reviews

A black life that mattered... Author:  Matt Taibbi This is a hard book review for me to write.  I’ve never been to New York City.  I don’t know what it’s like to hang out on the streets of Staten Island.  Obviously, I’ve never had any interaction with the NY Police Department.  Everything I “know” comes from watching TV shows, clearly not the best way to learn about a topic.  But what I do know is that Matt Taibbi is a hell of a journalist and I Can’t Breathe is just one more piece of evidence to support that claim. Taibbi [...]

Tiny saviors? Author:  Lisa Margonelli Apparently I was completely out of the loop.  No one had the good graces to tell me when, sometime around 2008, termite taxonomy was rearranged, demoting the order Isoptera – the exclusive home of the infamously destructive and socially fascinating “white ants” – to a lowly infraorder within the order Blattodea.   In other words, the once mighty termite was now officially just a unique type of cockroach.  For entomophiles like me, this ranks right up there with the Pluto’s demotion to  dwarf planet in the history of scientific hullabaloos, although the news of this particular [...]

Rabbits unite!! Author:  Richard Adams What makes a good nature novel?  Despite my obvious enthusiasm for nature writing of all sorts, I frequently end up criticizing the nature fiction that I read.  I’m not really sure why that is, but recent ruminations on the topic prompted me to revisit a book I enjoyed some 40 years ago.  I have to say that even though it’s been almost half a century years since it was first published, Watership Down by Richard Adams holds up remarkably well. Facing the imminent destruction of their warren, Hazel, the diminutive Fiver and a small cohort [...]