I love works of popular science and works of popular history, so naturally I love works of popular science history. One of my favourite books of all time is A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it is getting on in years and could use some updating. I rather naively hoped that The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) might be a worthy spiritual successor to that volume. Both Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford…
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Longtime readers of my reviews should not be surprised that I love time travel. I have a whole bookshelf dedicated to it, and I love Doctor Who. So Time Travel: A History by James Gleick was really a no-brainer. This is going to be a short review, because I don’t have a lot to say: this book does what the title promises. Gleick presents a brief history of the concept of time travel…
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Anyone who has read even a smattering of my reviews probably knows a few things about me. First, I am a teacher. Second, I live in Thunder Bay, Canada, which unfortunately is a strong contender for one of the most racist cities in the world. Third, a large proportion of the adult students I teach in this racist city are Indigenous. So over nearly a decade, I’ve done a lot of learning about anti-Indigenous racism…
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In my review of The Transgender Issue, I said I was more interested in manifestos than memoirs when it comes to trans people. This remains the case. However, as Redefining Realness demonstrates, memoirs can still be powerful and useful. I read this as part of the same book club that got me reading White Tears/Brown Scars. I was initially apprehensive to be one of the few if only transfeminine people in a group…
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Audre Lorde is one of those people whom we white people find so quotable yet seldom do we stop to listen to her words (we have done this to Martin Luther King, Jr. as well). Every time I see a quotation from Lorde or another prominent Black activist on a T-shirt, I cringe. One of the insidious aspects of whiteness is how it appropriates the radical language of oppressed people (just look at the evolution…
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Back in the summer, I participated in a book club for educators where we read White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color. Ruby Hamad cited this book once or twice, and I was intrigued. Hamad wanted to make the point that white women benefit from both patriarchy and white supremacy, that in colonial situations like this they will uphold the existing racist structure rather than work against racism because it benefits…
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Every so often one encounters a book that should be required reading for all Canadians. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance is one such book. The moment I cracked open the first chapter, I knew I had to use this in my English class of adult learners (all of whom, at the moment, are Anishinaabeg from Treaty 9 nations). Jesse Wente appears in a documentary, Reel Injun, that I often use in my English…
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I don’t remember when and how I was taught about climate change in school! I wish I did, because it would be interesting to compare my experience with the various experiences cited in Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America! Katie Worth is very thorough in how she seeks to understand such a broad topic, for the States is vast and populous and full of fragmented education systems.
I received a free eARC…
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Dava Sobel is perhaps my favourite non-fiction author. She has this ability to discuss the history of science in an enlightening and inspiring way. Her books make these historical figures come alive. While Galileo is far better known than the subjects of her more recent The Glass Universe, Sobel takes a new approach to biography of him by including letters from his daughter, Maria Celeste. Though I’m not sure the amount of letters and…
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This is a book I have been waiting for. I don’t just mean in the sense that I pre-ordered it (though I did); I mean that I am very much interested in books about trans liberation as opposed to personal memoirs. I know Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue is far from the first book on this subject. However, it is current and cogent. In her prologue, Faye makes the case clearly:
The demand for true
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Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to teach us about ecological awareness, the bar rises further. Back to Earth has a certain kind of charm to its optimistic idea that orbiting the planet helps you feel like we’re all in this together. Maybe I’m just getting pessimistic at the…
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This was recommended to me by my bestie (and podcast cohost), Rebecca. She has a talent for pointing me in the direction of books that might feel like self-help to an extent but are actually interesting dives into specific topics in psychology. She most recently finally got me to read Quiet, by Susan Cain, a book that definitely has overlap with The Highly Sensitive Person. In particular, Cain actually mentions this term,…
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This book came on my radar after reading Fossil Men. Whereas that book is a deep dive into one spectacular fossil’s story and the stories of those involved in its finding and analysis, Lone Survivors is more of an overview of human evolution entire. Chris Stringer focuses in particular on the origins of modern humans, i.e., Homo sapiens and our relationship with our cousins the Neanderthals. In so doing, he furnishes us with vital…
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As many of you know, I am a sucker for heist and con artists stories. So I was drawn to Priceless because Robert K. Wittman offered a perspective I haven’t heard from—I’ve read a lot of stories from the points of view of the criminals, as well as from the marks. I was excited to hear from a retired law enforcement officer who specialized at going undercover. Wittman’s memoir is a treasure trove of insight…
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This is a small thing, but I feel like it’s rare these days for a non-fiction book to lack a subtitle. The History of White People is minimalist in this sense: the title says it all. So too does the cover of my edition: pure white with a black circle in the centre containing the title and author in white block letters; nothing else on the front cover, blurbs pushed to the back and even…
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As Lee McIntyre reflects in the book, this topic seems even more relevant now than it did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have very effective vaccines that will help us mitigate the harms of COVID-19, yet a shocking proportion of people are hesitant to get vaccinated. A perhaps less-shocking proportion have decried public health measures, like mask mandates, designed to keep people safe. In How to Talk to a Science Denier, McIntyre tries…
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Every so often there’s a topic that catches what I call my “background interest.” These are the topics that I enjoy reading about but don’t obsess over. North Korea is one such topic—I definitely want to keep reading and learning about the country, the regime, the people, but I’m pursuing it gradually. Five years ago I read In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park’s story of escaping North Korea. Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee –…
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Quiet was yet another one of those books lingering on my to-read list. I had watched Susan Cain’s TED talk at some point, and this book kept crossing my feeds, yet I never got around to it. I think, on some level, part of me was worried it would disappoint me. But when my bestie told me she had just read it, I knew the time had come. So, to the library I went!
I…
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You know Kara likes stories of heists and swindles, con artists and the like, yes? Oh yes. For some reason this got lost when I moved and only resurfaced recently, so I’m finally getting to read Empire of Deception, all about Chicago swindler Leo Koretz. According to Dean Jobb, Koretz is impressive enough that we should be talking about Koretz schemes instead of Ponzi schemes, and after reading this book, it’s not difficult to…
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Although I would have picked this up on my own once I heard about it, I sought out and read White Tears/Brown Scars as a part of an antiracist book club that I joined for the month of June. Comprising mostly educators in Ontario, the book club’s organizer picked this book because our profession is predominantly white women, so white tears are a problem. As a white women, I’m a part of that problem,…
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