Tag: nonfiction

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#BookReview: Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis

This Book Has So Very Many Problems. Read It Anyway. First, let’s dispense with the fact that this is a fairly well documented book, clocking in at about 26% documentation… even if Karakatsanis’ sources are pretty clearly slanted one direction… which we’ll get into momentarily. No matter what else is said here, everyone considering reading this text should at least appreciate that Karakatsanis clearly shows his work. 🙂

Because of my own work and experiences within the anti-police-brutality spaces and indeed even the projects I was working with before giving them up in favor of book blogging, I bring a lot to this particular book that not everyone will have… which gives me a fairly unique perspective on it overall.

I can tell you that even as a former Libertarian Party official and activist, and thus someone who knew a lot of people of a *very* wide range of political persuasions… I’ve known *few* over the years who would be to the left of Karakatsanis. Indeed, your opinion of terms like “pregnant person” and “wage theft” is likely a good barometer of how often you’re going to want to defenestrate this particular text. “Wage theft” seemingly a phrase Karakatsanis is particularly fond of.

This noted, *from his perspective*, the narrative here is at least largely coherent, and even from such a far leftist perspective, he brings up a fair amount of solid points that every American *should* read and understand… even if you have to squeeze your nose so hard you’ll be afraid it will turn into a diamond as you do.

The problem, and the star deduction, comes from the simple fact that very nearly every single logical problem Karakatsanis decries in others… he also largely *employs* in building his “arguments” against them.

Hell, he even manages to fall into former Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington’s “perception of crime” problem – claiming over and over (and over and over and over and over…) that “statistics say” crime is down (which, as he points out, is *always true*… when you’re selective with your time ranges 😉 ) even as people report seeing ever more crime. As Richard Pryor famously said – “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”.

Indeed, part of the star deduction also comes from the pervasive “no true Scotsman” problem that runs rampant through this text. No matter how far left the politician, no matter how hard the most progressive activists pushed for a particular policy – especially in California and particularly the Bay Area – Karakatsanis *insists* that the policies were never actually progressive, that it was instead the bureaucrats and the media (“controlled” by the usual leftist scapegoats) – those he deems the “punishment bureaucracy” and that the *actual* leftist policy had never been implemented.

Still, despite the rampant problems and extremist politics, there really is quite a bit here about understanding how police and media collude and conspire to hide essential information from the rest of us, so you really do need to read this book.

Ultimately, I think there is a point Karakatsanis tries to make but utterly fails to, in his attempt to appear authoritative here:

Question. Everything.

Including this book.

And I’ll go so far as to say even this very review.

Read the book yourself. Write your own review of it – cuss me up one wall and down the other if you think I deserve it, if you think Karakatsanis is perfectly correct in all things and should never possibly be even looked askance at, much less questioned. Or maybe you’ll agree with me to some extent or another. *My* entire point here is to get you to read the book yourself and make up your own mind about it. I guarantee you you’re going to learn *something* you didn’t previously know along the way.

Recommended.

This review of Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis was originally written on March 16, 2025.

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#BookReview: Starbound by Ed Regis

Solid Look At Complexities Both Scientific And Ethical Regarding Interstellar Travel. This is exactly what the title says – a solid look at pretty well all aspects of the complexities of interstellar travel from both scientific and ethical directions, with discussions of the sheer distances involved, the various proposed types of habitation possibilities, propulsion technology, and seemingly every other conceivable facet of the topic at hand.

At 300 ish pages with just 11% or so of that being bibliography, the actual discussion is somewhat brief while still being comprehensive. Technical enough in both science and philosophy to underscore the key issues, yet informal enough to be easily followed along with by most readers. Indeed, the only real problem I had with the text was that 11% bibliography – it needed to be 50% ish larger, from what I’ve seen across my several years of reviewing advance review copies of nonfiction books, as I’ve done here.

Overall truly a fascinating book and a great primer for anyone even remotely interested in the complexities of actually achieving interstellar travel.

Very much recommended.

This review of Starbound by Ed Regis was originally written on March 1, 2025.

