Book Reviews

(2006-Present)

Summary: A behind-the-scenes account of Ed Rendell's first term as mayor of Philadelphia.

Review: I don't know if a better book has been written about local politics. This book may be one of the best ones I've read about politics, period. It's a dizzying portrayal of a big city mayor trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of public employee unions, the media, state and federal government, job loss, white flight, and more. It's both engrossing and deeply depressing. Not perfect (Bissinger lays it on a bit thick sometimes), but overall I loved it.

Summary: A novel about a New York couple going through a bitter divorce before and after 9/11.

Review: This book is trying to be darkly funny throughout and almost never succeeds. More importantly, way too much of the book takes place in the heads of its two main characters rather than in dialogue or in them living life. I'm sure that was sort of the point, and the one positive of this book is how well Kalfus paints a portrait of modern self-obsession, but he does it at the expense of everything else. There's a real lack of story. The reviews of this book are all glowing, though, so maybe fiction truly is wasted on me.

Summary: A history of Muhammad Ali's early career.

Review: Really, really good. Remnick is able to juggle a bunch of complicated characters and create a real sense of time and place. I was sad to finish this book.

Summary: A look at piracy, regulation, and commerce on the modern ocean.

Review: As with Fly By Wire, it's tough to describe this book. Langewiesche approaches a few different case studies in piracy, shipwrecks, and the like with tremendous lyricism and paints a picture of a wild frontier that remains totally untamed by modern institutions. The accounts of shipwrecks (reconstructed from survivor interviews) are absolutely riveting.

Summary: The stories behind 36 classic hip-hop albums.

Review: Surprisingly inane. Considering the personalities and history involved, I expected a lot more interesting stuff. Not recommended.

Summary: The autobiography of a veteran marine sniper.

Review: This book is a little too clunky and unfocused. Coughlin doesn't find the right mix of ingredients between his personal story and the story of snipers on the battlefield. It's not bad, but if you want to read about snipers, Trigger Men is much better, if you want to read about the on-the-ground reality for US troops, Joker One is much better, and if you want the bigger picture on the war in Iraq, The Forever War is much better.

Summary: An intensive look at a few years in the recent history of The New York Times.

Review: If you're looking for an accessible book about the changing nature of the news industry, this isn't it. This book is pure inside baseball, a detailed retracing of what happened in the NYT newsroom in the years post-9/11, with particular attention to the Jayson Blair scandal. I enjoyed it a lot, but it's definitely not for everyone.

Summary: A very discursive look at the author's relationship with crossword puzzles.

Review: There's a lot not to like in this book, but any crossword enthusiast will probably enjoy it.

Summary: About the ethical and practical dilemmas of eating and producing meat in the modern era.

Review: I'm not sure how I feel about this book in terms of its prescriptive elements. Foer doesn't really manage to tie it all together in the end, and most of his clearer points are retreads of now-standard complaints. Still, the book was a very good read. It's personal, but not too personal, and quite balanced and thoughtful. I appreciated that he wasn't approaching things dogmatically or in some utopian context. If you're interested in these issues, this is worth a read.

Summary: A general and personal history of skateboarding.

Review: I've been on the lookout for a good book about skateboarding history and culture, but I doubt this is it. The prose in this book was so excruciating I couldn't even make it past page 50. Maybe it hits its stride later, but I ran out of patience.

Summary: Memoirs from a disgruntled travel writer.

Review: I almost gave up on this book after the first 90 pages, but it turned around just in time. It starts to unravel again in the end, though. The middle third of this book is excellent, but probably not good enough to make it worth sitting through the plodding beginning and end.

Summary: The story of the crash of US Airways flight 1549.

Review: This very short book is great on two counts. First, the moment-by-moment account from the flight deck is genuinely gripping even though you know exactly what's going to happen. Second, this book is more interesting for the way in which Langewiesche ties the example of flight 1549 to a bigger story about modern aviation and human performance. He walks such a fine line so well that it's hard to even describe what the book is about once you've read it.

Summary: Conversations with comedy writers about their humor and their careers.

Review: In general, these interviews are a lot more illuminating and surprising than those The New New Journalism, maybe because comedy is so hard to get right, and so rare is the person who can do it well consistently. Read this if you're curious about what goes through humorists' heads when they're working on a bit.

Summary: Memoirs of an American reporter working the crime beat for a Japanese newspaper.

Review: This book was a big letdown. It feels like Adelstein has great source material but fails to turn into anything coherent. He switches back and forth between dull, unconnected anecdotes and a very weak overall arc. Not recommended.

Summary: Interviews on writing and reporting process with some great journalists.

Review: With a few exceptions, I didn't find these interviews all that enlightening, but on the plus side this book pointed me to a lot of intriguing books by the authors interviewed (although the last thing I ever need is a longer reading list).

Summary: Stories of life behind the Berlin Wall under the eye of the East German secret police.

Review: I really enjoyed this book. It basically consists of a handful of stories told by former East Germans ranging from former Stasi targets to former Stasi officials, and Funder is wise to let them do most of the telling. Collectively, the stories paint a disturbing picture of life in a police state - what it does to people to deprive them of a private self and the ability to trust their fellow citizens. Funder also injects bits of her own experience living in Berlin after the fall of the wall and is able to give it a real sense of place.

Summary: Memoirs from a big wave surfing pioneer.

Review: VERY light reading without much structure. Basically the book equivalent of sitting in Noll's living room and listening to him spin stories about the good old days in the surfing world (Southern California and Oahu in the 1950's and 1960's, specifically). If that sounds like your cup of tea, you'd probably like this.

Summary: A detailed history of the political maneuvering and civil unrest surrounding the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Review: This book is a tremendous achievement in reporting. Doyle's thoroughness is mindblowing, particularly since he manages to go into so much detail without turning it into a textbook. It's full of fascinating history about Mississippi, the postwar South generally, and the civil rights era, but is also a gripping story of a few days in which 30,000 troops were deployed in an American city and we came surprisingly close to a new secessionist conflict. Everyone learns about certain moments from the civil rights era - Bull Connor in Birmingham, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Little Rock Nine, etc. - and after reading this book it's hard to believe how little play the Oxford riots get in comparison.

Summary: A history of the big wave surfing rivalry between Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo in the 1980's.

Review: A pretty good read if you're like me and have an abiding interest in surf culture and history despite not actually being a surfer yourself. You get an inside look at a very specific moment in surfing history: Hawaii's North Shore in the 1980's, which was the epicenter for big wave surfing and its growing commercialization. The rivalry between Bradshaw and Foo doesn't really sustain the book on its own, but fortunately there's enough else to hold it together.

Summary: Eggers' memoir of life after losing both parents to cancer in a single month.

Review: I avoided reading this book because everything I learned about it made it sound like a pretentious pile of crap. Reading the discursive "Acknowledgments" section at the beginning of the book, all my worst fears were confirmed. Fortunately, once the real book starts, it turns around quickly. The first half of this book was some of the best prose I can ever remember reading, and full of unexpected small and large truths. The fact that it takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area and the setting is practically another character in the book made me appreciate it even more. In the second half of the book, when Eggers starts to get more self-indulgent, the book starts to unravel, but holds on just enough through the end. Definitely recommended.

Summary: Case studies of failure in the American criminal justice system.

Review: This is a great book, although probably 25% longer than it needs to be. Bach focuses on four examples of miscarried justice, and her research on each is remarkably deep and thorough. The key to this book is that while the cases read like crime fiction and revolve around a cast of characters, Bach doesn't focus on the key players' individual mistakes. Instead, she roots out the unseen structural and collective problems that led to a bad outcome at the level of a particular judge, prosecutor, or public defender. This book is startling and depressing - highly recommended for anyone with a healthy curiosity about criminal justice.

Summary: Inside the surreal world of America's retirement communities.

Review: This book revolves around Blechman's stay in The Villages, the world's largest retirement community (it's in Florida, of course). There's far too much in here about the quirks of The Villages and its residents, and not enough of the rest. He tries to look what effect isolating the elderly from everyone else has on both sides, and what generational turnover means for political participation, community cohesion, and so on, but I felt like he never got to the heart of the matter. My favorite parts of this book were the ones concerned with local politics; it's an unexpectedly fascinating look at how small communities and their residents function as political entities.

Summary: Dispatches from two years in Aspen in the late 1980's.

Review: After Conover's other three books, this one was a disappointment. I can understand that, after exploring two great underclasses (hobos and migrant workers), he wanted to report on an elite as a counterpoint, but his approach just doesn't quite work when applied to wealthy Aspenites. For the obvious practical reason that it's easier to play poor than play rich, he doesn't really immerse himself in the culture he's investigating this time around; he's stuck in a more typical observer posture, and it doesn't suit him. This book also feels dated in a way that his others don't (it may well be that what it means to be rich in America has changed a lot more in the last twenty years than what it means to be poor). This book isn't bad, but it's no standout.

Summary: A platoon commander's-eye-view of the war in Iraq.

Review: Campbell, who commanded a platoon of young Marines on a long and violent deployment in Ramadi, is resolutely NOT trying to tell any story of the Iraqi experience or of the political dimensions of the war. This book is purely about the reality of US ground troops in the war and about what the bond is like between men who go into battle together. On that score, it's a home run, and makes a nice complement to The Forever War and Imperial Life In The Emerald City.

