Review

** Decent Man, Decent Presidency ** Gerald Ford was not meant to be president. But when history handed him the job, he handled it with anachronistic decency. In a political era dominated by Nixonian shadows and LBJ’s compulsive meanness, Ford’s restraint was almost radical. “Decent men, when placed in positions of trust, will perform decently.” The book makes the case that Ford did just that. Ford is less a natural politician and more the high school football star who accidentally stepped into the presidency. That’s not a bad thing. His competence wasn’t theatrical nor his ambition consuming. ...

** Absentee Parenting ** For a book about fatherhood, there’s a surprising lack of fathers. Darwin shuffles through as the sole emotional protagonist—grieving, pacing, detached—while the rest are mostly historical men who happened to have children. Those who shaped the world often failed their families. The book catalogs legacy, not intimacy. Structures abound—patriarchy, empire, labor—but emotion gets footnoted. My takeaway is that when it comes to being a father, trying is more than half the battle. Then get good at being funny and good at hugging. ...

** Dread not: missing this one ** Jack Campbell’s Dreadnaught reads like a war story written by someone who’s never navigated the fog of war—or bureaucracy. Surprising, given Campbell’s rank as a Navy Lt. Commander—though evidently not high enough to grasp systems theory. Dreadnaught aims for gravitas but lands somewhere between space soap and HR training video. The central emotional thread— lingering tension between Geary and Captain Desjani—feels like it wandered in from a bad fanfic. It registers as cringe. ...

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.