Tag: nonfiction

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#BookReview: I Told You So by Matt Kaplan

Interesting History That Can In Fact Comes Across As Extended Ad For Author’s Day Job. I was perusing the existing reviews on Goodreads as I sat down to write this review, as is my custom, when I saw a 2 star review mention that this book felt, to that reviewer, at least partially like an extended ad for the author’s day job as a science reporter for The Economist and actually agreed with that point in retrospect.

Written almost as much in a memoir style as even a popular science history type book – the author’s bread and butter for twenty years now both in articles for The Economist and in books on various topics over the years, if you didn’t know (see what I did there? 😉 )- this is actually the second book this month I read that dealt with a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweiss and his pioneering antiseptic work in the 19th century, with the other being The Great shadow by Susan Wise Bauer, about the history of sickness and healing more generally whereas Kaplan’s text here focuses more on how right Semelweiss was… and how much a price he paid for being the one man that was beginning to get at least something right in an era when The Establishment (to use a more modern phrase) was oh so very wrong.

Semmelweiss’ story is the binder of this narrative, but along the way we encounter a few others similarly situated, from the famous (Galileo, Lister (whom Listerine is named after, to give those who may not be familiar with the name an idea of why it may be significant), and Pasteur, among others) to the more bleeding edge and let’s say not-yet-as-globally-famous, even though this modern set has at least one Nobel Prize winner among it and one who was essential in the creation of the COVID 19 vaccine.

The history is well written – as should be expected with someone of Kaplan’s experience – and doesn’t shy away from relevant facts that may make the historical figures look not so great in modern eyes, yet the modern is, while still well written, perhaps a touch *too* personal, offering insights into Kaplan’s own training and direct interactions with some of the subjects he is profiling. This is where the more memoir aspects of the tale kick in, and again, these are still well written and engaging, they just don’t share the same psychological distance as is notable when Kaplan is writing of Semmelweiss and others.

Still, the only reason for the star deduction is, as long time readers of my reviews of nonfiction books can probably already guess, a lack of documentation, clocking in at just 12% of the overall text here, just shy of the 15% or so of even my more recent more relaxed expectations on this point after having read quite a few nonfiction Advance Review Copy books over these last eight or so years.

Overall though, the book is truly fascinating and brings to light quite a bit of obscure history of the last few hundred years, and does a great job of making the points Kaplan is trying to make quite clear without veering too deeply into preachiness. Most readers will likely learn quite a bit from reading it, and have a generally pleasant experience doing so.

Very much recommended.

This review of I Told You So by Matt Kaplan was originally written on January 30, 2026.

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#BookReview: Feed The People by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Food – Like Reading – Is Not Political, Despite Authors’ Claims. I came into this book expecting a more science/ tech look at why industrial food is good (it is, and the authors are correct on this) and how it can be made better… and instead got a book focused almost entirely on the politics of the food industry and why the authors think that the small food/ farm to table crowd ala Michael Pollan and others is wrong. While I tend to agree with the authors in outcome, their reasoning here was extremely elitist and pro-totalitarian-government-intervention, with nearly every recommendation they make ultimately coming down to “government should dictate either specific actions or at worst the range of choices that businesses and consumers will have available to them”.

Given that one of the authors works in NYC and the other in Europe, perhaps this is understandable cultural bias, and perhaps you, the reader of my review, will agree with their reasonings as well as their outcomes. But for myself, a former Libertarian Party official who tends to agree more with the writings of Ayn Rand and Lysander Spooner… yeah, there wasn’t much here I could actually endorse myself. 😉

Ultimately, it isn’t the specific direction they chose but the sheer fact that they considered these recommendations the only possible policies and did not even allow for the possibility of other possibilities that lost a star. I love finding texts that come from different perspectives, but I expect *any* nonfiction book to at least mention other potential views and why they are more easily dismissed in the views of the author(s), and this simply wasn’t done here – making the overall text have at minimum an appearance of elitism. Again, your mileage will absolutely vary there, and I know people personally who will five star this book as among the most important food books you will ever read and people who will wish they could give this same book zero stars as utter trash that should never be read by anyone *for exactly the same reasonings* that I’m ultimately winding up in the middle of the road there.