Summary: The author's dispatches from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Review: This book took me about 30 pages to get into, and I almost gave up, but after that, wow. Filkins is one hell of a war reporter, and comes about as close as a visiting American can come to giving you real insight into the impact of war on the Afghan and Iraqi people. Highly recommended.

Summary: An exploration of running culture in modern America and among a rural Mexican tribe known for its running prowess, told through the story of an epic foot race years in the making.

Review: I hate running. I absolutely hate it. I avoid it at all costs. So when I say I loved this book, it's not because I'm a running geek. This book is tough to summarize, and it confounded my expectations. I expected a run-of-the-mill pop journalism exploration of a sport subculture, complete with all the obligatory expert visits, university studies, and so on, but this book reads like a movie (and I have no doubt the rights have already been sold). It's a genuinely gripping story, full of memorable characters, exotic locales, and no small amount of suspense. More than anything else, though, this book is the most joyful book I've read in a very long time. It's brimming with an earnestness and excitement that nonfiction books almost never possess, probably because people think it's uncool. But reading this book was a truly joyful experience, so much so that at the end I almost wanted to start it all over again.

Summary: An account of riding the rails around the American West.

Review: While studying anthropology at Amherst, Conover decided to take leave and live as a hobo for his research. Normally this is the sort of Ehrenreichian ploy I would roll my eyes at, but on the strength of Conover's other books, I was willing to make an exception. This book is a little rougher around the edges than Coyotes or Newjack, but when you consider that he was still basically a kid during the experience, his maturity and insight is startling. He paints a complex picture of life at the economic bottom, and it's hard to form any easy judgments. For every tramp he meets who seems pure of heart but snakebitten, there's another who continues to willfully make bad choices and exploit the system. It's hard to know how relevant his portrait of tramp culture is thirty years later, but even if it amounts to a historical artifact, it's still worth the read.

Summary: The author's undercover look at Mexican immigrants in America.

Review: To call Conover's project "undercover" is a little misleading, since as a white, blond American he can't exactly pass for Mexican, nor does he try. What he does do is insinuate himself into a group of migrant workers and document their experience. He works the orchards in Arizona, visits their Mexican hometown, and makes numerous illegal border crossings, among other things. This book is over 20 years old, but it doesn't feel dated at all, and Conover resists the temptation to preach. It's a great, thought-provoking read.

Summary: The author's account of his year as a guard in Sing Sing Prison.

Review: This book is simply outstanding. It's an evenhanded and deeply engrossing look at crime and punishment in America, not to mention a very brave work of immersive journalism. There are surprising insights at every turn about not just the prisoners, but politics, workplace power structures, and the effect of the job on the guards. I loved it so much that after I finished it, I immediately went out and got Conover's other three books.

Summary: An analysis of the causes and effects of America's lawsuit culture.

Review: Geoghegan uses this book to construct an elaborate theory about how we got into our current mess of litigiousness, the foundation for which is changes in labor law, unionization, contract rights, and political participation. He's an unapologetic liberal partisan throughout, and I ultimately disagree with almost all of his points, but I enjoyed getting his perspective and sparring with him in my head. The one larger point we seem to agree on is that the application of the law to Americans has become increasingly arbitrary, the effects of which are corrosive and far-reaching.

Summary: All about the proliferation of data and its effects on prediction, decisionmaking, and policy.

Review: This is the book Stephen Baker's The Numerati was trying to be. It's a steadier and more substantive treatment of a very similar subject. Nothing in here is too profound - it's still essentially airport bookstore fare - but it's not bad, and I appreciate Ayres for championing the cause of statistical literacy.

Summary: An anthology of rejected humor pieces.

Review: Any meta-point the editor (Friedman) is trying to make about the nature of rejection is largely lost, but there are plenty of gems in this collection. Fully half of them are self-indulgent pablum, but the rest are wickedly funny. Be advised that the "neurotic thirty-something Brooklynite comedienne with a failed one-woman show" demographic is drastically overrepresented.

Summary: The story of an unsolved double homicide case reopened 30 years later.

Review: This book wasn't quite what I expected, but it's a great piece of reportage. It boils down to a character study of a career criminal and his pursuer, and it's a great read throughout. Gourevitch gets bonus points for his vivid portrait of street life in 1960's New York.

Summary: A look at the dynamics of meth in rural America through the experience of a small Iowa town.

Review: Not bad, but not a standout either. Reding has some good scenes, some good reporting, and some good analysis, but somehow the book doesn't really tie together. It felt like he just barely missed the mark.

Summary: A biography of mixed martial arts legend Pat Miletich, along with a modern history of the sport.

Review: I grabbed this book off the shelf at the library on a lark and was pleasantly surprised. Wertheim does a tremendous job of bringing his main subject to life and exploring the rise of MMA from every angle. I enjoyed just about every part of this book, and I say that as someone who knows next to nothing about the sport.

Summary: A book about the heyday of stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Review: This book is outstanding. It strikes just the right balance between history and story, with three-dimensional characters and vivid scenes, and it finds a good focal point for what could otherwise turn into a sprawling mess. If you're at all interested in the world professional comedians inhabit or in the history of the entertainment industry, I highly recommend it.

Summary: Assorted diaries of fatherhood.

Review: I would read Lewis on drywall repair, so it was a given that I was going to read this, even though, like Kevin Nealon's book, it's a topic that normally holds no interest for me. Unsurprisingly, this book was very good, but if you adjust for font, page size, and very liberal spacing, it's only about 80 pages long, and yet the hardcover list price is still $25. So if you're going to read it, get it from the library - don't encourage them.

Summary: An autobiography of drugs, sex, and stand-up comedy.

Review: Every so often, Brand casually tosses out a laugh-out-loud funny line. Aside from those, though, there's nothing all that engaging about this book. His biography isn't bizarre enough to stand on its own, and he fails to turn a stream of anecdotes about drug-fueled mishaps into anything more meaningful. The whole thing lacks a storyline and feels very self-indulgent.

Summary: A tour of various international standoffs, civil wars, separatist movements, genocides, and other similar unpleasantness around the world.

Review: Harris walks a fine line throughout this book, trying to be funny without being glib, and mostly succeeds. It's entertaining and pretty educational, considering the format. If you're a world history or current affairs buff, you'll like this. But I recommend skipping the Africa section altogether if you don't want to be depressed for the rest of the day.

Summary: Steinbeck's famous memoir of driving around America with his French poodle.

Review: I loved the first three pages of this book, but it was all downhill from there. Steinbeck, fancying himself the bard of real America, gets a little carried away in his prose (OK, more than a little). More importantly, though, I think this book was lost on me because I wanted to connect to his experiences and observations, but I couldn't, because the America he's writing about doesn't exist anymore. The book is old enough that he may as well be talking about a foreign country, but there's just enough familiarity that I can't appreciate it as an exotic travel narrative.

Summary: Nealon's account of his wife's pregnancy.

Review: I think I have a special affection for Nealon due to his being a fixture on Saturday Night Live during that key window when a) the show was good and b) I watched it. That's why I ended up reading a book about something that has no relevance to me and for which the target audience is probably everyone but me. I didn't love this book, but I enjoyed it, and I imagine anyone with even a modicum of relevant life experience would enjoy it even more. Nealon is a very funny man, and his particular brand of funny translates well into a book like this. It's also surprisingly touching at times.

Summary: A collection of humor pieces about black (and white) America.

Review: I'm a fan of Wilmore's scripted comedy and a lot of his other work, so I thought this book had a chance to be good. It isn't. It's shockingly bad. It's mindless, predictable racial humor with very little in the way of actual wit.

Summary: An account of two years at Harvard Business School.

Review: This book felt like it ended too soon. There were a lot of things I would have liked to see Broughton go into, but he kept the parameters of the story pretty narrow. That being said, this book is a smooth read with a good structure and lots of interesting stuff (no surprise, since Broughton was a newspaper journalist for many years before going to HBS). Anyone who's curious about the business school experience and the type of people it attracts will like this book.

Summary: A book about neuroeconomics, autism, mental ordering, and digital culture, among other things.

Review: Cowen might be my favorite public intellectual, to the extent that he qualifies. He thinks and writes unlike anyone else I've read, and unlike most of his peers, I consider him to be genuinely open-minded. He doesn't have a tired shtick or an agenda, and when he starts taking me (as a reader) down a path, I have no idea where he's headed. That's very rare. This book has plenty of those moments. I won't even try to explain what it's about, in part because I'm still not sure, but I enjoyed it, learned a few things, and was provoked to think very hard about a lot of things. Cowen also has a delightful sense of humor that's so dry it may a) not count as humor, and b) be unintentional. Regardless, I burst out laughing a few times reading this book.

Summary: A sassy memoir about a year spent shooting an adventure travel reality show.

Review: This book reads effortlessly, which sounds like fainter praise than it is. Peters also gets the award for the best humorous use of footnotes I've ever seen. There's not much real substance to this book, but I don't think that was ever the point. Just tagging along with Peters is fun enough.

Summary: An investigation of the realities, subcultures, and paradoxes of modern Christian pop culture in America.

Review: This is another case in which I was excited to dive into a world that's totally foreign to me, but it turns out Radosh doesn't make a great tour guide. There's a certain weird distance in his prose, and he tends to get bogged down in the details, or at least in the wrong details. I can't help but feeling this book could have been so much better. Not particularly recommended.

Summary: Assorted writing about the author's life in small-town Alaska.