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#BookReview: Grocery by Michael Ruhlman

Memoir That Happens To Contain History. This book is less a history of the grocery store and absolutely less about the even then-current (nearly a decade ago as I write this review) grocery store practices and more about this one particular food writer’s experience in… Cleveland, of all places, home of Michael Symon, MTV and WWE’s Mike ‘The Miz’ Mizannin, and apparently this Michael… and his love of grocery stores. In particular, a local brand that while has expanded to Chicago, apparently hasn’t spread too far outside of the general Ohio region. And I get it, grocery stores in America are *highly* regional. Outside of supermarket chains like Walmart, Target, and Costco, there are few if any national grocery store chains here in the US – and Ruhlman certainly doesn’t go into any of the few (such as Kroger) that exist, instead harping incessantly about the aforementioned supermarkets and their impact on the industry.

Read as more memoir and personal shopping/ cooking / eating philosophical text, this is a clear love story for the grocery store and the author’s dad, which is quite awesome – to use Mizannin’s word – to read. That aspect worked quite well, for what it was.

But the bibliography alone – a bare 11% of the text – shows just how little actual details of grocery store operations you’re going to get, and a very large chunk of what we do get comes from the author’s direct interviews with – and being taken to trade shows by – executives from the local grocery store chain that Ruhlman’s dad took him to all those years prior to the writing of this book. Which are insightful, so far as they go, but also pale in comparison to the more comprehensive look at the topic through multiple eyes that we see in say The Secret Life Of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr, which is absolutely recommended more than this particular text if you’re looking for a more comprehensive examination of the grocery store and its practices. It is this dearth of bibliography that is the reason for the star deduction here.

Still, organized as it is around the various sections of the grocery store, this book works well for what it actually is and how the author and editors chose to organize the information it does present, so I’m comfortable with the single star deduction overall.

Recommended.

This review of Grocery by Michael Ruhlman was originally written on March 1, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Big Necessity by Rose George

Interesting. Possibly Benefits From My Reading Audible Version. The day I was finishing reading this book, my own dad was being congratulated for reaching 15 years working at Cobb County, Ga’s RL Sutton Water Reclamation Facility. One of my brothers had also worked at a similar facility several years ago, before dad even started working there, so I’ve had a tangential knowledge of at least some of the issues raised in this book for even longer than the near 20 yrs since George first began writing it back in 2006.

And this tale is absolutely interesting. Perhaps a bit dry at times, and certainly with many references from earlier tales in the book the deeper you get into it, but as a global tale of how the world takes on the issue of “solid waste management”, as the US euphemism goes, this was truly a fascinating and globe trotting tale that perhaps spent a bit more time in the Indian subcontinent than it arguably should have and could maybe have used a foray into South America, but was still utterly fascinating in what it did cover nonetheless.

From the origins of sewers as we currently know them in London to the high tech roboticized toilets of Japan to the open defecation so prevalent even then in India as George was writing this book, this is a globe trotting adventure that takes us on a look at an area of life that we all do… and do our best not to think about.

Ultimately this was a very well written examination of its topic, and one that I would love to see yet another update to – or perhaps even a full on sequel of – now that we *are* approaching the 20 yr anniversary of George’s first research into the topic.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Big Necessity by Rose George was originally written on February 3, 2025.

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BookAnon.com’s Top 24 Nonfiction Books of 2024

I wound up reading 208 books this year, so culling those down to even 46 was a bit of a challenge. I really do encourage you to check out them all, even the ones I rated as 1* are ones that you may enjoy, should you disagree with my thoughts on the books at hand.

With that noted, here are the 24 nonfiction books that stuck out the most to me this year, listed in publication order. Note that all of these books released in 2024, as this year I decided to limit the lists to exclusively books both read and released in the year in question.
Continue reading “BookAnon.com’s Top 24 Nonfiction Books of 2024”

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#BookReview: The Gift Of Not Belonging by Rami Kaminski

“New” (Yet Also Obvious, At Least For This Reader) Research Marred By Lack Of Bibliography. As I noted in the title just now, really the only objective flaw in this text, at least the Advance Review Copy of it I read in December 2024 months before actual publication, is the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at an almost non-existent 2%. Given the particularly strong claims made within this text, that is a *shockingly* small amount of evidence to support Kaminsky’s claims, which while I acknowledge are based on his personal career as a therapist, still need actual documentation from outside sources in order to be more fully believed and accepted as objective reality.

