Hi friends!
When I was lying in bed at 4:30am this morning feeling very uncomfortable and wondering why I was still pregnant, I thought of many funny and clever things to write in this blog post. Unfortunately, we are t-minus 6 days overdue and counting on the arrival of baby number two, and I have forgotten all of those clever things now that I sit down to write this. Oh well. While sitting around awaiting baby’s long-delayed arrival, I’ve had the chance to read a few excellent books this month. For expectant mothers, I highly recommend repressing nesting instincts in favor of reading books to prepare for your upcoming new one.* Thanks to my sister, Shelby, and my sister-in-law, Rachel, for recommending a few of these reads.
As always, let me know if you all have any recommendations for future reading or thoughts about these books.
Happy reading!
Tonya
*This might only work if you have a wonderful husband who channels those nesting instincts and decides to do all the cleaning and organizing for you.
Showdown at Gucci Gulch by Jeffrey Birnbaum, Alan Murray
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: For those very interested in public policy and/or tax reform
Review: This book is an in-depth case study of the legislative process that led to the Tax Reform Act of 1986. As a policy analyst, I loved reading about a time when Congress actually functioned as intended, worked with the Executive and passed a piece of sweeping, landmark legislation that incorporated many legitimate and beneficial aspects of tax reform. After reading the book, I came away with the impression that passing any piece of major legislation is nothing short of an enormous miracle. This book highlighted for me the complexity of negotiating legislation and balancing the interests of not only individual legislators and the executive, but also a vast array of special interests representing essentially every major industry in America. Hey, everyone has to pay taxes. Overall, I think the book was a little too in-depth with the authors relating every precarious step and near-derailing of the whole bill. To be honest, it made be doubt whether legislation like this could be passed again in the current political climate. Kind of a depressing take-away, but it’s kind of a depressing state of affairs when Congress is so dysfunctional that they can’t fulfill their most basic Constitutional prerogatives and pass a budget, let alone reform the overly-complex and hole-ridden tax code. Sorry to end on a downer.
Rating: ★★ / G
Recommendation: Not really
Review: I read Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization last summer and really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t find much to like in this book. Smil basically shoots down every energy reform policy of the past decade and explains with myriad numbers and charts why none of them are practical or can be implemented in promised/needed time frames. After condemning all these proposals, he fails to offer any solution of his own, or even thoughts about a path forward except to effectively say that energy change takes a horrendous amount of time and there’s no way we can implement the initiatives needed to address climate change and other pressing energy needs in a timely manner. Not exactly what I was looking for in a good policy book, but I guess that might just be the state of the world.
*Sheesh, after reading the previous review and this one, you can probably tell that I’m not in a very good mood while writing this. My only justification is that I’m 10 months + pregnant and don’t feel like I’m anywhere near going into labor. I think that would put anyone in a bad mood.
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: Yes, for those who love science and the history of science!
Review: Elements and the study of them, have built and destroyed fortunes and kingdoms, and this book tells the intriguing, compelling, and twisting story of the periodic table and its members. It's a collection of entertaining science anecdotes all tied together by the theme of the periodic table. In its pages you’ll find stories as wide ranging as King Midas, the Manhattan project, the discovery of DNA, the extinction of dinosaurs, and the creation of the earth and universe. As elements tie together all things in the universe, it seems appropriate that this book ties together a plethora of stories and themes all under the genius and simplicity of the periodic table.
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: Yes, for anyone who uses electricity
Review: The GRID! The title reminded me of Tolkien’s The Ring, and to be honest, the comparison is a fair one. Like The Ring, The Grid is intrinsically linked to power and conveys an aura of mysteriousness and the unknown. Bakke pretty much describes it as a type of One Ring, and spends a good deal of the book describing all the numerous shortcomings and issues with the grid. For what might be the most important infrastructure in America, it is astounding to learn the deficiencies in its physical and organizational structure. One of the things that I liked about the book is that it talked about more than just the many technical issues with the grid. Bakke is an anthropologist by trade and focuses a lot on how people interact with the grid and the political and organizational issues that impact it. The big take-away I had from this book is that any energy reforms we would every want to implement are infeasible and incompatible with the current grid that we have. Any attempts to reform, upgrade, or modernize the great will be extremely capital intensive and involve cooperation from politicians, utilities companies, regulatory bodies, and consumers. While she doesn’t offer any concrete solutions to these problems beyond saying that everyone will have to work together, I still found this book enlightening, helpful, and even a little hopeful.
