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More Comprehensive Than Some Yet Still Misses Key Elements. I read this book on my morning walks immediately following finishing Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar (about mandatory parking requirements in the US and featuring heavy discussions of some things and even sources that Gray discusses more briefly here), and I'll be following this book with Killed By A Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall. Clearly, I have a th [Continue Reading]

Quite Possibly Walker At His Absolute Best. I've been reading Walker's books for a few years now, and they've pretty consistently been rather amazing. Truly.

This one, even with its perhaps a touch disjointed start (though well within established norms of many different versions of multi-character tales such as this), is quite likely his best to date - which is saying much, given how powerful his earlier stories were as well.

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My grandmother died in April 2013. It was, to date, the worst death I’ve experienced - the last one among my grandparents, with my grandfather (her ex-husband) dying just weeks after my birth, my other grandfather dying when I was 20 yrs old (almost 20 yrs to the day after the first grandfather here!), my step grandfather (and effectively second grandfather, as far as I ever actually experienced a second grandfather in my life) dying that summer, and my other grandmother (the wife of said step grandfather for longer than I had been alive, even accounting for her death a few years after his) dying a few years later.

As we as a (rather large - she had had over half a dozen kids, most of whom had had at least three kids each) family were going through her things in the days after her death, we found a lot of pictures. Apparently, per the files where the above image came from, something around 2,000 pictures. Including pictures without any of us, particularly in her later years - happenings in her life that she had told some of us about, but we never directly saw. Except, it turned out, that she had pictures of some of it.

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(Thankfully) Not For "Second Screen" Readers. This is one of those books with a lot of moving parts, a lot of understatement... and a lot of terror, just below the surface. If you're not actively engaged with this text, you're going to miss quite a bit of what is going on here, because while there is in fact quite a bit right there on the surface, perhaps the *most* disturbing aspects - and the other aspects that make it all work in rather excellent fashion - are the things just "off" the text. Blatantly clear and obvious to anyone actively engaged with the text, but also rather easily missed for those engaged in other activities and simply "reading" this book while doing half a dozen other things, just because "everyone" else is.

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Myopic At Best Polemic. This is a book that starts with a personal preference premise - that cars are evil and parking is ruining urban cores - and proceeds to write a 200+ page book covering what could more rightly be a flyer.

It raises some interesting points here and there, enough for those willing to endure an hours long struggle session that is effectively laying your head on an anvil and allowing the blacksmith to hammer on your head repeatedly to learn the same maybe half dozen points over and over and over... and over and over and over... and over and over and over.

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Fun Mystery/ Romance Blend. This is a book that could take a bit of an adventurous reader, but for those readers who do enjoy it... you're *really* going to enjoy it. Yet again we have a romance where the couple such that once they're together, they - shock, gasp! - *actually enjoy being together*. Before marriage. So for those that have a problem with the last two words before this sentence... maybe not the book for you. Spice level is north of warm glass of milk but south of jalapeno, really.

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It Has Been A While Since I've Seen Someone Actively Praise Luddites. Until Now. Seriously, the title of this review pretty well sums up most of what you need to know about this book... that you could likely have figured out the gist of just from the title, subtitle, and description - at least as they exist roughly a month or so before publication, as I write this review.

Even from a - wildly - "left of center" (at least in US politics) approach, this book actually does a rather remarkable job of being a polemic without feeling like one. It is absolutely a polemic in that the entire purpose of this *really* extended essay is to specifically attack what Bullard calls "conveniences" but are more accurately "technology companies making decisions and becoming too popular to easily find another alternative". But it is also a polemic that openly questions even itself at times.

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Solid Introduction To Cultural Studies Marred By Dearth Of Bibliography. If you think that something "has" to be some way because of "biology"... Martens here is most lik [Continue Reading]

Academic (ie, Extremist Leftist) Slant Mars Needed Revelations. This is one of those books that with a more balanced approach could have been a clarion call about an issue that few (particularly those "in power" or among the more general, non-incarcerated, population) will ever really consider in depth or even really at all. Documentation is among the best I've seen in a while, clocking in at 38% of the overall text, while at least some is clearly cherry picked. Still, at least a version of data and evidence is there, and given the rather explosive claims at times within this text, the Sagan Standard is absolutely applicable and at least in volume clearly covered.

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Fun Spin On Time Loop Concept. Time loops have been done by a lot of storytellers in a lot of ways, but here Harbison presents a version of one I'd never seen before - a women's fiction tale set on the weekend of a funeral. I am intrigued.

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