Category: Nonfiction
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The Invisible Hiker by Kira Harland
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my cousin’s book and I edited the first four chapters. The Invisible Hiker is the autobiographical tale of Kira, a woman in her 20s who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT) with her father, John, and her cousin, Melissa. It’s called The…
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Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
Rating: 5/5, excellent It feels odd writing this after Trump’s been voted out of the presidency. I want to be done talking about him, but this book was fantastic and deserves the attention. Too Much and Never Enough is Mary L. Trump’s memoir/biography of the Trump family. Mary analyzes how Donald came to be the…
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The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
Rating: 3/5, average CW: rape, pedophilia The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner. Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime…
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Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Rating: 3/5, average Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned…
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Quiet by Susan Cain
This isn’t so much a book for introverts to learn how to fit into society as an argument as to why society should change to accept introverts.
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Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin
Rating: 4/5, good Maimonides: A Guide for Today’s Perplexed is a very slim volume, only 127 pages long, and is an introduction to Maimonides’s epically long tome The Guide for the Perplexed which was originally written in 1190. Maimonides’s main point seems to be that Jewish mono-theism is not simply believing in one God, but…
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You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero
Rating: 4/5, good This is a butt-kicker of a book. It contains some deep motivation, real talk, and psychological counseling that could help you get out of a rut. It also has some woo-woo aspirational-vibrational stuff, but the writing in this book is so witty and involving it didn’t bother me. I loved all the…
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Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc
Rating: 3/5, average This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism. It starts off with…
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Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright
Rating: 4/5, good I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by…
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So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman
Rating: 4 So Rich, So Poor encapsulates in 162 pages the forces that keep people in poverty in America. It’s written by Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former policy advisor to Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He draws on fifty years of experience in government to give a perspective on poverty in its historical,…