Dave's Reviews

A spectacular return to the gritty, offline cyberpunk world of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson, this time with a floating city, and a nanobonded orca and polar bear. Beam fighters, scalers, crime syndicate bosses, noodle shop vendors and a defiantly gender neutral skate courier create a rich cast of characters that I’d love to meet again. - Dave 

This fascinating book starts out with trying to understand how people in other cultures can believe such crazy things. The author interviews people who had their penises snatched in Lagos, and doctors who treated victims in Hong Kong. But he also investigates some of our American maladies that we take for granted as hard science. That’s where it really gets interesting. - Dave

I’ve got a soft spot for stories about librarians fighting to save their libraries and this hits it for sure. One man builds a library to save centuries of Islamic manuscripts. A world famous Tuareg blues musician inspired by Al Qaeda may help to destroy them all. Can they be spirited away before the bonfire? - Dave

Rebecca Romney, rare-book specialist on Pawn Stars, serves up an always spicy—and sometimes scary—collection of stories about books, book people, and book making, including words of wisdom such as “everything’s worse with chlamydia” and “you know you’re involved in a snobby movement when printing Shakespeare is considered selling out.” Gutenberg, Mercator (of map-making fame), Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dickens all get amazing, and quite often appalling, chapters. - Dave

Reading The Silk Roads can be like standing in the middle of a planetarium and looking straight up while the universe spins around at high speed. This book will reorient you by placing connections between east and west back at the center. Covering, among other things, religion, trade, war, disease, and agriculture, Frankopan weaves an epic tale dizzying in its re-conception. - Dave

The most beautifully made book of quotes I’ve ever seen, especially for the gorgeous typography with never the same style twice. And it’s a great selection on topics dear to my heart, with some newer quotes that you probably haven’t heard before. I sit around reading it and yelling out quotes to my co-workers when I hit a favorite. Lots of fun. –Dave

An engrossing read about the origins and persistence of vigilantism from the Spanish settlement to post-Civil War United States. With lively portraits of innocents, villains, and vigilantes, as well gun battles and trackers, it's also a capsule history of California. It gets my vote for the next Pulitzer Prize for History! –Dave

Aaah, another Bacigalupi. The Windup Girl was one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read over the last decade, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting his next adult SF work. (His young adult stuff has also been fantastic.) Bacigalupi’s new one, The Water Knife, reminds me of early Gibson, but the playing field is the water-parched Southwest rather than the online world. Like The Windup Girl, it has a hard-hitting environmental theme.

McKinty lovers rejoice! Gun Street Girl, his fourth book in the Troubles Trilogy, is out and detective Sean Duffy is on the trail of disappeared missiles, suspicious American agents, and some decent tunes. Duffy has the fascinating perspective of a Catholic cop on an almost entirely Protestant police force in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. If you haven’t already read McKinty, rush in and get a copy of the first Sean Duffy novel, The Cold Cold Ground. My friend Larry blames me for introducing him and says “All I want to do now is sit around and read McKinty.”

T. E. Lawrence was a whirlwind of force in the mind-bendingly complex Middle East during World War I. Scott Anderson does a great job of describing the hallucinogenic jigsaw puzzle of diplomacy and war. Anderson’s Lawrence is a full and quirky human being; an adventurer and scholar from the start. Bonus: Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune is based on the life of Lawrence and this book makes a great companion read.