Review: The main character in this book is really the town of Haines, Alaska, and it's very fully-realized. You get a good sense for the particular spirit of the town and its residents. Unfortunately, there's not much here in the way of substance. The different chapters don't much connect, and a lot of them fall flat anyway. If you want to gawk at small town quirkiness, I'd recommend you just rent a Coen brothers movie instead.

Summary: A memoir of two decades as a lobbyist for the NRA and the gun industry.

Review: This book is ostensibly about two things that interest me a lot and about which I know a fair amount (politics) and almost nothing (guns in America), respectively. It would seem to be a good combination, but instead of being a gripping, or at least darkly funny, memoir of power politics and legislative tricks, it's essentially a very boring laundry list account of Feldman's career. What little effort he makes to impose a real narrative on things fails miserably, and his writing style has no bite to it. I expected to learn a lot from this book, but learned almost nothing.

Summary: Following three young doctors through their final year of medical school and first year as interns.

Review: It's hard to say what exactly this book is about - there are certainly broader lessons about medical education, medical practice, human relationships, and all that. But it's also something of a memoir - one of the three subjects is the author's girlfriend - and is deeply personal (sometimes too much so). I'm not going to try to deconstruct it too much, and instead just say that I enjoyed it enough to read it all in one sitting. It loses some steam toward the end, but I thought Eule was an able storyteller and that he provided a good window into the high-pressure world of being a young doctor.

Summary: Another collection of Wallace's nonfiction essays.

Review: Despite my best efforts, I couldn't finish this book. Unlike Consider The Lobster, most of the essays in this book a) run on way too long, and b) are about subjects of little to no interest to me. At a certain point, a 60-page essay about the effect of TV on contemporary fiction just collapses under its own weight. This whole book has the feel of a long dinner with someone who loves to hear himself speak.

Summary: A memoir of the author's two years as a bit player on Saturday Night Live.

Review: Overall, this book was a lot of fun. For anyone curious about Saturday Night Live or the television comedy business, this book won't disappoint. It also helps if you peaked as a SNL viewer right around Mohr's time on the show, because the book is full of great stories about fellow cast members like Chris Farley and Adam Sandler. I could have done without the very neurotic thread about Mohr's own showbiz arc, though.

Summary: An anthology of O'Rourke's pieces on American car culture and road trips gone (mostly) wrong.

Review: O'Rourke is one of my favorite writers and humorists, so I expected a lot more from this book. In most of the new material, it feels like he's playing a caricature of himself, and in the old material, he hasn't finished sharpening his voice yet. Maybe he just loses something when he's not talking politics. I'm not sure what the root cause is, but this book is very skippable, even for a big P.J. O'Rourke fan.

Summary: An exploration of the different faces of present-day California.

Review: Some of the chapters in this book didn't work for me - the section on radicalism in San Francisco and Berkeley seemed particularly misguided. But when it's good, it's great. Arax blew me away with some parts, especially the chapters on migrant farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley and marijuana growers in Humboldt. Of course, there are plenty of other subjects in California I would have liked to see him cover, but this book was never intended to be thorough like that. It's more emotional than factual. Highly recommended.

Summary: A sendup of the world of modern literature in which the underachieving main character decides to game the system and write a bestseller-by-numbers.

Review: This book was up and down for me - sometimes it seems like Hely is lampooning something out of obligation rather than necessity, like he has to cover all his bases. That being said, I enjoyed it a lot. Like any good satire, it's funny and often uncomfortably true. Despite an unsatisfying ending, Hely did a good job of crafting a legitimate story while also mixing in a ton of great detail. The book also has more than its fair share of great individual sentences. (Full disclosure: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher for reasons that still aren't clear to me.)

Summary: A collection of Wallace's nonfiction essays.

Review: I find Wallace's literary criticism to be unbearable. Not necessarily because it's bad - it might be good, but if it is, I'm certainly not up to the task of parsing it or appreciating it. Once you take that out, this book basically boils down to four very good long essays: the titular essay about the Maine Lobster Festival, an essay about his trip to the AVN Awards (the Oscars for porn), an essay about conservative talk radio, and an essay about John McCain's 2000 campaign. The lobster piece and the talk radio piece are both available online for free - I know because I read them there first. And the McCain piece, which is outstanding, is included in a separate book with extra material. With that in mind, I wouldn't bother with this book. Read the good chapters online at their original publications and get the McCain book instead.

Summary: A pro-biotech manifesto covering recent and expected breakthroughs in fields like gerontology, oncology, and fertility.

Review: I didn't find Bailey's case to be persuasive, but that may be because I didn't need to be persuaded. I happen to agree with him on most points, and this book certainly feels like preaching to the choir. He deals with a lot of common objections to different sorts of research and proposed medical treatments, but it's hard to focus on that when he's constantly talking up new outlandish potential breakthroughs. Don't get me wrong, I like to geek out on impractical technology as much as anyone, but years of reading lazy science magazine journalism have taught me to be skeptical. I can even pinpoint the exact moment when this book lost me: it was when Bailey was gushing about a scientist who expects to replace the entire human circulatory system with a system of lightweight conveyor belt nanobots.

Summary: A collection of essays on topics ranging from online privacy to the Chicago post office.

Review: Underwhelming, although the essay on his father's Alzheimer's was both great and heartbreaking. Some of the chapters don't seem to belong in this book, like his Harper's essay, and others are just puzzling, like the Oprah piece. Definitely a Franzen overdose for me.

Summary: A sprawling true crime story from 1980's Savannah high society.

Review: The core story of this book is excellent, but I would have preferred some more selective editing. Huge sections are devoted to other interesting characters that don't really fit into anything else. I get the impression that Berendt just couldn't resist including everything, even though it doesn't all belong in the same book. Still, it's worth slogging through that stuff for the Jim Williams thread.

Summary: A Harvard ethnobotanist's account of going to Haiti to discover the secrets of zombie poison and voodoo rites.

Review: The prose is a little dense, but the sheer exoticness of the story and the setting make it easy not to notice. I enjoyed the book until about two-thirds of the way through, at which point the most interesting conflict in the book is resolved. After that, Davis feels the need to continue for another 80 pages that I didn't get anything out of.

Summary: How doctors are trained, what they know, what they don't know, and how they make decisions.

Review: On the whole, this book is quite good. The chapter on modern radiology is as great as the oncology chapter is depressing. My biggest complaint is that Groopman doesn't seem to have much of a sense of trade-offs in decision making. He wants doctors to be mavericks who make a bold diagnosis, but only in cases when the doctor would be right. There is little discussion of the cost to more routine cases when doctors go on a wild goose chase, and even less discussion of how money fits into everything.

Summary: A discussion of some common misconceptions about American History and why it gets mistaught the way it does.

Review: I expected this book to focus more on specific urban legends about American history, but most of it is concerned with how teachers teach it and how the textbooks are written. It raises a lot of interesting questions about the politics of history and the goals of history education.

Summary: All about US military snipers, with a particular focus on their use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Review: You probably don't need my review to know whether you'd like this book. If you would enjoy sitting in a bar with a bunch of special forces soldiers and hearing their crazy war stories and learning all about how to shoot someone in the head from 2000 meters away, you should read it.

Summary: A history of John Winthrop and the pilgrims.

Review: After Assassination Vacation, this was a big disappointment. Vowell's tone is a lot more serious in a way that doesn't really suit her, and she's too focused on sermons and religiosity at the expense of other aspects of the pilgrims' history. Her repeated attempts to connect the material to 9/11 and the war in Iraq also fell completely flat for me.

Summary: A look at sociological changes among knowledge workers in the US.

Review: I hated this book so much that I kept reading so I could find more things to hate about it. It's like an all-you-can-eat stereotype buffet. It opens with an absurd caricature of an urban professional as if Conley's ability to dream it up somehow proves his point. This becomes a habit, in which he simply makes huge assumptions and then works off of them without bothering to justify them. The only observations that I didn't hate were the completely obvious and unoriginal ones. I don't know why I don't learn my lesson about these books.

Summary: A historical/anthropological explanation for the current supremacy of Western societies.

Review: Maybe this is a testament to the influence of this book since its publication, but I didn't find a lot of new or shocking things in it. Diamond's points seemed a little too commonsensical. Still, the scholarship and writing were both strong, so it's a good primer on the subject.

Summary: An analysis of liberal democracy and the current geopolitical order.

Review: Anyone who wants to point out exactly how much shit Francis Fukuyama is full of is a friend of mine. This book lays out a convincing argument as to why the end of the Cold War wasn't the end of much, and makes good, restrained predictions about the near future. Perhaps most importantly, it's not padded with lots of repetition or nonsense; it's exactly as short as it should be.

Summary: Essays about American history and politics.

Review: As with any essay collection, this is kind of hit-or-miss, but I enjoyed it overall. The piece on Al Gore is especially good.

Summary: A memoir of conversations with a former professor dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Review: This book is just as sappy as you'd expect, but it's also pretty good.

Summary: The history of the Wright Brothers and the race to achieve human flight.

Review: Tobin's an able biographer, but the source material just isn't that good. I assumed that, since he bothered to write the book, that there was an interesting untold story behind the Wright Brothers. I was wrong.

Summary: Baseball, steroids, Barry Bonds, and the BALCO scandal.

