Tag: nonfiction

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#BookReview: It Starts With One by Jason Lipshutz

Solid Look At Linkin Park Pre 2024. Lipshutz does a truly excellent job of detailing the life and times of Linkin Park as a band, from most of their days in California toiling as Zero (giving rise to the 2024 effort “From Zero”… 😉 ) and Chester’s days in Phoenix pre-LP signing in various bands to their formation as one group to their initial success and detailing every record they ever made, before yes, coming to Chester’s suicide and its aftermath. This particular section is handled with the care it deserves, yet is also easily the dustiest rooms you’ll experience reading this book. Ending with discussions as recently as 2023 noting that the band didn’t know what the future held and releasing just weeks after the announcement of Emily Armstrong as the new lead singer of the band, this book truly does encompass pretty much every aspect of the “Chester Bennington” era of the band.

Long time fans are going to find a lot to enjoy here. Those who simply enjoy biographies of musicians are going to find a lot to enjoy here. Those of us who have been listening to Linkin Park’s music since they first hit radio are going to find a LOT to enjoy here, particularly if you weren’t one of the truly fanatical that may have already known much of this and even possibly been there for some of it.

Ultimately, this is going to make you want to go in and listen to Linkin Park all over again and appreciate ever more just how great this band is. The one star deduction was simply because the bibliography came in particularly short, at just 12% or so.

Very much recommended.

This review of It Starts With One by Jason Lipshutz was originally written on November 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey

There Is A Case To Be Made For The Premise Of This Book. The Text Of This Book Does Not Make It.

And ultimately, that’s the bottom line. Not because Stone Cold Said So, but because Stuckey was so utterly inept in trying to make her points that she didn’t bother to do even cursory research into the issues – at least, at bare minimum, immigration and police abuse of citizens.

Her points about abortion seem reasonable, if almost verbatim from the pregnancy crisis centers anti-abortion advocates run. Be warned, through this section – the first chapter of the book – Stuckey dives deep on being as explicit as possible on what exactly happens during an abortion. Not for the squeamish, but it is also clear that she is going for shock value here. So take it as you will.

Similarly, in Chapter 2 when discussing transgenderism, she goes for the shock value quite often again, while also making some genuinely intriguing points – many of which have been pointed out by various others (sometimes on both conservative and “progressive” sides) over the years. Here, she cites some work that sounds promising – but which another 1* reviewer claims has been retracted due to failure to obtain institutional oversight review approval. Take that as you will.

In Chapter 3, discussing LGB issues more generally, Stuckey actually shows probably the most promise of the entire text of genuinely being more compassionate… except that even here, she often ignores Christ in favor of some US right wing 2000s era talking point or another.

And then, as mentioned earlier, the last couple of chapters are just such *utter* trash that to even begin to describe them… well, let’s just say that it is *here*, in particular, that this book truly earns out my dreaded “gold mine” label. There is perhaps a modicum of genuinely good thought in these sections, but it is *so* buried under so much detritus that sifting through it may as well be moving mountains to find a fleck of gold dust. It is through this section in particular that I wish I had been able to see her bibliography, but this wasn’t possible in the Audible form of the book I read.

And, lest the reader of my review think I wasn’t going to point this out, there is indeed the constant and ever present proof texting – which is bad enough for a 1* deduction in and of itself.

Ultimately this is a right wing US political book calling itself a book about Christian thought… without ever actually (or, specifically, *accurately*) citing Christ’s examples in literally anything at all she discusses.

I picked up this book because it was being so utterly destroyed in my circles on Twitter – and now I have to admit that those friends and other luminaries were far more correct than I’d have liked about this book. I wanted to be able to defend this text – as I said in the title, I firmly believe that a case for the general premise *can* be made and even *should* be made. I simply wish Stuckey had given even a wet Dollar General paper towel’s worth of effort in crafting such an argument, rather than… whatever this is… that we ultimately got.

Not recommended for anyone but the truly masochistic.

This review of Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey was originally written on November 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: Proximity Politics by Jeronimo Cortina

Obvious “Research” Yet Still Manages To Be Hyper Political. The basic premise of this book is that people are more about those things that are physically, emotionally, or ideologically close to them. Ok, and the sky is blue. Next. Oh, but now there’s numbers showing this! And? There are numbers showing why the sky is blue. Nobody cares. Well, maybe the scientists and pedants. Aha! The target audience for this very academically oriented text!