Oh yeah, kind of gave away that there was another star deduction coming there, right? This is one long time readers of my reviews will be quite familiar with in my reviews of nonfiction books – the bibliography simply wasn’t long enough, clocking in at just 10% of the overall text here. The applicability of the Sagan Standard (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) is perhaps debatable given the ultimate discussions of this book, but even without applying Sagan, I’ve maintained for years that in my vast reading of even Advance Review Copy nonfiction books over the years, a bare minimum – by my later expanded standards – of roughly 15% documentation is needed to get this star, and as noted, that is actually expanded , as for many years I required a bare minimum of 20%. So yeah, 10% simply isn’t going to cut it there.

Still, for all this, read this book. Seriously. You may want to defenestrate it because it openly embraces unions and calls for more of them. You may want to defenestrate it because it says openly and honestly that if we are going to provide meat for billions of people, industrialized animal farming is the only realistic way that is going to happen. But you should read it anyway, no matter your own political persuasions, because ultimately this *is* a pretty realistic book looking at exactly how we can feed the masses going forward, even if it is an extremely pro-government-mandate and anti-individual liberty view.

Oh, and I repeat the title, since the authors were so adamant in the opposing view: Food is **NOT** political.

Recommended.

This review of Feed The People by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg was originally written on January 29, 2026.

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#BookReview: Citizenship by Daisy Hernandez

Ironic Downfall. Seriously, how much more ironic can you get than a book about citizenship being felled by… *a lack of documentation*????

To be clear, there are *many* more issues with this book. The biggest being that it is marketed as a critical and intellectual examination of the concept of citizenship (which is intriguing and deserves to be written about)… and instead what we actually get is a racist memoir that openly proclaims that the entire concept of citizenship was created whole cloth in the US in the 19th century to keep the brown person down and give the evil white man a way to exclude brown people while claiming to be objective. Seriously.

Now, maybe that last bit is something you tend to agree with. Even there, you should be pissed off at this book because it doesn’t even begin to try to objectively make this case. Further, when you make an extraordinary claim such as what this book proposes, the Sagan Standard applies and extraordinary evidence is expected – yet there is next to no documentation, clocking in at just 8% of the Advance Review Copy that I’ve had for four months before finally reading it just weeks before publication.

All of this noted, it actually was rather intriguing as a personal memoir of one person’s thoughts and experiences on the subject at hand. So yes, *as a personal memoir*, this book works much better than as any form of objective intellectual endeavor, and from the memoir angle it really is a compelling read of one person’s thoughts.

But that’s not what this is being marketed as, at least at this stage. At this stage, it is being marketed as much as a scholarly work as memoir, and as a scholarly work this book utterly fails in every conceivable respect.

Still, read this book as a memoir. Please. Hernandez has a clear and rare voice, and her story needs to be heard. I just wish she had put as much effort into integrating it into an actual objective examination of the topic as she did in expressing how evil the white man is.

Recommended.

This review of Citizenship by Daisy Hernandez was originally written on January 23, 2026.

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#BookReview: Country Life In Georgia In The Days Of My Youth by Rebecca Latimer Felton

Fascinating Look Into A Bygone Era From A Truly Remarkable Woman. Rebecca Latimer Felton was born in 1935 in DeKalb County, GA. She died in Cartersville, Ga – my own hometown – in 1930, just 53 years before my own birth. Her grandparents witnessed the American Revolution. Mine were children when she died – one of them a small child when Felton became the first female US Senator – and, in the same moment, the last formerly slave owning US Senator – in 1922.

This book is both a memoir of her early years through the Civil War and just beyond and also a collection of several of her writings and speeches as she became politically active in the last decades of her life, becoming a leader in both (white) women’s suffrage and the temperance movement that eventually lead to Prohibition – and its repeal – in her final years.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind has become a legend in American lore of the antebellum and Civil War periods. Meanwhile, Felton’s *real* story of those same periods has largely been forgotten. Even in Cartersville, where a home still stood on her plantation land *this Millennium* (as an abandoned lot, according to my memory of living just a mile or so away) until it was destroyed by arsonists in 2001, Felton’s name appears on a couple of shopping centers and a couple of roads near where her plantation once was.