Review: This book is very well-reported, but the authors seem a little too pleased with themselves. They are full of manufactured outrage, and place the focus too squarely on Bonds. They also consistently fail to address bigger, and to me more interesting, questions that are tied up in the BALCO ordeal. The book is a good read, but you might want to throw it across the room once in a while.

Summary: King's memoir about the craft of writing.

Review: The first portion of this book is a very skippable autobiography. Once he gets into his perspective on fiction writing, though, it gets better. What makes this book good is that he manages to talk shop without making it a how-to book. He shows restraint in offering his own perspective on big and small questions of writing rather than being too didactic. I especially enjoyed his long rant against adverbs.

Summary: A brief history of law in America.

Review: Dull and surprisingly uninformative. Most of the history in this book is very basic stuff, and when it comes to his broader analysis, Friedman is too noncommittal.

Summary: 230+ pages about sewage and toilets.

Review: This book's biggest shortcoming is the lack of any real narrative or central thesis beyond the fact that we don't pay as much attention to human sanitation as we should. George jumps around between disconnected topics like pit latrines in Tanzanian slums and the history of luxury toilet technology without even trying to justify it. And, as you might expect, the book gets a little slow as it goes on - one can only take so much sewer talk. Still, this is the sort of book that makes you look differently at an everyday something, and it's got plenty of good stuff for anyone curious about the subject (especially someone who wants to feel more guilty about conditions in the developing world).

Summary: Dispatches from the front lines of climate change science and policy.

Review: This book seems poorly-proportioned. It spends too many pages shoring up the existence of anthropogenic climate change and not enough time talking about the implications. Anyone open to the scientific premise isn't going to need 100 pages of proof before getting into the interesting part. Between assessments of the present and forecasts for the future, Kolbert also never pauses to explain exactly why this is a problem. I'm not a climate change skeptic by any means, but my biggest frustration is people who don't lay out the argument for why changing the earth at a geological level is either morally or practically unacceptable. Is it because it will dislocate coastal communities? Because it will wipe out animal species that are important to the ecosystem? Because it will lead to the extinction of man? Any or all of these might be true, but I'd like for people not to just take the catastrophic nature of global warming as an article of faith and tell me so. The most interesting takeaway from this book is that there are a number of positive feedback cycles and trigger points that make the natural human tendency to think of global warming as a steady, linear process very dangerous. Kolbert makes a thorough case for why stored carbon in permafrost, the ice-albedo feedback loop, and other things will make the effects of global warming far more irregular and sudden than we appreciate.

Summary: The author chronicles his slow descent into the fringe of survivalist culture as he gets more and more paranoid about governmental collapse, terrorism, and natural disasters.

Review: I'd put this book alongside A Fighter's Heart as a book that almost any man I know will enjoy, but probably very few women. The book has a good freewheeling style, and touches on all kinds of action hero stuff that every boy grows up wanting to know about: picking locks, escaping from prison, getaway driving, Swiss bank accounts, wilderness tracking, gunplay, how to make a knife out of a credit card, and so on. This book tries to impose a flimsy narrative of self-discovery over all this stuff, which doesn't really take. Fortunately you'll have too much fun reading it to notice.

Summary: A walkthrough of the excesses of the current American legal regime and the reforms needed.

Review: What a letdown. Howard's heart is in the right place, and I certainly agree with most of his conclusions, but this book is absurdly vague, mealy-mouthed, and wishful. He repeats himself over and over, and when he actually offers specific examples, he focuses too narrowly on the cases of medical practice and schools. There isn't even much in the way of interesting legal history, let alone a roadmap of specific, incremental reforms. This book is a pamphlet in disguise.

Summary: A memoir of the author's experience living the hobo lifestyle and riding freight trains around America.

Review: Vollman is the type of person who will ride the rails as a hobo all over the Western US just because. For this and many other reasons mentioned in the book, he is a very strange man. He also happens to be a tremendous writer, perhaps too much so for me - in this book it felt like he was operating on a frequency I couldn't hear, like there was a mountain of meaning and soul in his beat poetic prose that I couldn't quite get at. Even despite that, I found much to enjoy, especially his idiosyncratic descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of the trainyard. I'd file this under "Books That I Really, Really Wanted To Like More."

Summary: A political scientist takes a crack at predicting the major geopolitical events of the 21st century.

Review: Friedman makes some solid, if well-worn, points about the driving forces behind political and military power. Among other things, he makes a good case for why naval power and passable terrain are still so important in the digital age. I probably would have a favorable review of this book if it were just his predictions for 2009-2025, but after that is where he really loses it. Before you know it, he's raving like a madman about Battle Star satellites in geosynchronous orbit and secret Japanese lunar bases and other things so fantastical that I've blocked them from my memory. It's not that these predictions couldn't come true, it's that they are so inappropriately detailed and speculative that they undermine his more serious analysis and turn the whole book into a farce.

Summary: 50 essays, one about each state, written by a mix of novelists, journalists, and the like.

Review: It's going to hard for me to assess this book without sounding too gushing, because it's probably my favorite book of the last year or two (favorite is not to be confused with the best, which it isn't). If you feel ahistorical and disconnected from America and what it means and used to mean, this book will change that (at least temporarily) and reintroduce you to the impossible America of literature. Reading it is like going on the Great American Road Trip you never took, with lots of wonderful, lyrical descriptions and telling details. It made me want to go pick up the old WPA guides to the states and dig through old issues of Life magazine and hop a boxcar to South Dakota, not necessarily in that order. Some other thoughts: (1) I wish that more of the essays were written by people who still lived in the states they wrote about. It seems like every third essay is written by someone who lives in New York City, and something feels wrong about a bunch of hip New York authors trying to capture the soul of the American heartland, even if it is where they grew up. (2) There is very little about the real population centers of the country in here. As in the Senate, the emptier states get disproportionate weight, and even the chapters about the populous states focus more on the emptier parts. I'm fine with this, because it's not as though LA or New York or Miami is suffering from a lack of attention, and most people reading this book are going to be coastal urbanite yuppies anyway. (3) This book reminded me for the first time in a long time of just how important and mythic the Mississippi River used to be. (4) The California, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, South Carolina chapters were my favorites.

Summary: A manifesto on the ills of organized religion.

Review: As usual, Hitchens is impossibly eloquent and includes as evidence a ridiculous number of globetrotting personal anecdotes. When I read his work, I wonder who from my generation could possibly produce anything like it in twenty years (whither the public intellectual?). But as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data, and it's hard not to feel that he's cherry-picking sometimes. More importantly, it feels like he's preaching to the choir, and is a little too excited to play the role of provocateur (among his more contrarian points, he argues that Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are/were both assholes). He also tends to conflate religiosity with organized religion, particularly the historical excesses of the Big Five world religions. The most interesting discussion in the book is in the early chapters, when he looks at the danger of religious exceptionalism and the tension between modern institutions and religious arcana. Unfortunately, he quickly discards this line of inquiry to go on a whirlwind tour of bland, well-worn criticisms. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having their mind changed by this book, which is a major failing, but if you're a member of the choir to which he's preaching, you'll probably enjoy it.

Summary: A wide-ranging metafictional novel set in 20th-century England.

Review: Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that I found this book good but not exactly a standout until the end, when the payoff changed everything. Not that the rest of the book wasn't well-realized, but I had my standard difficulties with getting absorbed into a British period drama, and the balance between description and dialogue felt very heavily tilted towards the former, like getting a far-too-long tour from a kindly British guide in each new setting. On a more positive note, the book got me thinking about something I think about often in a real-world context - what does it do to a person to have their life defined by a single mistake?

Summary: Stories of the development and production processes for 25 different movie scripts.

Review: Like The Big Picture, this book paints a pretty unflattering picture of the creative process in Hollywood. Once you get past that, though, it's interesting to see how and why different story and character decisions were made in the movies discussed. The book forces you to think about the constraints and opportunities of film as a medium in a way that people rarely do, especially in the chapters that cover adaptations of novels. Recommended for movie buffs.

Summary: A broad introduction to the emerging science of neuroplasticity (the reorganization of the brain due to stimuli).

Review: I knew virtually nothing about the topic before reading this book, so I learned a fair bit. The general principles at work are fascinating, and Doidge does a good job making them accessible, but he's also a little bit too in love with his subject material. Each case study stretches too long, and overall the book could shed about 1/3 of its page count without any real loss. Also, one of the main takeaways from this book is that behind every advance in neuroscience, there is a monkey holocaust in a lab somewhere. I swear, every little research study cited is prefaced with an explanation of how researchers drilled, cut open, and otherwise tortured dozens of monkeys to prove some trivial new hypothesis.

Summary: Probably the closest thing there is to a photojournalism style guide.

Review: Too short on nuts-and-bolts information, and too long on vague pronouncements about the craft. The discussion of the industry's future also feels dated (the digital transition was just getting started when the book was published). On the plus side, there are some great case studies of specific photos - all the planning, setup, and techniques that went into getting certain iconic images (the story behind the famous photo of Elián Gonzáles is even crazier than I imagined).

Summary: The author chronicles a year spent trying to adhere to biblical rules as closely as possible.

Review: Another book I read a while ago but that I forgot to add to this list. I enjoyed this book immensely. I expected it to be entertaining and full of fun facts I would end up annoying people with at parties (it was both of these things), but I wasn't prepared for how sincere and reflective it turned out to be. Jacobs successfully walks the fine line between being funny and going for cheap laughs at the expense of religion. He seems to be making an honest effort to reconcile his lapsed Jewish sensibilities with a very alien culture and get a better understanding of his ancestry and of the modern sacred. Highly recommended, especially for any fellow sort-of-Jews.

