Books shelved under “Non-Fiction”

Trainwreck was published on my birthday, so it was kind of like Jude Ellison S. Doyle was giving me a birthday gift. Not really, at all, in any way. But still, a great coincidence. I’ve enjoyed reading their writing on various sites for years now, so when I heard they had an honest-to-goodness actual book coming out, I was elated. Fortunately, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why does…

Oh man, I did not pick the right time to start reading Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online (yay Oxford comma!). I started this two days before the American Election Day, and then after those results, I just had to kind of … put it down a bit. I was planning to read it over a week or so, because like Indigenous Writes, this is an academic-but-accessible book about some heavy stuff, and reading…

Wow, this one was rough. I had to borrow the audiobook version from my library/Hoopla because that was the only format available, and it is the abridged audio edition. I normally avoid abridged editions. What’s the point in missing out on a bunch of the book? In the case of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, however, I think I’ll make an exception. This is just a terrible, even actively harmful book,…

First off, an update on the shoe situation: I’m much faster at putting on shoes now. I’ve been training hard, lots of montages and such, and I’m proud to say I’ve seen great improvement.

Why Not Me? is the second autobiographical set of essays from Mindy Kaling. In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Kaling told us about her childhood and the path that led to her involvement with The…

I spend a lot of time (hah) thinking about how little we understand the way people in the past actually lived, day to day, simply because technology that we now take for granted has changed things we don’t even think about. I take it for granted that I can know the precise time, as we currently measure it, all the time. I take it for granted that I can flick a switch and have light…

The feedback cycle that exists between technology and society is an interesting one. I took a Philosophy of Science course in university, and one of our two textbooks discussed the “evolution” of technology and whether it is accurate to say that certain technological innovations are inevitable consequences of previous ones. While I agreed with the book’s author when he dismisses technological development as deterministic, it is so interesting to see how a society’s response to…

There is a school of thought rising in popularity which wants coding to become a mandatory subject in schools. I have some thoughts on this, but that is neither here nor there for this review. Rather, it’s just interesting that for all the talk of teaching kids to code because it will lead to “better jobs”, there isn’t much emphasis on teaching about the way Big Data is redefining our lives. From data mining…

The same friend who lent me Decoded asked me if I wanted to borrow Men Explain Things to Me, which is great, because it has been on my list for a while now. When I went over to her house, she handed me the book. A mutual friend who was there and only in town until early the next week then said, “Can you read it really quickly so I can have it?” So…

Sometimes you see a book and you just know that it’s the book you’ve been waiting for. That was my reaction when Chelsea Vowel, who blogs and tweets as âpihtawikosisân, announced Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada. You really should read her blog and follow her, because she her writing is clear and informative, and she is excellent at providing further resources. This continues in her…

Four years ago, I moved to England to begin my career as a teacher. Fresh out of Lakehead University's Faculty of Education, the dry job market in Ontario left me looking across the Atlantic. Thanks to Engage Education, an agency that specializes in recruiting teachers overseas for the English school system so desperately clamouring for them, I managed to land a classroom right away. When I moved back to Thunder Bay, I got on the…

A friend lent Decoded me after I expressed a desire to “get into hip hop”. This is not a whim on my part but a recognition of a gap in my otherwise wide musical listening. Although I would say that my “favourite” music tends towards a fairly narrow swath of sound, and my tastes are decidedly more pop than hard rock in later years, I appreciate a lot of different sounds, albeit perhaps not equally.…

I didn’t intend to read two non-fiction books, two books about economics, consecutively. That’s just how it happened. However, Unaccountable: Truth and Lies on Parliament Hill, is about as far away as you might get from Trekonomics. The latter is speculating on what might or could be; the former is a deeply personal tale about politics and events that actually happened. Kevin Page, who shares a hometown of Thunder Bay with me, recounts…

Money is one of humanity’s most clever and enduring technologies. It is a brilliant way of transferring value across vast distances and decentralizing our economy. Barter makes sense on a hyperlocal, neighbourly scale, but you can’t run a vast industrial economy on it. As Niall Ferguson chronicles in his excellent The Ascent of Money, increases in numismatic sophistication were vital in increasing the range of trade and our abilities to innovate and provide services…

I hate listicles. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t click on any post that starts with a number in its title. I know, I know, #notalllisticles, some are well-written and informative.

A Little Gay History is, when you think about it, a listicle; you could retitle it “82 Objects from the British Museum Related to Gay Sexual Desire”. Listicles were around before the Internet, and I suppose they will outlive the Internet…

Almost a year ago (has it been that long? gah) I read Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist. As you will know, I am a sucker for heist stories. That book led me to The Art of the Heist: Confessions of a Master Art Thief, Rock-and-Roller, and Prodigal Son. Myles Connor was (still is) a primary suspect in the Gardner heist, despite the fact he was…

This book was an indulgence: its price is US$60, which means in Canada it’s closer to $80 (although Chapters was selling it online at a considerable discount, so I didn’t pay even close to that). But it’s totally worth it. This book is as gorgeous as you would expect. It’s a coffee-table book, oversized and weighty, its pages thick and glossy and covered with colour photos of costumes, stills, and concept art. I mean, it…

Are you a perv? Of course you are, you pervy perv, you. At least, that’s the explicit (pun intended) promise in Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. Jesse Bering grapples with that truism that the only normal is that there is no normal. He catalogues, comments upon, and otherwise investigates the various types of sexual behaviours that are or have previously been labelled as deviant. The purpose of this exposé (pun intended),…

This review is lengthy and also gets quite personal, since I can’t help but examine For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood …and the Rest of Y’all Too in the light of my own experiences as a teacher.

TL;DR: Christopher Emdin is awesome, and this book is too. It’s short and accessible, but it has such staying power. I wish this were mandatory in teacher training everywhere. Also, minor spoilers for Anne of Green…

This book was like tearing the scab off a freshly healed wound. It’s been so long since I’ve had to deal with the shittiness that is evolutionary psychology, and then Naomi Wolf comes along and reminds me of just how terrible it is all over again.

Well, let’s do this.

Vagina: A New Biography is Wolf’s syncretism of Eastern teachings about sex (particularly Tantra) with Western medicine, with a particular focus on the way women…

Maybe a dog person would find Chad Orzel’s attempts to talk quantum mechanics in the language of a pet and her owner more endearing. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is Yet Another Pop Sci look at quantum mechanics, albeit one from a more technical than, say, historical perspective. Orzel frames each chapter within a conversation with his dog, Emmy, grounded in the context of something a dog would do, like hunt bunnies or…