This story, *her* story, deserves to be read and understood far more than it currently is. Felton was absolutely a person of her time and era, and this book shows it. She does not hide that she owned slaves. She is quite clear that she believes the white race superior to the black – or any other. Yes, that even means that she uses a certain word beginning with “N” that is virtually *never* used by anyone other than the most hardcore avowed racists of the 2020s. Even with these views however, Felton makes great effort to explicitly state – and devote a decent section of this book to conclusively proving in her own way – that the Civil War was explicitly because rich Southerners wanted to defend slavery specifically. Though in one of the more prescient statements that many today should take heed of, she also explicitly states that at least the politicians of Georgia had wished – and genuinely believed – that they could peaceably secede from the Union without bloodshed.

*And yet*, Felton also speaks highly of the society the Cherokee Nation built. She shows herself, particularly in the speeches and writings that form the back end of the book, to be a strong and stirring leader in pushing for women’s rights – not just to vote, but to be free from spousal and societal abuse. Indeed, it is clear that one large reason she was so passionate in her views of temperance was due to how drunk men treated the women around them – reasons that some of my own grandparents would see play out in their own lives after both of my grandfathers served in WWII and both survived the meat grinder of the Battle of the Bulge only to both be there to directly see the concentration camps liberated by them and their fellow American soldiers.

I’m not going to bullshit y’all. Felton is truly a fascinating and complex woman, and by 2000s standards, particularly 2020s standards, yes, she can be quite problematic indeed.

*And yet*, by the standards of her own era, she was more progressive than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even Bernie Sanders are considered today.

Read this book. Learn about an era that so many today have so many strong and passionate views on *from someone who was actively there*. Even as someone who grew up separated by just a few decades in time and barely a mile in distance from Felton, who went to elementary school literally down the road from the last home Felton lived in, even *I* learned many things about this era that *I* had previously never known, and it opened even my own eyes in several ways. Thus, I have every confidence that anyone not both from Cartersville and at least as knowledgeable of its history as I am will absolutely learn a great deal here, even if this is admittedly a difficult read almost a century after Felton’s death.

Very much recommended.

Download this book from the Internet Archive here.

This review of Country Life In Georgia In The Days Of My Youth by Rebecca Latimer Felton was originally written on January 21, 2026.

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#BookReview: The Price Of Mercy by Emily Galvin Almanza

Leftist Language Will Annoy Some Readers. Read This Anyway. Straight up, Galvin Almanza is absolutely a product of her time – in this case, “her time” being 2010s Harvard and Stanford and then abolitionist activism. So the words she chooses – “latinx”, apologizing for being white, etc – are going to annoy at least some readers.

From my view (see postscript for a brief bio relevant to this discussion)… this book is right up there among the ones those new to the field should consider. Those in and around criminal justice will likely know most everything Galvin Almanza presents here – or at bare minimum have largely similar stories of people they did know more directly. Her writing style is engaging – far from the academic speak one might expect from a Stanford Law lecturer and much closer to the dynamism one would expect from a tenacious advocate of the accused during a trial. While this is far from a John Grisham or Randy Singer courtroom drama, Galvin Almanza’s overall style bends more in that direction than a desert dry academic treatise.

One weakness here was her framing of the “racist” origins of policing, but again, that’s the culture Galvin Almanza comes from. It is unclear at this time if she’s ever even heard of Radley Balko’s excellent history of policing The Rise Of The Warrior Cop, released between The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (who blurbed this book, in case you, the reader of my review, missed that) and the 2013 execution of Michael Brown. Balko has a much more even handed look at the rise of policing in the American tradition, tracing it back even beyond the first “Shire Reefs” in feudal England and up through 2010 or so (with a 2020s update I’ve yet to go back and read). Even here, however, Galvin Almanza’s incorrect history of policing comes across more as a cultural/ worldview thing than an attempt to mislead the reader – she appears to genuinely not know the actual history at hand and genuinely (and uncritically) believes the constant leftist refrain.

