Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
★★★★☆ With roughly 30 published books and more than 100 pieces in The New Yorker over the course of a half century, John McPhee is widely regarded a master and a pioneer of the...
Category: Nonfiction
Why Dinosaurs Matter by Kenneth Lacovara
★★★☆☆ Dr. Kenneth Lacovara’s Why Dinosaurs Matter is a “TED Book,” meaning a book-length expansion on a single TED Talk lecture. The afterward claims that TED Books are designed to be read in a...
The Templars by Dan Jones
★★★★☆ The Templars have been transported through the dust of history to occupy a place in our consciousness that transcends who they really were and what they actually did. Hundreds of books and numerous...
Pig/Pork by Pía Spry-Marqués
★★★★☆ Our love affair with pigs – more accurately pork – extends to the dawn of human existence. Excavations at the site of Medzhibozh 1 in Western Ukraine indicate that “wild boar were being...
Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed
★★★★☆ This “scientific biography” of tuberculosis (TB) is a fascinating, scholarly account of a persistent, often misunderstood disease. TB, as Kathryn Lougheed so eloquently reveals, has been with us since we became us. With...
4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner
★★☆☆☆ Nicky Jenner presents Mars as the planetary neighbor that has most deeply captured the imagination of scientific and artistic communities throughout the eras. Unfortunately, her book 4th Rock from the Sun: The Story...
Morgue: A Life in Death by Dr. Vincent Di Maio and Ron Franscell
★★★★☆ Morgue: A Life in Death is an enlightening read; do not be put off by the title. Although there are graphic descriptions of wounds and modes of death, this is not a blood...
Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt
★★★☆☆ In 2002, bookstores were enthralled by the card-counting gamblers from MIT in Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House; a year later Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball showed that baseball could be gamed apart...
Word by Word by Kory Stamper
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ How do you define words and learn to pronounce them? Do you adhere to Standard English and, at the same time, reconcile it with the spoken English that you...