I’ll grant that the length of the bibliography is solid, clocking in at 30% of the text of the Advance Review Copy of this book that I read. Though content wise, it seems cherry picked specifically to support the author’s conclusions rather than offer a more well rounded view of the topic.

In making claims such as “Partisan polarization proved to be the deadliest factor for Americans’ health.” (while blaming elderly Americans for their own deaths during the COVID event) and saying the US-Mexico border “The US -Mexico border as we know it today is a product of historical correction that took place in 1896 to rectify mapping errors from the US-Mexican War of 1849-1855. However, it is not merely a line drawn by Washington, DC and Mexico City to separate two nations. Rather, it is a dynamic permeable membrane shaped by centuries of movement and interaction among indigenous peoples, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans.”, Cortina makes statements that his fellow members of the Academy may agree with… that will leave the rest of us in the “real” world wondering what the fuck those “Academics” are smoking, and if we can have some – particularly in these last days before the 2024 Presidential election. And then there is the fictitious claim that “assault rifles” exist (they don’t) or that anthropogenic “climate change” is causing ever more natural disasters. Here, I’ll at least give Cortina credit for moderating a *touch* in later chapters and moving on to a more “regardless of origins, it is happening” approach – which is still not actually borne out in the data, but is at least much closer to reality. Cortina would argue that my own proximal politics – growing up in the foothills of the Appalachians yet currently living just six miles off the beach – influences our disagreement here… I would argue reality does. 😉

And that is ultimately how anyone is going to find this book. If you like academic treatises with a strong leftward bent, you’re going to enjoy what Cortina has put together here, obvious though it may be. Hey, there’s numbers now! 😉 If you find yourself not drawn to that type of book… spare Cortina the much more vicious take down that even *I* was tempted to write and just ignore this book. Your cardiologist will hate you for it, but your family will love you ever more for allowing them a few more days with you from not having a heart attack over this book. 😀

Recommended, but only for very select readers.

This review of Proximity Politics by Jeronimo Cortina was originally written on October 22, 2024.

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#BookReview: Your Jesus Is Too American by Steve Bezner

No Matter Your Thinking About ‘Christianity’, This Will Challenge You. This is one of those excellent books that truly no matter what you think of Christianity or any given Christian-type theology, Bezner is going to find ways to challenge you – in the manner of the classic pastor joke as follows:

Man comes up to the Pastor after the service. “Preacher, you were stepping on my toes in there!”
Pastor replies: “I apologize. I was aiming about 3 feet higher.” (For his heart, in case that is unclear.)

In other words, yes, Bezner is a pastor and yes, this is written in that general style – but it also isn’t a book seeking to destroy everything you hold dear so much as gently goad you in areas where maybe you’re wrong – or maybe Bezner is.

And I’m not joking when I say no matter your thoughts on Christianity here. Bezner goads the conservatives with his talk of their lily white – or coal black – churches and the need for churches to be more multicultural. Bezner goads the liberals with his insistence that sex is only for straight married couples – and goads everyone with his insistence that more needs to be done to support single adults, no matter their sexual choices. He even manages to goad the Anarchists by *actively citing 1 Samuel* – the very passage where YAHWEH decrees that obedience to an earthly king as a rejection of Himself! – and arguing that earthly kings are necessary, but that a “prophet” is needed to stand outside their court and hold them to account.

If you’re looking for a book “taking down” “Christian Nationalism”…. this isn’t your book, and Bezner never intended it to be. If you’re looking for a book that decries *all* politics in the American Church and instead calls for complete separation between the Church and politics… this isn’t your book, and Bezner never intended it to be. It is quite clear that he sought to write exactly the kind of book he did – calling Americans of *all* political persuasions and telling them that according to his own beliefs, they’re wrong. As with anything else, at that point your mileage absolutely varies. I do believe that we can all gain something from reading this book, but I do NOT believe that Bezner is as correct as he clearly thinks he is.

Ultimately two stars were deducted here. One for the prooftexting, even though it only *blatantly* happened as quotes to begin chapters – I don’t really recall seeing it anywhere else. (For those unaware, “prooftexting” is the practice of citing Bible verses out of context in support of some claim or another.) So while not as bad as some others in this space, it is a practice that is an automatic star deduction from me *any* time I see it.

The other star deducted was for the near absolute dearth of any bibliography. While this book was indeed more pastoral in tone, it was still a nonfiction book and should have been cited much more thoroughly than it was – 20-30% bibliography is my general expectation based on my experiences overall, though I’m a bit more willing to come down to 15% as the lower number with more recent (2021 and forward or so) texts seeming to indicate this is a general shift in nonfiction books of this era.