This dearth of documentation was the cause of the star deduction, but otherwise this was an interesting, if obvious – at least to me – read.

Maybe it is due to being Autistic, maybe it is because I’ve always felt I lived my life between two worlds in virtually every possible arena, maybe it is any number of other factors, but Kaminsky’s arguments about an “otrovert” – a term he is coining here to mean someone predisposed to be focused outside of any group – felt rather obvious to me. In claiming that both extroverts and introverts ultimately want to be part of whatever community they find personally valuable, but otroverts exist more along the periphery and don’t feel those communal bonds as importantly… Kaminsky’s arguments made a lot of personal sense to me, as this is largely the way I’ve felt throughout my life. Indeed, in my later teen years I actually explicitly told those around me that I needed to learn what I believed for the simple reason that I believed it to be true – not because those of my community or any other community decreed it to be true, but because I had done my own research and reached my own conclusions. At the time I believed this was something every adult should do – though as I’ve grown over the near three decades since, I’ve realized that few ever truly do. Instead, most ultimately subscribe to some minute variation of the beliefs of those around them or those they have some strong online or otherwise physically distant relationship with. Which again, makes Kaminsky’s arguments ring true to my own personal observations.

But while my personal observations may flavor and direct my own personal beliefs and, through communication, can help influence the beliefs of others, I hesitate to claim my observations as true *conclusions* of objective reality and instead try to always point out that they are simply my own views. I’m just the blind mouse reporting my own observations as I feel around my own little section of the elephant, and my own direct observations could in fact be wrong in the more general and objective sense.

Which is why I *really* wanted to see a LOT more documentation here, because Kaminsky’s points *do* ring true to me – but without far more documentation from far more sources, it is truly hard to know if this is just a viewpoint Kaminsky and I largely share or if there truly is this third personality type out there, and that societal understanding of this third personality type could prove beneficial in the long run *if it is shown to objectively exist*.

Read this book. Kaminsky does a great job of laying out his arguments in a largely conversational, easy to follow manner, using a lot of personal and (non identifiable) patient anecdotes. Make your own call about whether you think Kaminsky is on to something or is a crank that shouldn’t be trusted. Write your own review of this book explaining which side you fall on and why. And hell, maybe together our reviews can provide a level of documentation that this text is utterly missing. 🙂

Very much recommended.

This review of The Gift Of Not Belonging by Rami Kaminski was originally written on December 28, 2024.

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#BookReview: Atomic Dreams by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Not As Much Of A Hit Piece As One Might Expect. If you see that a self-proclaimed “environmentalist” is writing a book about nuclear energy and specifically the Diablo Canyon Power Plant along Central California’s coast, many would likely assume this is going to be little more than a thinly veiled hit piece about how evil the plant is and how it should never have been extended.

And one would be WRONG in that assumption… mostly.

Tuhus-Dubrow instead actually does a reasonably balanced-ish (if still clearly tilted slightly (your mileage may vary on how “slightly”) towards the anti-nuclear position) approach of looking at the totality of everything about nuclear power in the 21st century, showing its evolutions from its earliest incarnations in the middle of the previous century when many thought nuclear power could usher in a Pre-War version of the world from Fallout (briefly seen in the opening sequence of Fallout 4, for example) into its most modern – and promising yet highly contested – forms, using the Diablo Canyon facility as the basis of much of the overall narrative.

Along the way she makes it a point to talk to many on both sides of the issue and give the requisite brief biographies of each of the key players to the narrative she is constructing, as well as discuss in varying detail the whole of the nuclear power saga – everything from its well known incidents to its lesser known incidents to how *exactly* spent nuclear fuel is stored (mostly, she never details the process involved at facilities such as South Carolina’s Savannah River Plant, where I’ve worked a couple of times in a couple of different software engineering roles) and most everything in between. She discusses the various pro- and anti- groups that have formed over the years and actively interviews several leaders on both sides.

But it is during these interviews in particular that Tuhus-Dubrow develops a new term she clearly means and uses as a pejorative throughout much of the text, specifically to describe many – if not all – on the pro-nuclear energy side: “nuclearists”.

