Book Reviews

Positioned chronologically and literarily between excellent biographies of Truman and Eisenhower on one side, and Robert Caro’s towering work on Johnson on the other, this Kennedy biography is middling. Kennedy’s story is amazing! His heroic endurance after the PT-109 disaster is epic, and his quote about committing fully to the life of a politician reveals a man more self-aware than often credited. The most important narratives in Kennedy’s legacy—Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his legislative wrangling—are told with more clarity and insight in other works. The Best and the Brightest handles Vietnam with sobering depth. Caro’s Master of the Senate shows us 60’s politics with dramatically more nuance. And One Minute to Midnight captures the dread and detail of the missile crisis in a way this biography can’t match. ...

What it Takes to be a Good Dog Dogs of War grabs you with action, then pulls off sharp pivots into a more contemplative legal and political thriller—never. I’m a sucker for stories with lean, exponential plots, and Tchaikovsky delivers. While mainstream debates about AI are stuck in endless useless sound bites, this novel explores what nonhuman intelligence might look like. Tchaikovsky moves past the usual “ai versus humans” noise, and the result is smarter and fresher. ...

Awe, Categorized tl;dr: Great topic, limited book. This book offers a thin but structured exploration of awe. One of Dacher’s most useful contributions is breaking it down into eight distinct categories: Moral Beauty Collective Effervescence Nature Music Visual Design Spirituality and Religion Life & Death Epiphany These categories provide a compelling framework for understanding how awe can manifest in everyday life. A particularly intriguing insight from the book is a study indicating that people with less wealth experience more frequent moments of awe during the day—suggesting that wealth, paradoxically, may dull our sense of wonder. ...

我是唯一没有被打动的读者？ 读完《小王子》，我感到有些困惑。在阅读的过程中我显然没有完全理解，而读完之后，我也没能感受到其中所谓“特别”之处。 一开始我以为可能是翻译的问题，毕竟这是从法语翻译过来的童话。但看到豆瓣上这本书的评价极高，我开始觉得也许问题不在书，而在我自己。 对我来说，这个故事的情节缺乏意义。如果要类比的话，有点像《爱因斯坦的梦》：每一章都有一套设定、一些角色，每个角色身上有某种缺陷或者隐喻。但这些“负面的故事”对我来说太简单了。我知道很多人欣赏的是这些“话中有话”的隐喻，但我自己却没有感受到那种深意，甚至觉得有些平淡无奇。 也许是我们长大了，于是变得“笨”了，失去了童心，也就无法体会那种纯真的寓意。 “王子的爱让玫瑰变得更有价值”——也许我并不这么认为。 可能我会更喜欢圣埃克苏佩里的回忆录或其他非虚构作品，但就这本《小王子》而言，它对我来说并没有特别打动的地方。 ** 2025年第41本书 **

** Blockbuster of the 80’s ** Reading volumes 2 through 5 of Akira found a new sensation: the pace is dictated not by the density of ideas, but by how fast you can turn a page. That physical act, rather than a director’s frame or an author’s prose, becomes the primary throttle of the experience. While Akira begins with an explosive, iconic first two volumes—arguably its most plot-rich installments—the rest of the series unfurls more like an extended aftermath than a dynamic narrative progression. As a post-apocalyptic story, it doesn’t quite cohere The setup is powerful, but what follows feels more like echo. ...

Not Enough for One Sitting Certainly a page turner. With sparse text and dynamic artwork, each page flies by. It’s not that the story is light, it’s just kinetic: you’re almost flipping pages in real-time with the action. I was surprised to learn there are six volumes in total. Having seen the iconic 1988 film, I now realize just how much of the original story was streamlined or reimagined to fit within two hours. ...

Wishing death on the world’s last man, not a good sign. DNF end of Book 1.

** Topspin and Emotional Spin ** Even for tennis prodigies, the odds of making it are astronomically low—maybe one in ten thousand. Both Agassi and Sampras beat those odds, and yet, neither grapples with the unknowable question: What if they hadn’t? What if they had just been great athletes who never made it? That alternate life—the life of the 9,999—remains outside their scope, and perhaps understandably so. Agassi’s Open, ghostwritten with J.R. Moehringer, is an emotionally raw, stylistically intense book. At times, it feels over-seasoned—but perhaps that’s fitting. This is a man denied a childhood, trying to find his identity in the rearview mirror. His tennis-obsessed father’s upbringing was essentially child abuse, a relentless regime of pressure and forced training that left little room for self-determination. The emotional flavor is heavy because his life was. Open is less a sports memoir than an exorcism of trauma. It’s as though Agassi is still looking for himself, and hoping the writing process can help. ...

** Unforgiving Realism ** I didn’t realize The Last Argument of Kings was considered grimdark fantasy until exploring reviews. To me, it’s just realism. The ending, in particular, stood out. Even for characters who achieve their life’s ambitions, success is a transition to another level of the same relentless game. Climbing the ranks only reveals another figure to grovel before. Progress means repeating the same mistakes—only now, the stakes are higher. ...

** AI Winter is Coming ** AI is a technological revolution. We take for granted that such revolutions occur. Yet understanding their economic and societal consequences remains elusive. Looking backward is the only reliable compass, and today’s pattern is familiar: a new general-purpose technology appears, spreads unevenly, and begins the long, messy process of reorganizing everything around it. * “When general purpose technologies exist, they are a model that can be followed by all, but [whose] configuration takes time, about a decade or more.” * ...