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: Yes, for those who love fantasy and dragon novels
Review: I grew up reading Anne McCaffrey’s and others’ dragon rider books, so this book felt like a trip down memory lane in a lot of ways. Novik combines dragon riding with the Napoleonic Wars in this, the first of nine books in her Tameraire series. This setting makes an excellent backdrop for her to tell exciting and compelling stories that explore everything from gender and class roles in 19th century Europe to geopolitics and the laws of piracy. The story proceeds in a fairly expected manner once you understand the premise: a British Naval captain seizes a dragon egg from a captured French vessel and bonds with the hatchling, going on to join England’s Air Corp of dragon riders, tasked with protecting the island nation from Napoleon’s own fleet of dragon riders. To be honest, the human protagonist was not entirely likable from our 21st century perspectives, as Novik tries to accurately convey the gender and class sentiments of the time, sometimes in ways that seem ridiculous to our modern values, but he did loosen up as the book progressed. All in all, it was a fun, quick read, and I’ll definitely read the next one, but I’m not sure I can commit to all nine.
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: Yes
Review: I’m inclined to like Giridhardas book and agree with his overall message that public institutions like government need to be strengthened and improved to address the most pressing social and economic problems our country faces, especially growing inequality between rich and poor. Giridhardas points out a trend that I have also observed in my government work that since the Reagan era people have labeled government as the root of society’s problems and increasingly turned to the private sector to solve issues that have historically been in the public arena. No institution or group is above blame in this book as Giridhardas accuses elites of creating and worsening the growing inequality and economic problems that vast swathes of the American public are experiencing and then swooping in with clever solutions to slap band-aids on the problems that they created in the first place through charitable giving and the idea that they can “do well while doing good.” He asserts that rather than surrendering the solving of public issues to a private group of elites who in many cases have direct conflicts of interest in solving these problems, we should seek to restore people’s faith in public institutions like government by addressing the problems that exist there to ensure that the government actually serves the public’s interest. There’s much to argue about and disagree with in this book, but I can definitely get behind that idea.
Rating: ★★★★ / G
Recommendation: Yes
Review: I watched the movie of the same title on Netflix this month and decided to read the book to find out the real story. Actually, the movie did a fairly good job telling it, and I recommend watching that as well, but as is always true in book-to-movie adaptations, the book was better. This was another one of those books that made me appreciate … well…. books! I will never know what it’s like to grow up in rural Malawi, and I hope that neither I nor my children will ever truly know what it’s like to face starvation and famine, but through Kamkwamba’s simple and direct voice, I now have more empathy with rural Malawians and better understanding of their circumstances. Kamkwamba tells his story without dramatics or exaggeration and focuses just as much on technical details, like how he crafted from old nails and a maize husk the drill that he used to build his first windmill, as he does on the life-changing impact his miraculous invention has had on the lives of his family and his village. Following a disastrous famine in 2001, Kamkwamba builds an electricity-producing wind turbine using an old energy textbook found in his local library and scraps from a nearby junkyard. That’s right. Books rule! And so do junkyards, I guess?... I was most impressed by his curiosity and desire to learn. It helped me realize how much I take for granted my own education and the amazing access I had and continue to have to life-changing knowledge.
Rating: ★★ / G
Recommendation: Maybe…To those who enjoy teenage romance novels, which let's face it, is more of us than probably like to admit it.
Review: This book follows all the typical trappings of a teenage romance novel, which I'm not going to lie I occasionally indulge in. Once you read the summary, you can fairly well predict what’s going to happen from beginning to end – yes, even that plot twist. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I enjoyed this one, though I considered it a kind of guilty pleasure. The boy was cute, the girl was clever, interesting, and it was fun to experience the world from her perspective. I think that’s about all you can ask for in this type of book.
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