Still, even this wasn’t truly significant enough to necessitate the star deduction. Instead, that comes from the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 11% or so of the Advance Review Copy of the book I read nearly four months before publication.

Ultimately, no matter your position on nuclear energy and even if you, like I, have actively worked in the field for any length of time, you’re going to learn something from reading this book. So give it a read, and make sure to write your own review about your own experience with it. And then go read the fictional Viral Apocalypse series by Michael McBride, showing one way Diablo Canyon could actually someday help cause the Apocalypse. 😉

Very much recommended.

This review of Atomic Dreams by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow was originally written on December 28, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Great River by Boyce Upholdt

Nothing Technically Wrong – Yet Your Mileage Will Absolutely Vary. This is one of those books where there is nothing technically wrong – even the bibliography clocks in at a healthy 30% or so – and yet with the way Upholdt chooses to write this book… eh, a lot of people are going to have a lot of problems with it.

The book does a decent enough job of going through (at a very high level, mostly) the breadth of the history of the Mississippi, particularly as it relates to human interaction with the river, from the earliest of “Native American” (themselves recent immigrants, at this point in history) all the way forward into 2020s era issues. But make no mistake, if you’re looking for a more geography-based examination of the river… this really ain’t that. Instead, this is far more of an engineering look at the engineering challenges of living amidst the river and shaping it – as much as possible – to human needs of the given era… no matter how ill-advised or not quite thought through or understood those efforts to shape it may have been in any given era.

One large point of contention here, for many, is the “less than straight” narrative flow, as Upholdt may be talking about 19th century efforts (or even 2020s efforts) and suddenly be doing a deep dive into ancient efforts either using an earlier tech or perhaps in the same area of the river. Similarly, we may be in New Orleans and suddenly jump to Chicago or St Louis or vice versa. These jumps worked reasonably enough for my own mind, but I also fully admit my own (Autistic) mind is very different than many, and not everyone will be able to follow such jumps with such ease.

I think, for me, the largest point of contention for my own personal tastes was Upholdt’s prevalent and pervasive denigration of anything good about Western and/ or white efforts within the River, getting quite preachy at times about how other societies’ efforts were “better” in some way or another according to his own tastes. No, I’m not defending in any way actual evil and vile actions that anyone of any race did along the Mississippi – humans are idiots in the best of times, and across all of humanity across all of time, there will always be people behaving nobly and people behaving abhorrently no matter their demographics. My issue with Upholdt’s commentary is simply that he routinely excuses the bad in every other group while highlighting the bad in Western/ white people and ideas.

But maybe my reading of the text was off and you don’t see any of that. Maybe my reading was spot on and you see it – but agree with Upholdt’s views on the topics at hand. As I said in the beginning, your mileage is absolutely going to vary on this book.

If you’re interested in the history of human engineering as it relates to the Mississippi River, you’re ultimately going to find this book at least somewhat enjoyable no matter your particular beliefs about any given topic, though there may indeed be sections where nearly anyone will also want to rapidly defenestrate it at the closest available opportunity. Read the book for yourself, decide for yourself what you think of it, and write up your own review of it. Feel free to call me out in your review if you truly think I deserve it. Just read the book for yourself if you think it is something you might be interested in and write your own review when you finish it. (Or even if you DNF it, write your own review noting where and why in the text you decided to DNF.)

Recommended.

This review of The Great River by Boyce Upholdt was originally written on December 28, 2024.

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#BookReview: Unforgiving Places by Jens Ludwig

Wherein Academia Catches Up To Eminem And Dr. Dre. First up, I gotta give Ludwig credit here, the text is 41% bibliography, which is truly remarkable – on the higher end of any book I’ve ever read. So, truly, kudos. No matter what those sources may say, the fact that they were so prevalent throughout the text is a good thing where I come from – at worst, it is crystal clear the information being used to present the narrative.

And before we get into the meat of the review, I do need to note that Ludwig’s reliance on the terms “System 1” and “System 2”, while perhaps academically accurate… also makes his arguments less clear and concise, as one has to constantly remember what “System 1” and “System 2” mean. So for this review, I’m going to do what Ludwig should have done and refer to them as “Automatic” and “Thinking”.

