Dave's Reviews

Just prior to the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted —later the designer of Central Park—went on a tour of the South as a correspondent for the New York Times. Just prior to today’s civil war, Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, retraced Olmsted’s route from West Virginia to Texas and into Mexico. From plantations and a monster truck mudfest to a New Orleans gospel-rocking church, he documents how much has changed and what’s still strikingly the same. - Dave

You’ll want to read this one just for the extravagantly gothic yet entrancingly informative example sentences. This on the past participle: You won’t get far in those corrugated pantaloons, sire. And: Sylvia wantonly splits infinitives, often with unheard-of verbs. This beautiful book is so much fun that you’ll learn some grammar despite yourself. - Dave

Quite certainly the spiciest use of commas in an educational text. An example of commas between independent clauses: I won’t rise to the occasion, but I’ll slide over to it. Even more ambiguously suggestive: He told her he belonged to another, yet his pajamas clung to her tights. Also the probably immoral, yet proper, usage of semicolons, hyphens, apostrophes, and the dreaded ellipses. - Dave

Here is recounted a selection of the more notable sackings that Rome has endured: Gauls, Goths, More Goths, Normans, Spanish and Lutherans, French, Nazis. Kneale tells the story of the attack and the sack, but he mostly uses this as a framework to tell the history of Rome and describe its changing landscape and people. Also the origin story of deep fried artichokes. Love it. - Dave

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