That particular weakness aside, however, this is a particularly well documented book, clocking in at about 28% documentation on even the Advance Review Copy edition of the text I’ve had for several weeks before finally reading roughly a month before release. It is quite clear that on most of her points, Galvin Almanza both knows exactly what she’s arguing and is more than willing to show you her work – which is always appreciated (and, yes, frankly expected) in any nonfiction work.

Ultimately Galvin Almanza’s proposals – because all books of this type must end with proposals in nearly as ironclad a genre rule as RWA/ RNA types try to insist that any romance novel end in a happily ever after – all come down to variations on “more funding” and for the most part are things most that are familiar with the field have already heard of before, but Galvin Almanza does put at least enough of her own specific vision in here that the text is still worth reading to see exactly what her own brand of reasoning comes out as.

Overall this was a strong book of its type, just not an overly novel one other than in Galvin Almanza’s own particular experiences.

Very much recommended.

Brief bio of me: Hi, I’m Jeff, and I used to work for a District Attorney for a bit as their office tech guy. Even got sworn in as a witness in one particular trial, in addition to helping my bosses with an “everyman” look at the case he had in a couple of cases. Even then, I was *also* a Libertarian Party official and an anti-police-brutality activist working with an org that has long went by the wayside (at least relative to what it was) and which particularly after Michael Brown’s execution in 2013 was rarely heard from again as more prominent orgs rose up. I even, at some of the very times Galvin Almanza was being recognized as one of the most promising young lawyers in America, had a database that virtually no one knew of, but which made me *the* world’s leading expert in mass shooting, school shooting, and killed by police events – at least in terms of the data I had and was actively both collecting and analyzing.

Which is a particularly long winded way of saying that I’ve been around the block more than a few times as it relates to the subject of this book. Frequently around it, rarely directly in it, but very much close enough to know much of what was happening… from most every side.

This review of The Price Of Mercy by Emily Galvin Almanza was originally written on January 19, 2026.

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#BookReview: The Great Shadow by Susan Wise Bauer

Interesting Take On The Subject With Writing Reminiscent of Rachel Held Evans. I suspect Bauer would have admired much about the late great Evans, even if they didn’t agree on every particular. Here, Bauer approaches the history of sickness the same way Evans, particularly in the last few books before her death, did various Biblical topics – with a fair amount of creativity to give examples of a particular point followed by reasonably well reasoned analysis based on the available authoritative texts – whether those be the Bible (and Torah) in Evans’ case or what we consider to be more “objective” science and histories for Bauer.

Bauer does a truly great job here with the scenarios she creates usually at the beginning of each chapter, showing both how a “modern” (21st century ish) approach to the next topic looks – usually in a way most current readers will readily identify with or at least have heard of – and a more historical perspective would look on that same topic, with “historical perspective” here ranging from pre-history through roughly the WWII period. With these, Bauer shows herself to have almost a novelist eye for storytelling, and a fairly good novelist eye for *compelling* storytelling.

The actual histories she presents here are fairly solid and mostly reasonably known or at minimum in line with things that are reasonably known, so I don’t necessarily feel the Sagan Standard applies for this text as it exists. Which allows the 15% documentation to suffice without a star deduction, even though it *is* around the lower bound of what I expect to see from a nonfiction text.

In Bauer’s message of trying to reach those skeptical of modern medicine – which should be most anyone who actually understands its history and where it actually currently is – she actually had one particular line that stuck out to me as particularly well said:

“If you’re going to try to convince people of something that is going to deprive them of something vital (freedom, agency, control, their livelihood), anything less than an ironclad case isn’t going to do the trick.”