Summary: A playful guidebook to creating and growing a high-tech startup company, covers topics such as VC funding, business plans, public relations, engineering, and recruiting.

Review: I was skeptical of this book because the author, Guy Kawasaki, is a member of the Silicon Valley pundit class of which I am always skeptical. He also seems to be a member of the subspecies that has coasted for the last 20 years based on one gig at one high-profile company; the Bay Area tech community is overflowing with people who answered phones for a few years at Microsoft, Sun, etc. and have since parlayed that into a vague executive bio and a string of 80 failed startups. I actually enjoyed this book, though. His straightforward, conversational style is well-suited to the material. He is also one of the only authors in the universe who understands that it's OK to have a two-page chapter when you only have two pages worth of stuff to say on a subject. Overly long chapters in nonfiction are a pet peeve of mine, because it makes it impossible to skip around to parts you care about, so I applaud Kawasaki for giving his book a structure that is USEFUL to the reader. On the content side, it covers the whole spectrum from enlightening to mindnumbing, but, per the previous point, you can easily skip the weak parts (or the parts that don't apply to you) without losing the thread. I think the title of the book is a good summary: most of the insights are commonsensical, but in practice Silicon Valley entrepreneurs all seem to lose their common sense, and this book would make a good refresher on the basics for when you've gone off the reservation.

Summary: An autobiographical open discussion of childhood, fatherhood, the development and decay of the human body.

Review: I've never really been able to appreciate the concept of "literary nonfiction," so I tend to shy away from it, but I would say this fits the bill more than anything else I've read. The book charts the arc of two parallel human lives - the general one, and the author's specific one. His 97-year old father also features heavily in his examination of his own frailty and mortality. I enjoyed the book a lot, but at times it's pretty dark. Not for those who fear introspection.

Summary: A book about the way people respond in disaster scenarios, with case studies of plane crashes, fires, and the like.

Review: I finished this a few months ago but forgot to list it. Ripley's approach can best be described as restrained, and I mean that in the best way. She doesn't try to inject herself into her narrative or speculate unduly. She does actual REPORTING, and lets the record speak for itself pretty well. I'd be lying if I said all the insights stuck with me, but some of them certainly did - particularly the analysis of office workers evacuating during 9/11.

Summary: A book about U.S. presidential assassinations, told through the author's pilgrimages to related historical sites.

Review: I'll only say two things about this book: (a) the fact that it mostly avoids talking about JFK bothered me, and (b) when I read, I dog-ear the bottom corners of pages that have great sentences or interesting facts I want to revisit when I finish the book, and I'm pretty sure this book set a new record for number of folds by the time I was halfway done.

Summary: A memoir of the author's tour through different worlds in the universe of fighting (kickboxing in Thailand, boxing in Oakland, Jiu-Jitsu in Brazil, etc.).

Review: This book reminded me a lot of Jarhead in the way it explores the nature of manhood. Aside from some ill-advised chapters on dogfighting and tai chi, it was great. I totally lost myself in Sheridan's very personal story, and it gave me a lot to think about. I'd recommend this book to any guy, but women will hate it.

Summary: Yet another collection of Hornby's Believer columns on what he's been reading lately.

Review: More of the same, and still good. This book also features a wonderful introduction in which Hornby delivers a case against book snobbery.

Summary: Another collection of Hornby's Believer columns on what he's been reading lately.

Review: This book is a little more tentative and self-deprecating than Shakespeare Wrote For Money, but otherwise it's the same deal. It's fun, breezy, and will point you in the direction of some great books.

Summary: A user's manual for the movie business.

Review: I loved this book. I felt like I learned something new on almost every page. Epstein peels back each layer of the movie business to help you understand it from all angles. I was even impressed by the parts with information I already knew, a true testament to how crisp and engaging the writing is. If you're curious about how movies do or don't get made, read this.

Summary: A wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between thought and language.

Review: This book is a little uneven - sometimes Pinker is on a roll with fascinating ideas and his particular dry wit, and then every so often he lapses into professorspeak and puts you to sleep. Regardless, the book is full of insight and things that will make you sit up and say "huh." It's also worth the price of admission just for the chapters on swearing and politeness.

Summary: A novel set in the waiting room at a porn shoot, told from the perspectives of four participants (Debbie Does De Palma?).

Review: The highlight of this book is how well Palahniuk develops the voices of the different narrators. Aside from that, though, it's a bit of a mess. In the end, the book is just an excuse for him to give you all the fun porn facts he learned during his research and to search for yet more ways of describing bodily functions.

Summary: A self-described grump goes on a tour of the world's happiest and unhappiest places.

Review: This book sort of alternates between travelogue and armchair psychology, and it's much stronger as the former. Weiner tends to get a little carried away in analysis mode and rely on the standard crutch of meaningless university studies, but his eye for detail in describing his travels makes the book worth reading.

Summary: A novel told from the alternating viewpoints of a supervillain and a rookie member of the superhero league trying to stop him.

Review: As someone who grew up reading his dad's Bronze Age comic books, I probably enjoyed this more than the average reader would. Grossman has a great time poking fun at old comic book tropes, but on a macro scale, this book is a little lacking. The lack of dialogue really hurts the flow of the book, and the plot seems to be a bare bones vehicle for Grossman to sneak in his favorite zingers. Only read this if you're a comic book nerd.

Summary: A doctor/science columnist reports on the epidemic of scientific misapplications and misunderstandings.

Review: This reads more like a manifesto than a straightforward nonfiction book. I didn't necessarily learn a lot, but I liked where Goldacre's heart is at, and it helped renew my outrage on the subject.

Summary: The memoirs of Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Review: This book has plenty of bizarre rock star nonsense, and sometimes it starts to read like a laundry list of benders and sexual conquests, but I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I read it cover-to-cover and liked it a lot. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been one of my favorite bands ever since I found my brother's copy of Blood Sugar Sex Magik in 4th grade, and I enjoyed getting the detailed backstory.

Summary: A novel about a guy who works in a historical theme park and makes extra money pretending to choke in fancy restaurants in order to pay for his dying mother's care.

Review: I enjoy Palahniuk's style, and the last 40 or 50 pages of this book are great. But overall, this book borrows too heavily from his other work. The story boils down to the same sort of pseudo-anarchist fantasy as Fight Club, with a lot of similar plot points.

Summary: A wide-ranging look at the Supreme Court during the Clinton and Bush years.

Review: This book betrays a slight liberal bias, and spends a little too much time talking up the "conservative movement" boogeyman, but aside from that, it's quite good. The book is well-organized and well-researched, and Toobin's writing flows quite nicely. I was particularly fascinated by the personal profiles of the justices - it made me want to read full biographies on Thomas and Souter.

Summary: A book about emergent behaviors in groups of undirected units like ant colonies and cities.

Review: I read this book by mistake when I mixed it up with a (hopefully much better) book with a similar title. This one is frustratingly devoid of specifics, and the chapter on software is completely dated. Don't read this.

Summary: A collection of short stories, each centered around a different generation in a family of doctors in New York.

Review: There's not enough continuity between stories to appreciate this book as a whole, but neither is there enough diversity for each one to stand on its own. I was underwhelmed, although there are certainly bright spots. The last story, in particular, blew me away.

Summary: A light-hearted history of research into and claims about ghosts, reincarnation, and so on.

Review: By far the weakest of Roach's three books, with most of the pages wasted on boring shenanigans from the 19th century. Roach is at her best when she's a foil for real scientists working in real labs, and this book only has a handful of them.

Summary: A history of English spelling.

Review: This book is even less interesting than it sounds.

Summary: One of the top trial lawyers in America discusses his major cases from 1997-2000.

Review: Boies isn't the best prose stylist, but he does a good job of breaking down complex legal issues, and you can learn a lot about procedures and how lawyers approach a broad, high-stakes case (which are, I realize, things that no one other than myself wants to learn about).

Summary: A collection of Hornby's monthly columns for The Believer magazine about books he's been reading.

Review: Hornby is one of those assholes who can cram an impossible amount of cleverness into one paragraph. I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm just jealous. These columns are aimless, but great, and they give you some sense of how an acclaimed writer reads things. More importantly, this book introduced me to dozens of other great books I might never have heard about otherwise. After finishing this, I learned that there are two other collections of his earlier columns, which I will pick up if I ever make some headway on my newly-inflated reading list.

Summary: A memoir of the author's first year at Harvard Law School.

Review: Turow does a masterful job of taking the reader through the same emotional ups and downs he experienced in his first year at HLS. I found myself getting tense along with him as his exams approached, and relieved when he got his grades. The book is also full of sharp commentary on legal education and the legal profession, particularly in the afterword. There is one big problem with the book, not Turow's fault: his first year of law school was in 1975, and I have no ability to judge how much things have changed. For that matter, I also can't say how much of what he observes is specific to Harvard, and how much of it is common to all law schools. So, I have to be careful about drawing larger lessons and assume that his book may just represent a dispatch from a peculiar set of circumstances. Regardless, if you're interested in legal education or the law generally, this book is well worth your time.

Summary: The author's account of his misadventures in Brazil as a Lonely Planet guidebook writer.

