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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Bonica has commented on (4) products
Family Furnishings Selected Stories 1995 2014
by
Alice Munro
Bonica
, August 25, 2015
A treasure of insight and life observation "That Alice Munro is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now," wrote Charles McGrath, who edited many of Monro's early stories at the New Yorker. A year after he wrote that, in October 2013, Monro won the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy declaring her "master of the contemporary short story." This collection includes 24 of her finest works from the years 1995 to 2014 and is a treasure of insight and life observation. The stories bring to mind other masters of the short form like Anton Chekhov and Katherine Anne Porter and offer the same sort of clean language, total lack of pretense, and wonderful blend of particularity and universality about the human experience. They take the everyday people and occurrences of life and make of them works of art to which we can all relate. One of the things I love about this collection is that it includes works that Monro has said are "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact," and "closer to the truth than usual." In "Dear Life," "Working for a Living," and "Home" we see the joys and pains of her own early years and her perspective as a writer. It's fascinating that a little Canadian girl raised on a failing fox and mink farm, writing so often about her own corner of the world, the small towns and flatlands of Ontario, grew up to become one of the world's great authors. Her stories are rich and dense, full of power. This is a collection to love and savor as a reader and study and learn from as a writer. It's unique because Monro has experienced what most of the other recognized 'great' writers of Western literature have not: bearing and raising children, being a working mother, getting divorced from a husband. She brings to the table a literary form, a part of the planet, and a point of view that have never before been so recognized and honored. Bravo!
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Galileos Middle Finger
by
Alice Dreger
Bonica
, August 25, 2015
On her Web page, Alice Dreger, the author of Galileo's Middle Finger, says her mission in the book was "to travel the country to ferret out the truth behind various controversies." With a PhD in the history and philosophy of science, she apparently feels qualified to judge a number of the most complicated disputes among leading experts in genetics, biology, medicine, neurology, psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines. As I was reading her smooth but often rather glib seeming prose, I couldn't help but wonder how, if entire communities of scholars on these varied subjects are divided, this one author could be in any way qualified to determine who's right and who's wrong. Her oft-repeated quip, "I'm not a doctor, but I sleep with one," really didn't do much to inspire my confidence. Nor did her opening words in Galileo's Middle Finger: "Soon enough I will get to the death threats, the sex changes, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the antilesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova, and of course Galileo's middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess." That sounds more like PEOPLE magazine than serious scientific inquiry, and Dreger's tone doesn't strike me as sufficiently respectful of or sensitive to her subjects, actual people who've suffered tremendously and even died in the incidents she writes about. It's like they're the hooks and she's the story, and that is unfortunately how much of this book plays out: All About Alice, more memoir with some petty payback than an unbiased account of science under activists' attack. Ironically, this highly slanted narrative is being marketed under the banners of Truth and Social Justice. Dreger writes of herself, "I'm constitutionally inclined to use evidence (especially historical and scientific evidence) to help create a more just present and future. I spend a lot of my energy pushing specific groups of people to be more evidence-based, particularly within controversies." But Dreger offers little to no evidence to support many of her key points. Her whole discussion of J. Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard's offbeat theories of transgenderism, for example, reads more like something their publicist would pen than the words of a journalist or scholar. She writes, "When Blanchard considered the historical and clinical literature and his own experience working as a psychologist with hundreds of adult men seeking sex reassignment, he realized that there are TWO basic types of male-to-female transsexuals, very different from each other in terms of their life histories and demographics. Blanchard also realized that these two types could be recognized primarily by their sexual orientation." This is like reporting how the flat-earthers or holocaust deniers or proponents of the refrigerator-mother model of autism REALIZED the truth of their own personal observations without providing one iota of authorial critical analysis. Dreger raises no questions or perspective and goes on for pages simply reporting what Bailey and Blanchard "point out," "note" and "explain," then later references them in the camp of "researchers determined to put truth before politics" as opposed to the purely politically motivated 'activists' who disagree. Nowhere does she suggest it is in fact the psychologists' poor science and unfounded assumptions to which so many object. Even more disturbing, Dreger fails to even mention any of the substantive evidence from brain scans, genetics studies, embryological development, autopsies, and other research by neurologists, geneticists, biologists and scientists at UCLA, Boston University Medical Center, The Netherlands Institute for Brain Research, King College London, and other centers around the world that transgenderism is a bio-neurological condition that develops in utero and is far more complicated and varied than psychologists' Bailey and Blanchard's simplistic personal theories suggest. Instead, Dregar writes of the prevailing neurobiological view, "Although there is little science to support it, this [brain-body mismatch idea] has become the most popular explanation of transgender, probably in part because it is the easiest one for uptight hetereosexuals to accept . . . . But Mike Bailey has never cared for simple, politically correct stories." No way is this objective or even truthful writing, and I find it extremely disturbing that what so often reads like a polemic is being touted as the `Truth.' The Bailey section devolves into a lot of "she said, he said" disputes, with the author right in the middle of them, and she ultimately publishes her `findings' about the `attacks' on Bailey, who is her colleague at Northwestern University, in a journal for which Bailey himself serves on the editorial board! Ethical? Evidence-based? Um . . . Hello, as Dreger herself might say in that catchy, `evidence-based' style of hers. If she's this inaccurate and unreliable in an area I've read a lot about, I'm not about to take her word in other areas where I know less but her style and tone reflect similar flaws. This is not a book I could ever recommend.
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Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
by
Neil Swidey
Bonica
, August 25, 2015
This is one of the most compelling and interesting nonfiction books I have read in years. It reminded me of Into Thin Air in the gripping way it brought the scenes and characters to life. It also educated me tremendously about environmental engineering and the incredible and often unacceptable risks to the workers who build the great tunnels, bridges and other construction projects of our world and the way governmental and private interests, safety and budget concerns, often collide. It's reminiscent of the costs of war and the way young lives and unquestioning risk takers are required to fuel the system. Meticulously researched and brilliantly presented, this is creative nonfiction at its best, both heart-rending and thought-provoking.
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Village Effect Why Face To Face Contact Makes Us Truly Human
by
Susan Pinker
Bonica
, August 25, 2015
I found this a really fascinating book. You can dip into it almost anywhere and learn something interesting or new. For example, I'd never heard that people who have more varied face-to-face relationships (instead of just fewer good but homogenous ones) catch fewer colds and have better odds of surviving heart attacks, strokes and cancer, or that happily married folks have lower blood pressure when they sleep. Unlike many popular science and psychology books, The Village Effect is very well written and full of not just the frequently cited studies but also less commonly discussed ones. The author goes into considerable depth on all the ways face-to-face contact benefits us, as well as some of the potential pitfalls, from our earliest bonding experiences through computer use at various ages, love and marriage, and when we are in trouble or fall ill. It's not a surprising or unfamiliar thesis, but Pinker writes about it from so many different angles and with such fine detail that it really made me think about my contacts and motivated me to be more active socially. Why not strike up conversations in the park, join a new group, get together with some old friends? I tried all of these and feel better for it. This is an inspiring and life-affirming.
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