May 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, an eye-opening look at how the current media landscape has incentivized us to see our fellow citizens as characters in an ongoing entertainment—and how we can fight back against this phenomenon.

Whether it’s our reality-television-star President or our expertly curated Instagram feeds, the line between fact and fiction—between what’s real and what’s fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Megan Garber explains how today’s internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters in an ongoing show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion.

In ten chapters, each themed around an element of stagecraft—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Props,” the strangers we turn into objects of our amusement, to “the Haters,” the worshipful Qanon-types who expect the prophecies of their anonymous leader to play out on live television—Garber argues that this comedy of our daily lives is quickly becoming tragedy. And we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture.

Like The Anxious Generation but about our media diet, Screen People shows why Megan Garber is one of the most respected and widely-read journalists of our day. It is an urgent, page-turning, and dazzling look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament, and how we might find our way out of the maze of misinformation and chaos.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My key take-away from this read was the new-to-me framing of social media as "two-way screens." I find that idea very useful in understanding the intense and very recent driver of our twentieth-century discovery of the joys of staring at things coupled with our ancient desire to be heard.

It's an important text but I felt it might just end my life as a sentient being from the numbing effect of too many wrong examples that don't amplify the argument (or even sometimes make sense to me) coupled to no examples of things that badly need explication.

HarperOne (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $14.99 for an ebook. Borrow it from the library.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Wasting of Borneo: Dispatches from a Vanishing World by Alex Shoumatoff

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Acclaimed naturalist Alex Shoumatoff issues a worldwide call to protect the drastically endangered rainforests of Borneo

In his eleventh book, but his first in almost two decades, seasoned travel writer Alex Shoumatoff takes readers on a journey from the woods of rural New York to the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo, documenting both the abundance of life and the threats to these vanishing Edens in a wide-ranging narrative.

Alex and his best friend, Davie, spent their formative years in the forest of Bedford, New York. As adults they grew apart, but bonded by the "imaginary jungle" of their childhood, Alex and Davie reunited fifty years later for a trip to a real jungle, in the heart of Borneo. During the intervening years, Alex had become an author and literary journalist, traveling the world to bring to light places, animals, and indigenous cultures in peril. The two reconnect and spend three weeks together on Borneo, one of the most imperiled ecosystems on earth. Insatiable demand for the palm oil ubiquitous in consumer goods is wiping out the world's most ancient and species-rich rain forest, home to the orangutan and countless other life-forms, including the Penan people, with whom Alex and Davie camp. The Penan have been living in Borneo's rain forest for millennia, but 90 percent of the lowland rain forest has already been logged and burned to make way for vast oil-palm plantations. Among the most endangered tribal people on earth, the Penan are fighting for their right to exist.

Shoumatoff condenses a lifetime of learning about what binds humans to animals, nature, and each other, culminating in a celebration of the Penan and a call for Westerners to address the palm-oil crisis and protect the biodiversity that sustains us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Shoumatoff's eightieth birthday is in about six months. This book, a long-form journalism piece written ten years or so ago, is typical of his non-fiction hobbyhorse of the roots of climate change in human activity.

He'd like us to stop fucking the planet over. Now, thank you and please. Happen I agree, so here's my plug for his eloquent plea-cum-demand.

Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) will use their share of the $13.99 you spend on the ebook well.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World by Tim Marshall

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tim Marshall, the New York Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography , analyzes the most urgent and tenacious topics in global politics and international relations by examining the borders, walls, and boundaries that divide countries and their populations.

The globe has always been a world of walls, from the Great Wall of China to Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall. But a new age of isolationism and economic nationalism is upon us, visible not just in Trump’s obsession with building a wall on the Mexico border or in Britain’s Brexit vote but in many other places as well. China has the great Firewall, holding back Western culture. Europe’s countries are walling themselves against immigrants, terrorism, and currency issues. South Africa has heavily gated communities, and massive walls or fences separate people in the Middle East, Korea, Sudan, India, and other places around the world.