Review: The first ten or fifteen pages of this book, before Kohnstamm leaves for Brazil, are some of the best I've ever read. Maybe they set my expectations too high, because the rest of the book was a letdown. Kohnstamm is an able enough writer, but the book quickly turns into a typical booze-and-sex-fueled memoir, just a laundry list of bars visited and strange foreigners encountered that doesn't convey much of the flavor of Brazil or the business of travel writing. I might recommend it on the strength of the first chapter alone, but don't expect too much else out of it.

Summary: A book about the proliferation of data and data mining in modern life and its implications for marketing, health care, voting, etc.

Review: This book is rather Friedman-esque, and I mean that in the worst possible way. Baker had a germ of a thesis (and a rather obvious thesis, in my opinion), and then proceeded to work himself into a froth over it and produce 200+ pages in which he restates it over and over with increasingly strained analogies. Worse yet, the most interesting questions in this field - questions about things like changing expectations of privacy, identity, and the ways in which targeting might itself change behavior - are glossed over in a few meager paragraphs. Try one of the other trendy books on this subject instead.

Summary: Everything you didn't realize you wanted to know about dead bodies and cadaveric research.

Review: Way cool. Roach takes you inside anatomy labs, mortuaries, crash test facilities, and more in a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion on the past, present, and future of what we do with the bodies we leave behind.

Summary: A darkly comic novel about sex, family, politics, and coming of age in New Delhi.

Review: I'm more than a little biased because I lived in a dorm with the author my freshman year of college. On the other hand, good fiction is usually wasted on me, so hopefully those biases balance each other out. This book starts out a little slow, but is great when it hits its stride. It's full of subtle comedy and even subtler drama. My only real complaint is that I felt like not being Indian, or at least Indian American, was a handicap in absorbing the full texture of the descriptions and the characters' mannerisms.

Summary: Gladwell does some more speculating, this time on the cultural and demographic components of success and the myth of the self-made man.

Review: This book is fun, but with no shortage of cherry-picked evidence and logical fallacy. Take it with a grain of salt and enjoy it for the storytelling. As another plus, it seems a lot less padded than Blink, with the exception of the ill-advised chapter on the racial dynamics of Gladwell's personal history.

Summary: Swofford's memoir of serving as a Marine sniper during the first Gulf War.

Review: I was afraid that having already seen the movie would ruin this book for me, but the resemblance between the two turns out to be bare. The book is not quite what I expected in that it's not at all event-driven. Instead, it's a very intense exploration of adolescence and manhood and purpose, among other things. Swofford's writing is brutal, powerful, lyrical stuff. Read it.

Summary: Gawande's first book, about the dimensions of medical fallibility.

Review: Not as good as his follow-up, Better, but still worth a read. He captures some of the tensions that exist in the American health care system that get in the way of ideal patient outcomes, and, more than anything else, gives you a new appreciation for how hard it is to be a good doctor.

Summary: A sportswriter goes to training camp with the Denver Broncos as a placekicker and explains the day-to-day reality of life in the NFL.

Review: This book seems like it's supposed to sort of a reinvention of Plimpton, but I wasn't that emotionally invested in the author's success or failure. The aspects of the book dealing with life as an NFL player are good, but not great, and more than a little biased toward the players. More than anything, what fascinated me about this book was what goes into being a placekicker. I'm not sure that's a great endorsement.

Summary: A book about statistical fallacies, probability, the history of statistics, and the nature of success and failure.

Review: Disappointingly remedial. The statistics and probability concepts covered in this book are high school level stuff, and the anecdotes and studies he references are mostly ones I already knew. The historical parts were new information, but not interesting. The only part of this book that hints at something worth reading is the section on cognitive biases and failures of Bayesian thinking, but here again he doesn't dive deep enough and seems to be writing for a very incurious audience.

Summary: A geography/demography book about the ascendance of the "creative class" and geographic clustering.

Review: Florida is full of it, and this book is a big pile of guesswork. Don't waste your time.

Summary: A sportswriter goes on the competitive Scrabble circuit.

Review: This book is fun, but for reasons I can't quite place. I couldn't really appreciate the wisdom about Scrabble, and the profiles of the strange characters that dominate the Scrabble world didn't really stick with me either. I guess in the end this is really a book about obsession, and what drives the story is Fatsis letting you into exactly what he is thinking and feeling about his growing attachment to the game and pursuit of ever higher rankings.

Summary: One of the funniest science writers in the business tackles the topic of sex research.

Review: Not all that substantive, but very funny and full of cool but useless information.

Summary: Lewis looks at how the internet is changing the social order, our identities, and the comparative advantages of "insiders."

Review: This book was written in 2001, but the strongest praise I can offer it is that although the case studies (file-sharing, message boards, etc.) feel very quaint, the insights Lewis draws from them are still useful today. Not his best work, but not half-bad eiher.

Summary: Tyler Cowen, econ blogger extraordinaire, basically writes about whatever he feels like.

Review: Of all the pop econ books I've read, this is the only one worth anything (I really should learn my lesson). Cowen bucks the trend of explaining pointless things through equally pointless analysis and instead brings his qualitative economist savvy to bear on things like how you should consume culture and what restaurants you should visit. If you're thinking about reading a book in the genre, pick this one.

Summary: Bissinger profiles Tony LaRussa's St. Louis Cardinals during one weekend series against the Cubs.

Review: Not on the same level as Friday Night Lights, but still very good. He's able to produce a lot of broader insight about the sport and the players and uses the three-game structure to good effect. That being said, you probably won't like this unless you're a baseball fan.

Summary: A book about stuntmen in Hollywood.

Review: I was naturally curious about the day-to-day reality of a career stuntman, and how the job has changed over time. This book has some of that, but left me wanting more. There's lots of filler, and too much time spent profiling individual stuntmen at the expense of other things.

Summary: Two comedy writers compete in an around-the-world race without using airplanes.

Review: Absolutely hilarious. Read it.

Summary: A book about the natural and cultural history of the banana.

Review: The story of how the banana went from a novelty to a staple fruit is full of intrigue ranging from overthrown governments to diseases to robber barons to modern genetic science. Koeppel's approach is a little scattershot though, so the book drags at times. Whether I would recommend it really depends on how curious you are about bananas, the Industrial Revolution, and Central American history.

Summary: A book about driving habits at both the individual and social level.

Review: This book is interesting enough, but I couldn't help but think Vanderbilt missed the chance to do a lot better. He tends to lean on the standard science writing crutch of rattling off the results of lots of studies, and he also fails to tie together the different threads he presents. For example, he spends a good portion of the book talking about traffic engineering for speed, and another good portion talking about traffic engineering for safety, but never really discusses tradeoffs between the two or unifies them under one analysis.

Summary: A wide-ranging look at Mexico City in the 21st century.

Review: Lida's prose can be awkward, and some of the chapters should have been cut, but his subject is interesting enough to shine through. If you're curious about the city, and you should be, this is worth a read.

Summary: Petroski, a civil engineering professor, talks about engineering failures and the impact they have on engineering progress and public attitudes.

Review: Surprisingly interesting, despite fairly dry prose. This is something I didn't know I cared about until Petroski convinced me.

Summary: A biologist looks at the relationship between human evolution and modern beliefs.

Review: This book is excruciatingly dry and repetitive. He makes a one paragraph point and then spends 30 more pages restating it and supplying bland anecdotal evidence. I'll summarize the whole book for you: humans are the only animal that understands the concept of causation, and we've gotten a little carried away with it and like explanations for everything, and we end up with superstitions and religions and that sort of thing. Now you don't have to read it.

Summary: A first-hand account of the invasion of Iraq from a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with the Marines' 1st Recon Battalion.

Review: This book is impressively restrained in its politics. Rather than focusing on the right or wrong of the invasion, the focus is squarely on the Marines he accompanies. He takes you inside the camps and the convoys and shows you what the soldiers go through with sharp, funny prose and a great eye for detail. Read this book.

Summary: Angier, a New York Times science columnist, guides a tour through all (or at least most) of the sciences.

Review: This book starts out strong but peters out quickly, and Angiers has a need to quip when there's no quip to be had. By the halfway point, any joy is gone and it has become a slog. Read A Short History of Nearly Everything instead.

Summary: A biography of Poppa Neutrino, a man who has sailed a raft made of garbage across the Atlantic and invented a new football offense, among other things.

Review: The story of Neutrino's life is full of adventure and eccentricity, but throughout the book, it feels like Wilkinson is grasping for a larger theme and failing to find one. At the end of this book, I don't feel like I learned anything new about Neutrino as a person, or what his experience means for anything else. I don't necessarily blame Wilkinson for that, because his subject is particularly inscrutable, but it left me underwhelmed.

Summary: Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Wall Street Journal editor, writes a how-to book for writing narrative nonfiction.

Review: This book is a great insight into Stewart's creative process and a nuts-and-bolts look at how you turn a set of facts into a real story with characters, an arc, and dramatic tension. If you are curious about how great nonfiction writers write, check this out.

Summary: Bryson does Australia.

Review: A very earnest and funny exploration of a very strange place. This book will make you want to go to Australia and retrace his steps.

Summary: The autobiography of an internet millionaire who teamed up with a friend to buy the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas.

Review: I thought an account of what it's like to suddenly get rich and own a casino would be interesting. I was wrong.

Summary: A year in the life of a championship high school chess team.

Review: Reasonably entertaining, and it will teach you a lot about chess, but nothing special.