Basically, Ludwig’s entire point is that gun violence is not a question of “bad people” – as he claims the GOP likes to proclaim (in a fair amount of straw man, but perhaps with some valid enough straws) or of “bad environments” – as he claims the Democrats like to proclaim (in a similar amount of straw man/ straws), but rather *bad decision making*. Ummm…. duh, doc. From there, Ludwig’s entire premise centralizes on disrupting the Automatic action and forcing the person about to commit gun violence – be it murder or suicide – to *think* about what they’re about to do and whether they really want to do it.

So this entire 352 page book that clocks in at 41% documentation is essentially a long way of saying exactly what Eminem and Dr. Dre said in Guilty Conscience over 20 years ago.

Ludwig does in fact lay out the arguments in a very systematic, academic manner. Though he *does* rely *way* too much on Chicago, the *very* place most Americans think of as having the *worst* problem with gun violence in the entire country (and as Ludwig himself admits in the text, having perhaps only the second worst gang problem in the country, IF it is behind LA’s gang problem in any given year). But given that at least one recurring example used in the narrative is the doc walking his own dog… maybe there are reasons Ludwig didn’t look too much further afield.

But seriously, read the book. Maybe it will help crystallize in your own mind exactly what Ludwig does throughout the text: the arguments and policies of the last century clearly aren’t really moving the needle on the issue, so perhaps it is time for new ways of thinking. Of finding ways that disrupt the Automatic system and instead force individuals into the Thinking mode for even 10 minutes (or up to 3 hrs or so, in the case of suicide attempts, apparently).

Maybe if enough politicians read the book, maybe if Barack Obama or Bill Gates put it on their 2025 reading lists, maybe more people will consider these thoughts, and maybe things might actually get better.

Maybe if we’d listened to Eminem and Dre 20 yrs ago, we might have already been there.

Very much recommended.

This review of Unforgiving Places by Jens Ludwig was originally written on December 22, 2024.

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#BookReview: Fewer Rules, Better People by Barry Lam

The Practical Case For A More ‘Libertarian’ Ethic In All Walks Of Life. First off, let’s acknowledge that the Libertarian Party in the US is a joke of its former self that has squandered in these last few years all the hard-won gains it had achieved in its first 40 years – including the first so-called “third” Party candidate with over a million votes in any US election *ever* (John Monds, Governor of Georgia, 2010, followed by the LP’s Presidential nominee, Gary Johnson, in 2012 and again in 2016).

But seriously, forget about the LP and every instance you’ve ever heard of “libertarianism” in the media, particularly over the last 15 yrs or so.

What Lam does here, instead, is build a far more practical case for largely the same ideals. No, he never specifies “remove this government agency” or “that mandate is unconstitutional” or some such, his arguments are far more practical and every day – why must a mandate exist to buy coffee from a coffeeshop that doesn’t even open (at least on certain days) until 10am exist? Why shouldn’t I be able to buy coffee for my 8a meeting from a different vendor who is open at that time? As but one example Lam actively cites.

Time after time after time, case after case after case, Lam builds his argument chiefly around the insanity of the proliferation of laws, mandates, and rules across the US in particular. Even mandates with lofty ideals often wind up *harming* those ideals in their specificity and implementation, according to Lam, in a common theme throughout this text.

While entirely a philosophical, if practical philosophy, text, the writing style is far from a Mill or a Thoreau – this is far more approachable and conversational, easy for basically anyone with the reading skills to actually read the text to follow through logically and understand Lam’s points.

No, the singular flaw I found here was dearth of its bibliography, clocking in at a paltry 9% in the Advance Review Copy of the book I read just a couple of months before publication. Had this had double (or even triple, if I’m being hopeful here :D) the documentation it does, it would be a truly flawlessly executed book that strongly and persuasively makes its case quite well indeed.

Overall a compelling book written in an easily approachable style, this is one of those books that anyone committed to “Liberty in our lifetime” (as the LP once proclaimed) should read, take to heart, and begin beating the drums for. It makes the case for its points truly better than most libertarians of any era have, including the oft-cited (in LP circles) Harry Browne.

Very much recommended.

This review of Fewer Rules, Better People by Barry Lam was originally written on December 12, 2024.