Dave's Reviews

Heirs of the Founders is the perfect sequel to books like Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers and The Quartet. While none became president, Webster, who could make an opposing Supreme Court justice cry; Clay, the great compromiser; and Calhoun, chief apologist for slavery, were the giants of American politics and it was their compromises that held the union together and their clashes that sent it flying apart. They died with slavery unresolved and the Civil War looming on the horizon. By the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Traitor to His Class. - Dave

40 years before the internet became popular, an alternate digital universe was the genesis of dungeon games, Flight Simulator, Castle Wolfenstein, Freecell, Lotus Notes, chat rooms, email, the first online community, and Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2. The Plato System flourished nationally and then disappeared from our memory. This is the first book to tell its story. - Dave

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.