Still, despite the two star deduction here largely on technical matters, this really is a solid book that every American needs to read – perhaps particularly during election seasons.

Very much recommended.

This review of Your Jesus Is Too American by Steve Bezner was originally written on October 15, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

Weather Machine : Political Machine :: forge : weave. Hey, first time I’ve ever used an analogy in that particular format in the title of a review. The answer, of course, is that all four are ways of making different things. Forging is the process of creating metal objects, weaving is the process of creating cloth objects. Similarly, a “political machine” is the process of creating some political outcome, and according to Blum in this text, a “Weather Machine” is the process of creating a… weather forecast.

Blum begins with a history of some of the earliest attempts at forecasting the weather for a given location, moving from the realm of religion and superstition to the realm of science – religion and superstition by another name, but sounding better to the “modern” ear. The history largely culminates with a discussion of the early 20th century concept of the “Weather Machine”, a giant warehouse full of human computers using slide rules to run calculations based on observations placed into a mathematical model in order to predict the weather.

An admiral goal well ahead of its time… but once computers (and particularly supercomputers) became a thing… perhaps an ideal no longer ahead of ours. It is here, in the era of computing, that Blum spends the rest of the text, showing how the first and earliest computer models found success all the way up to showing how certain modern models and teams work to forecast ever further out ever more rapidly… and how all of this now largely happens inside the computer itself, rather than in the suppositions of “trained meteorologists”.

In other words, this is a book not about weather itself, but about the process and, yes, *business*, of creating a weather *forecast* and the various issues and histories tha come to bear in this process.

Ultimately a very illuminating work about the business side of forecasting, Blum could have perhaps spent more time showing how say hurricane and tornado forecasts are formed and how much they have progressed in the last few decades, rather than forecasting more generally – but he also ultimately stayed more true to his general premise in staying more general, showing how forecasting *as a whole* has gotten so much more detailed without diving too deep into any particular area of forecasting itself.

Ultimately a rather fascinating look at a topic few people truly understand.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum was originally written on October 3, 2024.

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#BookReview: Polarized By Degrees by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins

Solid – And Solidly Dense – Examination Of The Topic. You know those jokes about the Christmas fruitcakes that are so dense you could use them as an anvil or even the cornerstone of a house? This… is damn near that dense. So be prepared for that up front, and it is a solid examination of political and even, to a lesser extent, religious polarization in the US over the last 60 years or so – with more emphasis on the last 40 years or so, when the authors claim that the “Diploma Divide” began explaining ever more of the results of elections.

Well documented at roughly 33% of the overall text, there isn’t anything particularly “explosive” here, but there *is* a lot of detailed discussion of what has occurred and why the authors’ research says it happened. One of the few books of its type where the authors are explicit in *not* making policy recommendations, instead taking an attitude of “this is the data we have, this is what we believe it shows, do with it as you will”. Which is actually refreshing – the authors note that they are academics working in academia, and even if they have worked with campaigns off and on at times, they are not politicians or political operators, and thus their expertise isn’t campaigns or campaign strategy – their expertise is in asking questions, gathering data, and analyzing that data.

Overall, while the outcomes are those we all know, Grossman and Hopkins add more data to the discussion – which is never a bad thing – and thus help aid in our overall understanding of what we have seen, giving us a more complete picture of the events as we know them.

Recommended.

This review of Polarized By Degrees by Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins was originally written on August 30, 2024.

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#BookReview: Distorting Democracy by Carolyn Renee Dupont

Distorting The Discussion. For a book about the history of the Electoral College that opens up admitting that the author thinks the Electoral College is foolhardy at best… the actual history here is quite good, and absolutely stuff virtually no one learns about even with a major in American History in college. (Perhaps Masters’ or PhD students specifically studying the EC or at least the Constitutional Convention that created it would know at least some of this?) So absolutely read this book for Parts I and II, where Dupont shows that the fights that we have today about the Electoral College have been there basically since its creation and have reignited every few decades since.

It is in Part III, where Dupont begins discussing the current debates about the issue, that her acknowledged disdain comes to the fore and truly distorts the discussion. Here, she creates strawman after strawman after strawman and “debunks” them… without ever actually getting to the heart of any of the arguments she is “debunking”.

Which is a shame, because throughout parts I and II, Dupont almost goes to pains to show that there have been some throughout American history who had at least part of the actual solution to the problems we now see – and were working to push that part of the solution through. In Part II, she even notes the other part to the solution… and glosses right on by it.