While this line, if I remember correctly, was specifically about trying to get docs to adopt more stringent standards in line with more current thinking, it really does apply equally well to anyone seeking any change from any other person for any reason at all. Thus, it is both quite wise and quite well spoken – and gives you a pretty solid idea of what to expect from the overall tone of the book here to boot.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Great Shadow by Susan Wise Bauer was originally written on January 18, 2026.

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#BookReview: Smitten by Tom Bellamy

Weird Blend Of Neuroscience And Self-Help Lacks Critically Necessary Documentation. This book is fascinating in a lot of ways, and could genuinely help some people, but its critical flaw is also its biggest: showing up at just 12% documentation – at least in the Advance Review Copy edition I read over a month before publication (and which I’ve had for several weeks already before getting to it) when you’re proposing a novel diagnosis of neuroscience fails the Sagan Standard (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) pretty damn badly.

Now, for what the book actually covers… “weird” is actually putting it nicely. This is a novel blend of science and self help unlike any I’ve ever personally come across, and I read literally hundreds of books per year. (Admittedly across nearly all genres and not just in the neuroscience/ self-help spaces.)

Both the science and the self-help seem reasonable enough to a layman who simply reads a lot, though I’m nearly positive both actual neuroscientists and psychologists may have more choice words and harsher criticism there. But again, the severely lacking documentation, knowing this is such a novel concept… I mean, I only removed one star because that’s what I do for lack of documentation, but the case really could be made that the lack of documentation combined with the novel claims here are a much bigger problem than a single star deduction. But read the book for yourself and write your own review and let’s see what you think there.

Overall it is an interesting and very easy to read book (at least for those accustomed to reading popular neuroscience type books), I’m just not sure I would trust what it says any further than I could physically throw the book.

Recommended. But think critically about it.

This review of Smitten by Tom Bellamy was originally written on December 30, 2025.

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#BookReview: Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

If You See This Review, You Should Be Terrified. I’m a Xennial. I’ve grown up with computers. The Net first became a public thing when I was 10 yrs old, and within a decade I would complete a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I’ve known all along that privacy online was more theater than fact, no matter how careful you are – that if it has a computer chip, you’re safer to assume it is tracking you than not, and that someone you may not like will likely be able to access that data.

Even knowing this almost as long as I’ve known anything… Ferguson makes clear just how much worse it actually is, from a legal perspective. *Even in* the United States, where we “supposedly” have 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States rights limiting government searching of our data and how it can use the results of such a search.

While Ferguson doesn’t address at all how very eroded and damn near paper thin those Amendments have become over the last 250 yrs of jurisprudence, he makes it all too crystal clear that the words on the papers haven’t kept up with the actual technical capabilities, and because of this, many of the things that once kept your written words on paper safe or even your words to certain people safe no longer protect you in this digital era *at all*. Indeed, quite the opposite – many of the exceptions to those earlier forms that actively limited what government was allowed to do are instead now the rules that give government nearly unlimited abilities to search your data without even having to get a “warrant” rubber stamped.

Indeed, another of Ferguson’s large points throughout this text is just how little privacy you have *specifically* when a warrant is signed… and he even tosses a point or two in about the “qualifications” needed to be able to sign such a warrant. (There are basically none to be a Magistrate Judge in particular.)

While all of this is utterly terrifying – and Ferguson goes to great lengths to show that this *should* be terrifying no matter your own personal political bent -, Ferguson does actually offer paths forward at every level that could at least begin to alleviate many of the concerns he details. He even goes so far as to note which ones are likely more politically palatable within the current system and which ones would do more to actually alleviate privacy concerns… but which are also far larger hauls in the current political environment.

Overall this is absolutely a book every American should read, and indeed anyone globally who thinks of America as the “land of the free”. Ferguson shows here that this “freedom” is illusory at best, particularly in the current world environment.

Very much recommended.

This review of Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson was originally written on December 22, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Oldest Rocks On Earth by Simon Lamb

Part Geologic History. Part Memoir. All Intriguing Information. This is one of those books where, like at least one other early reviewer mentioned, it is nearly as much about the author as it is his subject. So for those looking for a book more solidly focused on geology or science, where the author rarely if ever interjects himself into the narrative… know up front that this isn’t that. At all.