Summary: P.J. O'Rourke explains how the federal government works with his characteristic skepticism and wit.

Review: This book was published in 1991, but it doesn't seem dated at all. Highly recommended if you want to hear what one of America's best, smartest humorists has to say about why the government can't seem to get anything right.

Summary: Anthony Bourdain's memoir about becoming a chef and navigating the New York restaurant business.

Review: My only real problem with this book is that Bourdain tends to generalize from his own experience. He thinks he's talking about all restaurants when he's really only talking about one small upscale segment, and he tends to assume all chefs are like him. Aside from that, though, it's a fun, engaging memoir.

Summary: The book that spawned the movie and TV series. Bissinger spends a year in Odessa, Texas in the late 1980's chronicling the high school football team and the town that surrounds it.

Review: An outstanding book, and one that's only tangentially about football. The football team is really just a foil to discuss small town America, economic transition, race relations, and teen angst. A great piece of journalism.

Summary: A Harvard PhD candidate in sociology spent a year as a beat cop in inner city Baltimore and wrote a book about it.

Review: The storytelling in this book is very lacking - it reads more like a sociology paper. That being said, it's full of real insights into the priorities of modern law enforcement and the dynamic between cops and criminals. If you're curious about those things, check it out.

Summary: Ken Jennings explores the history of trivia and looks inside some of its many subcultures, from college quiz bowl to game shows to pub quiz nights.

Review: Jennings surprises as a very sharp, funny narrator for this exploration. This book is equal parts autobiography, history lesson, and trivia almanac. But if you're looking for a behind-the-scenes tale of his Jeopardy! experience, read Prisoner of Trebekistan instead.

Summary: A Washington Post reporter covers life in the Green Zone in the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Review: I can't really speak to whether this book is evenhanded, but it's a pretty disturbing picture of the chaos and mismanagement in the critical months following the Iraq War. I think what I ultimately took away from the book is that all the talk of war profiteering and backroom deals and hidden agendas was overblown; that it was sheer ignorance, more than malice or greed, that led us to screw things up so badly.

Summary: A book about the notoriously brutal qualifying tournament for the PGA Tour.

Review: This book is surprisingly entertaining, although a little scattered. The constant barrage of stories about tragic collapses and miracle comebacks is draining. If you have any interest in professional golf, this is worth reading, but otherwise don't even think about it.

Summary: Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover as a working class American to see how the other half lives.

Review: This book is mildly famous and has garnered a lot of praise as a brutally honest look at the American working poor. I found the whole thing crass and disingenuous. Ehrenreich barely spends a few weeks in each of her jobs and cheats on her original rules at various opportunities. She doesn't really live like the working poor at all - she's just at blue-collar fantasy camp. The equivalence she implies between her experience and the real thing is a tremendous disservice to the real working class.

Summary: A year in the life of the Baltimore Police homicide unit, and the book that gave rise to the TV show of similar name and, indirectly, The Wire.

Review: This book blew me away with its breadth, storytelling, and Simon's ability to turn all the homicide officers into fully three-dimensional characters. This book is not really about policework, it's about the people who do it and the people they go up against. Some chapters in this book read like a great mystery novel, while others read like long magazine profiles of career police officers. Read this book.

Summary: Steve Martin's memoirs about his childhood and comedy career.

Review: I would read a Steve Martin book about sea snails, so this was an easy sell. Don't read this if you're looking for humor, but if you want a great memoir, Martin displays uncommon insight into his own past and into comedy in general. Recommended.

Summary: A sociology graduate student spends several years hanging out with the leader of a drug gang in Chicago public housing during the late 1980's.

Review: This book should have been a lot better, but Venkatesh is not as good a writer as he is a field researcher. He can't seem to get the story off the ground and draw the reader in. Don't bother with this one.

Summary: A book about risk and our inability to deal with uncertainty and extreme events.

Review: Taleb wants to convince you that our thinking about risk is useless because history is driven by huge, unpredictable events that we systematically underestimate. He convinced me fine, and the book is peppered with occasionally strong insights, but it also has lots of strange digressions and abstract analogies that overcomplicate the basic central thesis.

Summary: Michael Oher, who comes from a broken home in inner city Memphis and can barely read, gets adopted by a rich white family and sent to a mostly-white private school. Did I mention that he's 6' 5", 325 pounds, freakishly athletic, and almost immediately becomes one of the best high school football players in the country?

Review: As usual, Michael Lewis takes something I didn't know I cared about and makes it read like great literature. Whether or not you care about high school football, urban poverty, trends in NFL strategy, or race in the American South, this is a great, well-told story and worth the read.

Summary: Bill Clinton's autobiography.

Review: I think this book took me longer to read than the entire Harry Potter series. It's just that long and just that dense. I enjoyed it, but I also happen to be a big Bill Clinton fan and a bit of a policy nerd. And I have to admit that by the end it was starting to feel like homework. I came away with two realizations: Bill Clinton is even smarter than I thought, and even more of a megalomaniac than I thought.

Summary: Thomas Friedman tries to explain globalization.

Review: Friedman really puts his ill-conceived analogy skills to the test in this astoundingly uninformative book. It's a mish-mash of wild speculation, obvious truths, and irrelevant anecdotes. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper since 1999 already knows everything this book has to offer.

Summary: A novel about two friends who inherit money from another friend who dies young, and then take off on an impulsive trip through Africa and Europe trying to give it away.

Review: I loved the premise, and the book has its bright spots, but I don't really see what all the Dave Eggers fuss is about.

Summary: The sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy.

Review: Extremely disappointing. Not in the same league as Hitchhiker's Guide by any stretch.

Summary: A very famous vaguely sci-fi novel about World War II, particularly the firebombing of Dresden, that was apparently assigned reading in every high school except for mine.

Review: I have to say I don't see what the big deal is. The book wasn't bad, but I didn't find it especially poignant or well-written either. I thought it was completely forgettable.

Summary: A whodunit about a murdered dog told from the point of view of an autistic child.

Review: This book manages to walk a fine line, using the conceit of an autistic narrator effectively without letting it overshadow everything else. The short length of the book helps, as I felt like the premise was starting to wear thin by the end. It's an interesting and enjoyable enough read, although I think the unintended true moral of it is that being autistic sucks. A lot.

Summary: A book about the cognitive effect of popular culture in which Johnson argues that pop culture has become more stimulating and complicated over time, and makes us smarter.

Review: The premise of this book is certainly appealing to me as a way to retroactively justify all those video games I played. But this is a perfect example of a 30-page term paper disguised as a 200-page book. The main thesis is easy enough to go along with, but it gets beaten to death and beyond, and he doesn't provide any really profound evidence to justify all the extra pages. Not worth reading.

Summary: You know.

Review: I gave in and decided I had to see what all the fuss was about. I enjoyed all the books, but the pacing is a little off. The earlier books are more obviously children's books, and then, as the broader appeal of the series became clear, she started to write for a more adult audience and both the plotlines and prose become more convoluted. If for some odd reason you haven't read these yet, I'd recommend them, if only for the sake of cultural literacy.

Summary: The classic book about the step-by-step uncovering of the Watergate scandal.

Review: As someone who knows only the basic parameters and cultural memory of Watergate, this book was hard to follow at first. Woodward and Bernstein freely throw around references to specific people, events, and organizations that have no meaning to me. Eventually, though, it all comes together, and this book reads like a great murder mystery even though you know the ending.

Summary: Michael Lewis profiles Jim Clark, the fiercely strange and brilliant founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

Review: This book is about Clark, but it isn't. This is Michael Lewis doing for Silicon Valley and the tech bubble what he did for 1980's Wall Street in Liar's Poker. It's a book about mania and obsession and a strange subculture of American business. The fact that Clark is a fascinating individual is just a bonus.

Summary: A sci fi novel about war, militarism, and leadership, among other things.

Review: Everyone told me I had to read this. I finally did, and it was very good, although not exactly "nag me about it for 10 years" good.

Summary: The classic sci fi comedy novel.

Review: Its fame is well-deserved. Read it if you haven't.

Summary: The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about comic book writers in mid-20th century New York.

Review: To call this book ambitious would be an understatement, and I probably only absorbed a fraction of its different layers. It's worth reading for the sense of place alone. Chabon is a master of description who gives an unbelievably vivid sense of settings ranging from the Prague ghetto to postwar Manhattan to Antarctica.

Summary: Steven Levitt is an unconventional, unorthodox, loose cannon economist who plays by his own rules. Some might call him a renegade. This ain't your daddy's economist! Did I mention that he's also a rogue?

Review: I assumed I didn't need to read this book because all the people who read the book and then couldn't shut up about it had already given away the interesting parts. I was right.

Summary: The history of British English.

Review: Disappointingly dry and disorganized for Bryson. Don't bother.

Summary: Bryson covers the history of American English.

Review: This book is full of interesting information about the development of the American accent and lexicon, but reads more like a reference book than any kind of narrative. Aside from a loosely chronological structure, it's just a firehose of fun tidbits that Bryson found during his research. Probably best to read it in small increments.

Summary: A story about the rise and fall of Wall Street as told through the autobiography of a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers.

Review: It's easy to see why this book launched Lewis's career into the stratosphere. His observational powers are keen, and he shows a knack for telling big stories through little things. My only complaint is that I hoped to learn more about the financial system itself, but this book focuses on issues of culture and human folly without much discussion of the actual financial instruments and interactions.