The solution that Dupont brings up repeatedly is the “District method” (vs the “General ticket” method we now call Winner-Take-All). Here, each Electoral Vote is, essentially, chosen by the popular vote of each Congressional District, with the overall popular vote of the State determining the Electoral Votes represented by that State’s US Senators. Going to that method right now would mean that both “large State” and “small State” (to use the Founders’ terms) or “urban” and “rural” (to use more modern terms) concerns would be more accurately represented in the overall Electoral College system.

But wait! There’s more! The item that Dupont glosses over is the 1920s era law passed by Congress capping the number of US Representatives at 435. This was the final nail in the coffin as far as how unequal the system currently appears, allowing even a District based Electoral Vote in Wyoming to represent 400K ish people vs a District based vote in Los Angeles to easily represent 3x as many people. But that is “simply” an Act of Congress… meaning Congress can remove that restriction at any time, even, literally, the day you are reading this review.

And then there becomes a point in the Constitutional Convention that even Dupont completely misses. You see, while I haven’t examined the relevant records myself (and perhaps Dupont could, and possibly release a 2nd edition of this text examining this), there are some who point out that the First Amendment as we know it… wasn’t the actual First Amendment. Instead, it was the *second*, and the actual First Amendment actually closed the “Representational loophole” that Article I, Section II of the Constitution created when it noted that the “number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand”. Reading that carefully, it means that the population represented by a single US Representative has a *minimum* – 30,000 people – meaning that the overall number of US Representatives has a *maximum* – 11,234 US Representatives, based on the US population in August 2024 as I write this review. But notice what this does *NOT* do – set a population *maximum* – and therefore an overall number of US Representatives *minimum*.

THIS is where the fight over the Electoral College misses its most crucial point – and it is a point Dupont seems to be entirely unaware or even ignorant of. If this so-called “true First Amendment” had passed, it would have set the population maximum per Representative – and therefore the minimum overall number of US Representatives – at 50,000 – or 6,740 US Representatives based on current US population as of late August 2024 as I write this review.

Combining the District Method Dupont discusses at length in the text here + this missing “actual First Amendment” would largely solve every single argument Dupont has against the Electoral College, and yet she missed such a crucial detail of James Madison’s own efforts regarding the construction of the Constitution – thereby distorting the discussion from the get-go.

Recommended, mainly for Parts I and II, where most everyone will learn quite a bit.

This review of Distorting Democracy by Carolyn Renee Dupont was originally written on August 30, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Highest Law In The Land by Jessica Pishko

An Imagined History. Pishko starts off this text openly admitting that, as the Southport NC Police Dept cop who murdered Keith Vidal in North Carolina a decade ago this year said less than two minutes after encountering Vidal – and 14 seconds after Vidal had already been Tasered and was being held on the group by two other cops when the kill shot was fired -, she “doesn’t have time” (paraphrase from her, exact words of the murderous cop) to do any real investigative journalism that might show any degree of nuance or any alternative explanations for anything she writes about in this book. She openly admits in the prologue that she is going to label anything and anyone who is not a leftist progressive as “far right” because “The intent of this book is not to desegregate all of the complexities of the far-right movements – I do not think I could if I tried – which is why I have opted for the simplest terminology. Most important to me is the acknowledgement that these sheriffs and their supporters are plainly opposed to the left and progressives.” (An exact quote from page 18 or so, at least of the ARC text I read.)

Thus, Pishko proceeds to concoct her imagined history, complete with narrative-defining boogeymen, the “Constitutional Sheriff’s And Peace Officer’s Association” or CSPOA, as it is so frequently noted on seemingly every other page throughout the narrative. Pishko “cites” well-debunked “facts” such as Donald Trump calling the Nazis at the Charlottesville, VA “Unite The Right” rally “very fine people” (actual fact: He openly decried the violence of this group specifically, noting that *other* people *not associated with them* were the “very fine people” that happened to be at the rally as well), or the repeated-three-times-throughout-the-narrative-that-I-caught bald-faced LIE that “the leading cause of death of children is gun violence”. Even when looking at the CDC data *that Pishko herself cites*, the only way to get to this is to include people that are not legally children – indeed, some of the 18 and 19yos included in these numbers are actively serving the US military in war zones! Pishko also claims that “AR-15 SBRs are the weapon of choice of mass shooters” despite the number of homicides via rifle – any form of rifle, not just so-called “assault weapons” – proving that to be untrue for many years now. She claims that she observed a man walking around at one rally with an “automatic” rifle. While this is *possible*, it is also *extremely* rare – and without inspecting the gun in question (which Pishko does not detail that she did, if she did it at all), there is no way of knowing from a distance that the rifle at hand was fully automatic.