Instead what we get is a book where the author has spent a lifetime researching something he is clearly passionate about, one where he has several personal theories he openly admits aren’t shared by all of those in his field, yet also one who has had some very interesting experiences along the way as he was doing his research. This narrative encompasses all of the above and more. We get a lot of deeply scientific detail of how the oldest rocks on Earth formed and how scientists find and study them. We get a lot of stories of the type of “and that is how I wound up being the personal taxi for an entire region when the regional bus failed one day” or “these are the people I was partying with at a remote campsite deep in the African wilderness”. We also get several instances of “these are my personal theories based on my own research and studying the field for a lifetime, but not everyone agrees with me”.

In other words, a fascinating look at a topic that some could consider quite dry indeed, but which Lamb brings to life with both his own life and his passion for the subject. Yes, there is perhaps too much here at times for anyone who knows anything less about this subject than Lamb himself does, but for the most part he really does explain even these concepts well enough that the reader can have at least a rough understanding of them – enough to generally follow along with Lamb’s narrative and story, if not enough to pass any kind of test about them.

No, the only real thing I could find to fault here is the dearth of a bibliography. Yes, I recognize that this tale is at least part memoir, but still, there is enough geology and objective nonfiction here that just 12% bibliography still seems lacking, even if much of the objective nonfiction is based on the author’s own research. But hey, maybe I’m being a touch harsh there. Read the book for yourself and write your own review of it and let the world know either way what you think on that point. 🙂

Overall a truly fascinating book that works as much as a travel memoir as it does as a geologic tale.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Oldest Rocks On Earth by Simon Lamb was originally written on December 18, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Most Awful Responsibility by Alex Wellerstein

Reasonably Well Documented Book Will Force You To Rethink All You Think You Know Of The Post-WWII Era. This is one of those rare history books that actively goes in to not just point out something most people missed about an era and/ or a person, but also goes to show the reader that a lot of what you thought you knew… may not have happened quite the way you think it did.

For example, one of the main points of the early part of the text: You think President Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was what most textbooks (at least in America) teach, at least lower than say upperclassman history majors at the collegiate level. Except…. Wellerstein shows here – repeatedly – that this wasn’t exactly how that went down. Indeed, Wellerstein uses first hand sources from a few different key people – including Truman himself, where possible – to show that not only was there not one single decision to drop the bombs or where, but that Truman himself likely understood neither the weapon nor the target profile. (Which, let’s face it, both humanizes him a bit more – something Wellerstein is *great* at in this text, for what that’s worth – and should give most of us at least a touch of hope given more recent Presidents and their mental abilities.)

Then, in the period after the bombings, Truman – and the world – realize what has been done… and Truman is personally absolutely horrified. This is where and when the real struggles begin, and the “rest of the story” (as Paul Harvey famously proclaimed for so long) begins. And y’all, this part reads almost like a DC spy thriller/ court drama. High ranking people across several different realms within the US government all seeking to have their vision of the future made manifest, with Truman – and his famous “buck stops here” mantra – the focal point and the one both making decisions and seeking to establish his own preferred path.

Now, with all this lesser known history and with the entire point of the book showing a side of Truman most often ignored by history and historians, some may argue that this necessistates application of the Sagan Standard -that these are extraordinary claims that thus require extraordinary evidence. From my reading here and my understanding of both this text and the relevant histories as I know them, I don’t think this is true. This is a bit of a bombshell, yes, but is also fits pretty squarely in with known histories, it simply illuminates lesser known corners of those histories more properly. Thus, for me, the roughly 20% bibliography here sufficiently establishes a reasonable amount of documentation, and the frequent citations of the diaries and memoirs of those directly involved show the depth of research Wellerstein was able to bring to the table here.

Overall a very well written text that will completely rewrite your understanding of the post-WWII period as it relates to the use and control of atomic weapons – which seems to be Wellerstein’s very point, meaning he executed that point to near perfection.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Most Awful Responsibility by Alex Wellerstein was originally written on December 14, 2025.