Between the Covers: The Supreme Court, Hard SF, and Hubble

Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine offers a thorough examination of the Supreme Court, tracing the selection of justices and landmark cases from the mid-1980s through roughly 2007. Readers get a clear look at the Court’s inner workings and how it functions day-to-day. While Toobin appears to strive for objectivity, the book struggles to maintain its neutrality, and the lingering political undercurrents detract from what could otherwise be a more commanding account.

In the realm of science fiction, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem stands out for its originality and its welcome departure from US-centric storytelling. The narrative offers a window into China’s history from the 1960s to the 1980s, while also exploring global political themes around extreme environmentalism and the desire for self-destruction. The scope of the science runs from hard Martian-style engineering to outright fantasy. One point of friction: a civilization capable of unfolding particles across dimensions and using quantum entanglement for interstellar communication would likely have moved beyond conventional VLSI etched onto 2D surfaces. That inconsistency aside, the book is engaging enough to warrant picking up the sequel.

Visual Guides and Humorous Memoirs

David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work Now is a heavily illustrated guide to modern technology, complete with detailed hand-drawn diagrams and a cast of comical mammoths. The visuals are excellent, though the explanations can run shallow. Still, it hits its mark as an engaging introduction for kids.

Gerald Durrell’s Birds, Beasts and Relatives, the second in the Corfu trilogy, recounts more family adventures with a surprisingly strong focus on reproduction—whether deliberate or reflective of the narrator’s age is unclear. It’s one of the funniest books in recent memory. Randall Munroe’s What If? 2 delivers more esoteric questions, each answered with a signature blend of rigorous science and dry humor.

Craft and Memoir: From Space to Bonds

Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s Good Prose shares insights from a Pulitzer-winning author and his longtime editor on the realities of nonfiction writing. It’s an enjoyable read for those curious about the writing process, though aspiring writers seeking actionable tips may find it lacking.

Astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan’s Handprints on Hubble provides a detailed account of her career, with special attention to the development, launch, and maintenance of the Hubble Space Telescope. The book’s coverage of in-space servicing and the intense planning and training it required is particularly compelling.

Russell Wild’s Bond Investing for Dummies (3rd edition) is a thorough, sensible guide. Published in mid-2022, its advice is generally sound, though it glosses over the unusual bond market developments of 2022—an understandable choice for a book aiming to age well, but a noted gap.

Physics Classics and Biographies

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time attempts to explain modern physics to a lay audience, from its foundations to the origins of the universe. While well-written, much of it remains dense enough to challenge even readers with a physics background. Written in 1988, it also lacks the discoveries made since, such as gravitational waves.

Laura Fermi’s Atoms in the Family is a biography of physicist Enrico Fermi written by his wife. It follows his life from childhood in Italy to his career there, his move to the United States, and his time in New York, Chicago, and Los Alamos. The unadorned prose is a refreshing change from standard professional biographies.

Development, Mysteries, and Historical Epics

Rick Battagline’s The Art of WebAssembly is a practical introduction to WASM’s textual format, covering its use and interaction with JavaScript host environments in both browsers and Node.js, with plenty of hands-on examples.

Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing follows a woman abandoned in the North Carolina marshes. The mystery plot is somewhat weak, but the richer descriptions of local flora and fauna make for pleasant reading. In Emigrant, Gersh Taicher offers an autobiographical account of leaving the USSR for Israel in the 1970s, written in Russian and recommended by family. It is funny and engaging, though somewhat self-centered. More striking is how deeply rooted the author’s worldview remains in his Soviet past, written in his late 60s after leaving at 26.

John Rocco’s How We Got to the Moon is a rare find, discovered in a public library’s science section. The book distills the engineering and training behind Apollo 11 for a middle-school audience without dumbing it down. It covers nearly every facet of the mission, down to flame deflector design and fuel tank insulation, complemented by the author’s own detailed illustrations on every page.

James Michener’s The Covenant is a sweeping historical novel about South Africa, painting a damning picture of the Afrikaans population’s role in apartheid, fueled by religious zealotry. Written in 1980, it predates the regime’s dissolution. Michener’s attempt to give equal page time to successive eras feels uneven: ancient Xhosa stories drag into soap operas, while pivotal recent events are compressed into encyclopedia-like summaries.

Deirdre Langeland’s Meltdown offers a short yet detailed account of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

Re-reads

  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  • Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley
  • Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder