead, even though it's much drier. Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance: If you're reading about the Batavia, you're sad for people in the past who ended up on the deathboat. If you read this book, you're sad for all the people everywhere in time, pretty much. This might be among the most depressing books I've ever read, and it's very very good. It's jargon-heavy, but I think that's appropriate because it's trying to make some distinctions which, though they seem small, are significant and precise. Covers cosmetic surgery, disfigurements from accidents, Operation Smile, facial feminization surgery, etc. I particularly identified with the section on cosmetic surgery, though my decision to have it was influenced by its ability to obfuscate an underlying condition. Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & The Wilderness Hunter: Theodore Roosevelt writes about his hunting trips. This is the book I keep next to the toilet, since it's very simple and straightforward and there's not a lot of "depth", it's just accessible anecdotes about hunting from one of America's greatest presidents. So you can pick it up and read a few pages, then put it down, and when you pick it back up again you're like "Ah right, elk! You can shoot those" and then he's talking about shooting those, so there you are. Going Clear: Everyone's already mentioned how good this book is, so I'll reiterate that. Another one of those stories where it seems too absurd to be real, but here we are! I usually don't read books about topics this modern, but I am glad I made the exception. Rust: A fascinating topic, though the book is not written so well. The guy just doesn't know which content to cut, so it's incredibly difficult to piece out what is and isn't important. Lots of chapters about corrosion, some vastly better than others. The chapter on canning is loving great. I also enjoyed the chapter on pigging the Alaska pipeline. I think you can get a sense of the vibe of the chapter by the first few pages though, so there are many options depending on what you enjoy. The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: This is a collection of Grann's articles, which are each about 40 pages, which is approximately the correct number, although any one of them is a bookworth of content for a less scrupulous writer willing to pad stuff out. He's definitely a journalist with his feet on the ground, and the topics are amazing. Interviewing Toto Constant, researchers seeking giant squid, impostors, failures of the justice system (and of arson investigation), etc. I'd definitely recommend this one, in part because you can pick and choose whichever articles strike your fancy. I didn't much care for the amnesiac fireman, for example, as a topic since it didn't particularly go anywhere. The Lost City of Z: Everyone and their cat has read this, but you should too! It's another of Grann's books. In this case, he followed the footsteps of a rockstar explorer from the "glory days" of white-guy Amazonian expeditions, both through the library and, yes, literal jungle. The explorer, Percy Fawcett, went searching for a "lost city" deep in the rainforest and never returned. It's the most satisfying book about a real-life mystery I've ever read, since books like this are usually blueballs.txt. Has the right amount of first-person content for a book of this type, it's an excellent example of how travel writing can be, you know, good. The Poisoner's Handbook: I found this one interesting except for the incessant spew on Prohibition. I would probably recommend that you watch the PBS documentary based on this book (on Netflix at the moment) and not read it though, since the documentary has all the actual chemistry parts and leaves out the many many MANY unnecessary segues about Prohibition which disrupt the flow of the book and feel more whiny than informative. That is to say, there are better dedicated texts on Prohibition, so at the very least, don't read this for that. The stuff people who were on the Essex wrote about their ship sinking and then having to eat each other: Good stuff, super short read. Funny to have them curse the whale that sank their ship when they were murdering poo poo-tons of them, no notion of this being a pretty fair thing for a whale to do in response. I was perhaps most surprised at how readable it still was? They feel like reports that could have been written today, if we were still hunting down whales by hand. Anyway, an interesting peek into life at the time. Currently reading The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, DisneyWar, and The Great Mortality. Pick fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 00:23
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 21:34 |
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Earwicker posted:I'm currently reading Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, it's by a dude who grew up in middle class southern California and then went to grad school in Chicago to study sociology, became interested the poor black neighborhoods that surrounded the school and decided to focus on studying them, and then wound up becoming friends with a gang leader in the projects where he was essentially "embedded" in a way that is fairly rare for sociologists and allowed him to have a lot of very direct involvement and observation. Really interesting book that focuses a lot on the relationship between the gang and the non-gang residents of the projects and how they rely on and feed off one another. I read this book, and unfortunately I'm not sure I'd recommend it? I think there's perhaps some good content there, but similar to Tokyo Vice (which I'm convinced is 85% total B.S.), I think the author got too caught up in his own narrative, or trying to refine a narrative. He does say the conversations are based largely on memory, but they seem... way too crisp? They read a lot more like a screenplay than an actual recitation of fact. I'm not claiming he didn't do the work, but I think his memory has been affected substantially by what he wanted to learn when he first set foot in the projects. He made himself the main character of a story that's just too clean (and rather condescending). It ends up feeling paper-thin and more like a novelization of The Wire than a serious academic work. Pick fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Apr 7, 2016 |
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Apr 7, 2016 01:33
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I get that, but among the other nonfiction I read it's a standout for... lack of substance. Meanwhile, I'm still getting through Lawrence in Arabia and drat it's a good book. It's so loving good!!
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Apr 16, 2016 05:39
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Pick posted:Meanwhile, I'm still getting through Lawrence in Arabia and drat it's a good book. It's so loving good!! I finished it and it's one of those books, along with The Wilderness Warrior, that I am going to shove down people's throats. It's a must-read and a wild ride and fun/depressing as hell. Also, boy was TE Lawrence both a spitfire, a horse's rear end, a genius, a martyr, and a big weird. Current reading list: Lincoln (David Herbert Donald) Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Crusade for America The Great Mortality Indefinitely shelved until that one Twilight Zone episode where the guy breaks his glasses happens in real life: The Children's Blizzard: Everyone wants to hear about children dying in a huge blizzard, but the tone of this book is obnoxious. The author seems to be trying to inject drama into a situation where hundreds of children died, which is unnecessary for a situation where hundreds of children died. I skipped around through this book, and the organization is also rather poor. The Last Viking: Not "bad" but taking too long to get off the ground, will return to it later most likely or just skip to the most key chapters about Amundsen. Pick fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Apr 24, 2016 |
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Apr 23, 2016 21:39
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Wheat Loaf posted:I've just finished DisneyWar and it was great. Is there anything else like it that's worth checking out? "Like it" in the sense of the story of a business, following proud people make terrible decisions, or what made it stand out to you?
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May 5, 2016 16:51
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 21:34 |
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Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools: A fast read, and basically just a long research paper. I'd still recommend it though, based on the information you get and how quickly/easily it's relayed. Things have changed since the book was released, but then again, a lot of the people who are in power who went to boarding schools were in these schools during this era. I'd say it's a nice peek into a different world, and gives insight into the development of the "elitist" mindset.
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Jul 28, 2016 16:55
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