#BookReview: Key To The City by Sara C. Bronin

Taylor Swift != “Modern Day Elvis Presley”! I came into this book wanting to read about the American Government on the Fourth of July. Honestly, as an avowed Anarchist and former Libertarian Party official at both the State and local levels + 2x rural small town City Council candidate… I probably should have known better. 😉

It isn’t that this book isn’t illuminating nor well documented – it actually is reasonably good at both, with a bibliography clocking in at 21% of the overall text. Seriously, if you’ve never considered the topic of land zoning as it is practiced in the United States and how it is used to control you, your neighbors, your town, even to a slightly lesser (direct) manner your State and even the entire Country… you need to read this book.

Bronin truly does a great job of examining the history of zoning as practiced in the US, including how it came to be and why and how it has been used over the century or so since it first came into being. (Indeed, according to Bronin, the Supreme Court cases that effectively legalized the practice are still not quite a century old at either the writing of this review in early July 2024 or when the book is scheduled to be released in early October 2024.)

My issue, and I think it is objective enough (if, perhaps, barely) is that Bronin approaches this topic as a Chair of a Zoning Board who wants Zoning Boards to be even *more* active in limiting what you can do with the property that you legally own and actively encourages strategies to accomplish a very progressive agenda, including “Climate change” and mass transit theories that barely work in the extremely densely populated “Boshwash” (Boston – Washington DC) corridor she rules the aforementioned Zoning Board in – theories that could never work in the *far* less densely populated areas of South Georgia or even Central South Carolina that I’ve lived in, much less west of the Missisippi River where population densities (until you get to the Pacific Coast) largely truly plummet. And yes, there are *reasons* I mentioned my political background up front in this review. 🙂

As but an example, I point to the title of this review – at one point in this text, Ms. Bronin does in fact claim that Taylor Swift is a “modern day Elvis Presley”. To be clear, if she had compared Ms. Swift to say the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or even Johnny Cash himself, that would have been a fair comparison and I would have had to find another example of where she is particularly outlandish without going into the actual details of the book (ie, spoilers). But as Ms. Swift never had to so much as register for the Draft – much less be selected by it and forced to serve in the US Military, this alone shows that Elvis was a different breed entirely. And to be clear, lest any Swifties attack this review just because of this paragraph, I’m not actually criticizing Ms. Swift. She is indeed a global phenomenon and is clearly quite talented in her own right. I am not saying otherwise or taking anything from her. I’m simply noting that for all she has done and all the fans she has, Elvis was *still* on another level from her.

Overall, read this book. Seriously. You’re going to learn a lot, no matter your own political leanings or how you feel about the sanctity of private property. But “if you feel as I feel” (to quote the always amazing V for Vendetta), know there will be many points you will want to defenestrate this book forthwith and from the highest available window. But unless you’ve had the experience of myself or Ms. Bronin or the admittedly *numerous* people like us who *have* actively dealt with zoning boards at some direct level before… you really are going to learn some things here. Clearly, even *I* learned a few things here myself, even *with* a few years of directly relevant experience.

Recommended.

This review of Key To The City by Sara C. Bronin was originally written on July 5, 2024.

#BookReview: Friends Don’t Fall In Love by Erin Hahn

Country Music Romance For The Anti-Second Amendment Crowd. So let’s get it out of the way as quickly as Hahn does in the book: Seemingly literally on page 1 of this tale, Hahn brings in an anti-Second Amendment screed. Which could have been excused… except that then became a recurring and even somewhat central theme of the overall book. And not even in a way that felt particularly organic, if anything it actually felt quite derivative of the real-life Dixie Chicks anti-Iraq War controversy of a generation ago. So there’s the star deduction, right there. And from a tactical side of “As an author, I want to sell as many books as possible”… tacking into the *anti* Second Amendment side of *Country Music*? As a lifelong fan of Country in all its forms… eh, there may in fact be a sizeable enough niche there to sell a few books. I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a career as a romance author specifically within that niche. (Though it is certainly wider within the overall romance novel reader set, and perhaps *there*, it could in fact be more sustainable in today’s hyper-divisive world.)

As to the actual friends-to-lovers romance here… it works, and it certainly has enough spice and XXX elements that the clean/ sweet crowd probably won’t like this one as much. And enough F-bombs that those who abhor those won’t like it either. But overall, for the characters as portrayed and the situations they are placed into, it actually works rather well. Maybe not as good as the first book in this series – but that could be the lingering aftertaste of the hyper politicization and preachy politics still tinging my thinking of this book.

Ultimately, if you like spice and you like being in the room for sex scenes in your romance novels, you’re going to like this book – likely even if you don’t actually care much for Country Music itself and particularly if you find yourself to be more of a Dixie Chicks / Taylor Swift fan. If you happen to actually agree with its preachy politics, you’ll probably like it even more. For more Country Music traditionalists… eh, maybe less, maybe you want to build your trust in Hahn a bit by reading the first book in this series first before you come into this one.

And as more of a note to Hahn, herself a teacher who openly notes that she wrote the politics of this book this way due to her beliefs about the classroom… I myself am *also* a former teacher. One who actually had a high school senior lean across my desk and directly say “If you do [the thing I had just told him I was about to do, which was to write him up for blatantly sexually harassing a Junior in my classroom not 10 feet from where we were then standing], I *will* kill you.” Yes, I then wrote him up for the threat, and yes, he then spent a few days out of school. So yes, I’ve seen at least some of the same things you have. And I still disagree.

Recommended.

This review of Friends Don’t Fall In Love by Erin Hahn was originally written on October 19, 2023.

#BookReview: In The Blood by Charles Barber

Visionary. Outsider. Hero. One of the great lines from the movie The Imitation Game (whose trailer I was just watching as I tried to find this quote, and where I found the title of this review) that has always stuck with me is “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” Obviously, in the context of The Imitation Game, it is about the legendary “Father of Computer Science” (and suspected Autistic) Alan Turing.

Barber, in *this* text, makes it clear that it could very equally be said of a man who may well go down in history as at least as important as Turing himself – Frank Hursey. Hursey was a South Carolina native living in Connecticut who discovered a remarkable property of a fairly common substance – and then set it aside like Mordin in Mass Effect 2 looking at some gadget he was no longer interested in. Until Bart Gullong came into his life and recognized the significance of what Hursey had found – and together, the inventor and the salesman/ marketer would go on to change the course of world history.

Barber, through a seemingly episodic format where he provides brief biographical sketches of each of the key players in the unfolding drama while keeping the narrative squarely focused on Hursey, Gullong, and their products, tells a story at least as motivational as anything has ever been told about Turing’s own life. A story of a almost literal garage inventor who finds and develops a substance that has literal world changing powers.

A substance that can make battlefield – or anywhere else – traumas far more survivable, by finally solving a problem humanity had never before solved in its known history – how to stop mass bleeding.

This is the story of how Hursey and Gullong found, developed, and marketed the substance to the US military – and then later found mass market appeal in nearly every segment of the economy that might find a desire to stop a potential bleed out.

Including, per Barber, Taylor Swift having it near her at all times in the case of an attack at one of her concerts.

The only reason for the star deduction here is the slightly lower than my expected average of 20-30% on the bibliography, clocking in here at 16% instead. And as I’ve noted in other reviews of late, given that so many more recent texts are clocking in closer to this 15% point, I may well need to revise my expected bibliography size down a touch.

The tale opens with the story of the Battle of Mogadishu and the subsequent movie form of it, Black Hawk Down. Don’t be surprised to see a movie form of this book itself at some point. Very much recommended.

This review of In The Blood by Charles Barber was originally written on April 27, 2023.