Summary: Spoiler Alert: Jack Bauer saves the world.

Review: Sam got me this book as a joke, so I read it to spite him.

Summary: A book about the fashionable worries of modern humanity, like over-population and environmental destruction, told through O'Rourke's travels in the worst example of each (the Amazon rainforest, Bosnia, etc.).

Review: Although I applaud anyone who maintains a chapter-long analogy between Fremont, CA and Bangladesh, this book feels overreaching, in terms of both its scope and its contrarianism. It's overly long, and sometimes O'Rourke sounds like he has run out of steam and has resorted to playing the character of himself. Like Peace Kills, I preferred the first chapter, a summary of his general sentiments. I have to conclude that O'Rourke works best when he's covering everything that's wrong with the human race in the course of a few pages, instead of trying to deconstruct it piecewise.

Summary: Pinker explains the computational theory of the mind and the evolutionary underpinnings of certain human behaviors.

Review: This book is difficult to digest, and you have to read with unusual focus (there's no filler here), but Pinker is able to write just accessibly enough that you can really appreciate what he's saying. If you're curious about this sort of thing, this book is a great place to start. I can also pretty much guarantee that you won't find a book with more instances of the word "cuckold."

Summary: Essentially a compilation of O'Rourke's dispatches from war zones such as Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq.

Review: O'Rourke offers his typically acid take on the world's various modern wars, but what's surprising is how sober his tone is at times. He proves here that he is not a gleeful humorist, but rather someone who is deeply troubled by human folly and who uses humor as a way of dealing with his outrage. What I loved most about this book was the first chapter, titled "Why Americans Hate Foreign Policy" - O'Rourke's game attempt to tie it all together with a whirlwind tour of the vagaries of 20th century war and diplomacy.

Summary: John Hodgman acts as a sort of lit-nerd Willy Wonka fabulist and writes a lot of pages about things of various kinds.

Review: This book is even harder to review than it is to summarize. I can't even really call it a book, because you wouldn't read it the way you read any other book. Is it funny? I guess. Is it overwrought? Probably. Are there some things in the book, like a list of 700 made-up hobo names, that prove Hodgman to be not just a genius, but my favorite kind of genius? Absolutely.

Summary: A book about how people handle life-threatening situations and what separates the ones who live from the ones who die.

Review: Gonzales looks at cases of plane crashes, lost hikers, and that sort of thing to try to figure out what makes the survivors special. I have a healthy curiosity about this subject but found this book pretty useless. It's a lot of haphazard speculation and Gonzales never really reaches any sort of unifying theory about the subject. All I really learned from this book is that fighter pilots are even more bad-ass than I had assumed.

Summary: Before Friedman took a job as America's weird uncle who has a new hare-brained rant every time you see him, he was actually a real reporter with real expertise. Here he writes about his days as a New York Times reporter in Beirut and Jerusalem during the 1980's.

Review: I am woefully ignorant of most of the conflicts in the Middle East, and even though the information in this book is pretty dated, it offers a useful window into the dynamics in Lebanon and Israel. Friedman writes with restraint and insight, and has some truly great pieces of analysis, like the chapter on Israel and Jewish identity. Now if he could only stop indulging his analogy fetish. Which one is it, Tom? Is the Middle East like an ice cream cone, or is it like The Great Gatsby? Make up your mind!

Summary: A trashy political novel based not-so-loosely on the Clinton campaign.

Review: Not exactly great literature, and certainly not educational, but it's not a bad read.

Summary: Bill Bryson tries to walk the Appalachian Trail and, in so doing, get back in touch with America after spending much of his adult life in England.

Review: One of the review blurbs on the back of this book referred to the Appalachian Trail as "the last great American wilderness." I assume that person has never been to Alaska or Utah or the Sierra Nevadas or, for that matter, anywhere west of the Mississippi. But I digress. This book is a very fun read, and a classic Bryson mix of sarcasm, sincerity, and historical anecdotes about his subject (he spends quite a few pages detailing various Appalachian Trail deaths). In the end, the book is a kind of loving elegy for the Appalachian wilderness and an appreciation of the physical and emotional tonic nature can provide. Highly recommended.

Summary: A satirical novel about office life.

Review: Pretentious, half-baked, and not at all worth reading.

Summary: A collection of essays by the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Review: I wouldn't say I read this book so much as I plodded through it. The writing style and subject matter are both dense throughout, and especially tough for someone without much of a life sciences background. Not a book to take to the beach, but certainly educational if you're curious about the topic.

Summary: After Bryson's father dies, he returns home to Iowa and borrows the family stationwagon to retrace the road trips of his childhood.

Review: My favorite Bill Bryson book, in no small part because it's the most sincere and personal of all his books. He's still funny and sarcastic, but he shows a softer side too. This whole book reads like a love letter to the American wide open, and made me want to jump in a car and follow in his footsteps.

Summary: A Freakonomics ripoff that tries to explain the economics of everyday life.

Review: Don't read it.

Summary: Bryson wanders around Europe.

Review: On the plus side, Bryson does have some observational gems about the places he visits, and his powers of description made me want to visit places I didn't know I cared about, like Hammerfest, Norway. Overall, though, I was underwhelmed. Bryson seems unusually crabby throughout the book and is too prone to rants for it all to hold together.

Summary: Pollan analyzes the coevolution of the human world and the plant world through four case studies: the apple, the tulip, the potato, and marijuana.

Review: Pollan has a tendency towards purple prose and taking his own speculation too seriously, but once you get past that you'll find a unique approach and a compelling thesis. Read this if you're curious about how the histories of plants and people have shaped one another.

Summary: Another Freakonomics ripoff with economic explanations for everyday phenomena.

Review: Useless and awful. Don't read it.

Summary: A pop-sci take on all our cognitive hang-ups that prevent us from remembering or predicting what makes us happy.

Review: Not the most serious treatment of the subject, but Gilbert's evidence is compelling, and he keeps it simple enough that you can really appreciate his conclusions, chief among them that assessing a possible future by imagining it is just about the least accurate way to do it.

Summary: A book about performance, the pursuit of perfection, and the social and personal barriers to ideal medical care.

Review: Portions of this book are repurposed from Gawande's New Yorker articles, but even if you've read them, the book is utterly fascinating. Gawande uses well-chosen case studies like executions, the history of hand-washing, and combat medics to make his larger points about achievement in general and the modern medical profession in particular. The book is sweeping and bold in its aim, and I can't even articulate what it's really about. Just read it.

Summary: The Dalai Lama discusses the common ground and conflicts between science and spirituality.

Review: Not the most exciting read, but it's certainly refreshing to hear a spiritual leader speak with great respect and reverence for science, and to see it as an ally and extension of his faith rather than an enemy. If you want to read about some very big questions as approached by a very wise man, check this out.

Summary: Bob Harris, comedy writer and former many-time Jeopardy! champion, writes a book about his Jeopardy! experiences and many other things.

Review: This book is a little hard to categorize. It's sort of the author's amateur investigation into how his own minds works, coupled with lots of different chunks of autobiography. Regardless, what matters is that Harris has a great voice. The book is interesting, funny, educational, and surprisingly touching. Not bad for a book that's not really about anything.

Summary: Gladwell tackles the adaptive unconscious and snap judgments.

Review: This book is about three times as long as it should be. Gladwell latches onto each point and makes it over and over instead of moving on. If you can sort through the chaff, though, it's fairly interesting. Just don't expect an academic level of rigor. Plenty of conclusions are jumped to, and questionable assumptions made.

Summary: Dean Karnazes, otherwise known as the guy who once ran 350 miles in one stretch and 50 marathons in 50 days, writes about his experiences as an ultramarathon runner.

Review: Karnazes isn't the best writer, but the subject matter of the book is so cool that it's easy to look past the clumsy prose. It's effortless and fun to read along as he narrates all his superhuman feats.

Summary: The memoirs of Mike Greenberg, ESPN anchor and sports talk radio host.

Review: I can't remember why I ended up reading this book. It wasn't bad, but there was nothing memorable or fresh about it either. You should probably only buy it if you're in an airport bookstore and need something to read on the plane.

Summary: Another collection of essays from David Sedaris.

Review: Good, not great. Me Talk Pretty One Day is much better.

Summary: A look at how Americans create and eat their food, organized into three sections: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer.

Review: Pollan's agenda (monocultures are bad, mass-produced meat is bad, our subsidies are bad, fast food is bad, etc.) is clear throughout, but the book is also consistently interesting and full of things you didn't know before. Pollan is a great storyteller and his closing pitch, that you should develop a closer relationship with your most basic necessity, is powerfully made. This book will change the way you look at your food for at least a week, until you revert to all your old habits.

Summary: A.J. Jacobs tries to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

Review: This book is one of my favorites, which may say more about me than it does about the book. It obviously has its share of fun facts, but it's also full of very sincere, human moments. Jacobs does a beautiful job of capturing the joy of new knowledge and of tearing down the false dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. I absolutely love this book.

Summary: A book that covers two parallel histories: the natural history of our universe, planet, and species, and the history of scientific progress.

Review: Bryson is a great tour guide for a trip through the canon of science. Nobody can match Bryson's eye for the absurd, so he makes a great guide for a tour of everything science. This book is a favorite.

Summary: A collection of humorous essays about anything and everything.

Review: Hilarious, and difficult to put down. Highly recommended.