No, as with one of her criticisms of one of her primary targets of scorn throughout this text – Pinal County AZ Sheriff Mark Lamb – the best that can be said of this text is that while it is well documented, clocking in at 33% or so documentation, it is “light on substance and heavy on [extreme leftist] vibes”.

Read this book – if your politics are to the left of Bernie Sanders. You’ll find a new boogeyman to scare yourself with in your fantasy world.

For anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders and living in the *real* world, don’t bother with this drivel. There are *far* superior books about the problems with modern police and how we got to this point, such as Radley Balko’s Rise Of The Warrior Cop.

Not recommended, unless you’re an extreme leftist or extreme masochist.

This review of The Highest Law In The Land by Jessica Pishko was originally written on August 26, 2024.

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#BookReview: Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze

Brilliant Examination – Yet Outdated By The Author’s Day Job Just Before Publication. Define irony. One sense may be writing a book wherein you detail how one Supreme Court decision in particular a few decades ago allowed for an exponential growth in the number of laws and regulations Americans must abide by… and then just a handful of weeks before publication of the book you made this point in, joining with five of your eight colleagues in your day job in announcing that you collectively have… *over ruled*… that very prior SCOTUS decision in question. One might consider that a form of irony.

Beyond the discussion of Chevron though, Gorsuch and apparent longtime assistant Nitze do a truly admirable job here of showing just how much the laws and other edicts with force of law of the United States have grown in just the last few decades alone, primarily at the National level, but with brief examinations of the volume of State and local laws as well. Various case studies are used to illustrate various ways in which the explosion has occurred and how it has harmed every day working class Americans of nearly any imaginable stripe, and showing how many Americans can be in violation of some rule or regulation… and not even know it until cops raid their house with guns drawn in order to kidnap these “perpetrators”.

Indeed, some of the cases are quite sobering and harrowing indeed, including the one that opens the book – that of a Florida fisherman suddenly accused of tampering with evidence… due to a law that passed as a result of the Enron scandal. In other cases, Gorsuch and Nitze show various other “offenses”, including at least a few – such as civil asset forfeiture and occupational licensing – that will be on Gorsuch’s desk in his day job over the next couple of years, thanks in large part to the efforts of groups such as the Institute for Justice, which actively seeks to combat the very problem Gorsuch details in this book.

One thing that I can’t speak to that I normally do in this space is the length of the bibliography, as I read the Audible edition of this book on my way back home to Jacksonville, FL from my homeland north of Atlanta, GA yesterday. (Though I *can* note, from that, that it can easily be read at 1.5x speed on a 7 ish hr drive. 😉 )

Truly both a well written and genuinely important book for all Americans to read.

Very much recommended.

This review of Over Ruled by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze was originally written on August 19, 2024.

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#BookReview: Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

All Too Identifiable. Ok, so the first version of this review was basically comparing my life to Vance’s as he relates in in this book, but let’s face it – y’all don’t care about the details there. 😀 Suffice it to say that as a trailer park kid from the southern Appalachian foothills outside of Atlanta, who also spent time “in the country” (though Atlanta has now fully taken over that region since my childhood) at his family’s farm and who also became the first person in his immediate family to go to – and graduate from – college… yeah, there was quite a bit I could identify with in this book. There was also quite a bit where we diverged, specifically in that while the hardships Vance lived through within his own family were frequently seen in my *friends’* and *schoolmates’* and *neighbors’* lives… *very* little of it was ever as immediately in my face for me, even back in the trailer park.

I read the Audible version of this book, actually as I was driving from my home in Jacksonville, FL to my homeland north of Atlanta over the weekend, so I don’t have any information about the breadth of any bibliography here. What I can say is that Vance’s words, from his perspectives of his experience, ring true with my own observations and experiences in a similar-ish background, time, and region.

I can also say that Vance describes his time in the Marines much as I’ve seen and heard others of our generation describe them, particularly as it relates to being crystal clear that while he served in the Green Zone in Iraq, he never directly saw enemy fire or fired on the enemy.

Overall there is truly little if anything to fault here. The writing style – and reading style, in Audible form – were very easy to flow with, it is clear that Vance is actively examining his life and not simply making excuses for himself or anyone else, and in the end, again, this truly does ring all-too-true to my own observations as a contemporary in a similar ish region of the country.

Very much recommended.

This review of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance was originally written on August 19, 2024.