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Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. Highly enjoyable urban fantasy about a London copper turned apprentice magician, but still employed within the police force. Peter is biracial and the human avatars of the rivers of London are of Nigerian descent; he courts a brook and also a fellow copper, with minimal success in both cases but a lot of humor and cameraderie. He’s trying to apply scientific principles to magic at the same time as he’s trying to solve a wave of violent murders, and there’s just enough worldbuilding to make me wonder what happens next. Marred only by a few typos (which I hope were corrected in the final printing). Funniest: there is a big difference between “cat-shaped eyes” and eyes shaped like a cat's.
Karen Marie Moning, Bloodfever: Like the overwrought plot (fae invading! Our heroine is The One with superpowers who might be able to save the world, if she can only figure out what if any allies are trustworthy! She makes dangerous choices to save herself, with unknown consequences!); don’t like the overwrought writing, especially the descriptions of her clothes. She likes pink. She used to have long blonde hair which is now short and dark. I get it. To be fair, that repetitiveness diminished by the end of the book. Lots of mature content, from the consumption of sentient (but icky) beings to a strongly implied sexual assault (or at least extended torture).
Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Mark Tappan, Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes: Canvasses clothing, music, sports, entertainment, and other sources of messages that our boys get. Unlike girls, boys get the message that the world is made for them and that they are (or can be) powerful, but the emphasis is rarely on hard work, practice, and the benefits of learning to do something even if you don’t dominate the whole world. Thus, the authors argue, boys are deprived of any recognition of uncertainty; if they’re scared, they aren’t allowed to show it, or any other “soft” emotion—it’s all rage and occasionally tears of joy when the team wins. The only alternative to the hard, always-winning superhero is the slacker, who doesn’t care. This is especially destructive to boys’ ability to succeed in school. Their recommendations involve a lot of talking to your kids; I only wish I was confident that messages from parents would be enough to overcome all these other overwhelming archetypes.
Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment: Sadly overpromising title! This book is about how academics responsible for making fellowship grants think, and while this clearly has implications for broader issues it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Lamont documents differences by field in terms of how reviewers characterize excellence and the role of subjectivity—anthropologists are the most anxious about disciplinary issues, political scientists/economists least—and finds very little overt consideration of racial or socioeconomic diversity; diversity among fields and institutions tends to be much more important to reviewers. Theoretically rich, but not what I wanted to read.
Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Accessible and persuasive book about how government is necessary to make capitalism work, and how the antiregulatory/everyone-for-themselves ideology that dominated the past couple of decades destroyed a lot of lives (and economic value). Chang takes the position that capitalism is better than other regimes, but points out that there are lots of ways of having capitalism, and that the state is necessarily involved in the structure of the market—at a bare minimum, by controlling immigration, and also in many other ways. He argues that, like the availability of bankruptcy, social supports (education, job retraining, unemployment insurance) are ways of making people willing to take socially beneficial risks, and suggests that the minimal safeguards for American workers help explain why Americans are so much more protectionist than citizens of other advanced countries; if they lose their jobs because an industry is contracting, they have much more difficulty transitioning to something else than workers in many other nations. Other notable points: education isn’t the be-all and end-all; we aren’t living in an information economy, and making stuff is still the most important function of an economy; and capital needs to be slowed down so that long-term investments make sense. Quite readable, if much more of an overview than a detailed treatment of the various topics.
Karen Marie Moning, Bloodfever: Like the overwrought plot (fae invading! Our heroine is The One with superpowers who might be able to save the world, if she can only figure out what if any allies are trustworthy! She makes dangerous choices to save herself, with unknown consequences!); don’t like the overwrought writing, especially the descriptions of her clothes. She likes pink. She used to have long blonde hair which is now short and dark. I get it. To be fair, that repetitiveness diminished by the end of the book. Lots of mature content, from the consumption of sentient (but icky) beings to a strongly implied sexual assault (or at least extended torture).
Sharon Lamb, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Mark Tappan, Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes: Canvasses clothing, music, sports, entertainment, and other sources of messages that our boys get. Unlike girls, boys get the message that the world is made for them and that they are (or can be) powerful, but the emphasis is rarely on hard work, practice, and the benefits of learning to do something even if you don’t dominate the whole world. Thus, the authors argue, boys are deprived of any recognition of uncertainty; if they’re scared, they aren’t allowed to show it, or any other “soft” emotion—it’s all rage and occasionally tears of joy when the team wins. The only alternative to the hard, always-winning superhero is the slacker, who doesn’t care. This is especially destructive to boys’ ability to succeed in school. Their recommendations involve a lot of talking to your kids; I only wish I was confident that messages from parents would be enough to overcome all these other overwhelming archetypes.
Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment: Sadly overpromising title! This book is about how academics responsible for making fellowship grants think, and while this clearly has implications for broader issues it wasn’t what I was hoping for. Lamont documents differences by field in terms of how reviewers characterize excellence and the role of subjectivity—anthropologists are the most anxious about disciplinary issues, political scientists/economists least—and finds very little overt consideration of racial or socioeconomic diversity; diversity among fields and institutions tends to be much more important to reviewers. Theoretically rich, but not what I wanted to read.
Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Accessible and persuasive book about how government is necessary to make capitalism work, and how the antiregulatory/everyone-for-themselves ideology that dominated the past couple of decades destroyed a lot of lives (and economic value). Chang takes the position that capitalism is better than other regimes, but points out that there are lots of ways of having capitalism, and that the state is necessarily involved in the structure of the market—at a bare minimum, by controlling immigration, and also in many other ways. He argues that, like the availability of bankruptcy, social supports (education, job retraining, unemployment insurance) are ways of making people willing to take socially beneficial risks, and suggests that the minimal safeguards for American workers help explain why Americans are so much more protectionist than citizens of other advanced countries; if they lose their jobs because an industry is contracting, they have much more difficulty transitioning to something else than workers in many other nations. Other notable points: education isn’t the be-all and end-all; we aren’t living in an information economy, and making stuff is still the most important function of an economy; and capital needs to be slowed down so that long-term investments make sense. Quite readable, if much more of an overview than a detailed treatment of the various topics.
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And when I said that out loud, my girlfriend started laughing and jumping up and down, meaning that it is the most lolarious thing that I would want to know what they were. She elaborates: "I figure they don't tell you for a reason!" But really, she just likes to mock.
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