In fact, at least sixty-five countries, more than a third of the world’s nation-states, have barriers along their borders. There are many reasons why walls go up, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, and politics, to name a few. Understanding what is behind these divisions is essential to understanding much of what’s going on in the world today.

As with Marshall’s first two books, The Age of Walls is a brisk read, divided by geographic region. He provides an engaging context that is often missing from political discussion and draws on his real life experiences as a reporter from hotspots around the globe. He examines how walls (which Marshall calls “monuments to the failure of politics”), borders, and barriers have been shaping our political landscape for hundreds of years, and especially since 2001, and how they figure in the diplomatic relations and geo-political events of today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Decent read, very outdated but I got interesting insights into conflicts still going on in 2026. It's time for a second edition!

I like the guy's style; it's footnoted well enough but again, it's an older book of more historical contextualizing utility than up-to-the-minute political analysis.

Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks $13.99 is fair. I agree on reading merit, but think the library's even better for an 8-year-old title that could use a second edition.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Immersions by Kyle McCarthy

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Taut and spellbinding, Immersions follows the aftermath of a celebrated dancer’s abrupt decision to quit her company and join an enclosed convent in France, and her younger sister’s obsessive conviction that her sister’s ex-husband is responsible.

Frances’s older sister Charley was a star of the modern dance world. But just as she was ascending, she fell in love with Johnny, an enigmatic trust fund artist, and married him. A few years into their turbulent marriage, Charley mysteriously leaves her dance company and joins an enclosed convent in Provence. Much to the shock of her family, she changes her name to Sister Anne and cuts off contact with the outside world.

Frances, a dancer herself, grew up in the shadow of her brilliant sister and is suddenly unmoored without her. From their first uneasy meeting, Frances has distrusted Johnny. Now, she is certain he had something to do with her sister’s abrupt abandonment of her art and family. When Frances discovers that Johnny has returned to New York, she reaches out to him, looking for answers and seeking confrontation. The two plunge into an ambiguous intimacy—diving ever deeper, as each tries to unlock the other's secrets. A slender and twisted tale of sexual coming-of-age and of the deep bonds of lust and loyalty, Immersions asks how we are made—and unmade—by desire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Toxic straight people in obsessive tidally-locked orbit around their barycenter, obsessiveness; Charley and Johnny plus Frances among them all are incapable of not acting impulsively, breaking things that can't be repaired, then replacing them with poor copies.

Your pleasure in the read will vary in strength in direct proportion to how much you enjoy the prose style. Satanic-second person is an unfavorite of mine.

Tin House/Zando Projects (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you to pass over $12.99 for an ebook. It's all second person. You decide.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (34%) by Todd Miller

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As global warming accelerates, droughts last longer, floods rise higher, and super-storms become more frequent. With increasing numbers of people on the move as a result, the business of containing them—border fortification—is booming.

In Storming the Wall, Todd Miller travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for environmental justice and sustainability. Reporting from the flashpoints of climate clashes, and from likely sites of futures battles, Miller chronicles a growing system of militarized divisions between the rich and the poor, the environmentally secure and the environmentally exposed. Stories of crisis, greed and violence are juxtaposed with powerful examples of solidarity and hope in this urgent and timely message from the frontlines of the post-Paris Agreement era.

Todd Miller's writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, Tom Dispatch, and many other places.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: At 34%, when Author Miller quoted Joseph Nevins' Dying to Live about borders being conceptually related to apartheid, I started having chest pains. I was scolded for trying to fix the world, told to go lie down and watch a stupid movie, and stop scaring the staff.

Uncharacteristically, I obeyed because I didn't want another weekend-eating hospital trip.

City Lights Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $17.95 for any edition. Well worth it if you're stout of heart and hale of constitution.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (51%) by Adam Tanner

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: How the hidden trade in our sensitive medical information became a multibillion-dollar business, but has done little to improve our health-care outcomes.

Hidden from consumers, patient medical data has become a multibillion-dollar worldwide trade between our health-care providers, drug companies, and a complex web of middlemen. This great medical-data bazaar sells copies of our prescriptions, hospital records, insurance claims, blood-test results, and more, stripped of names but still containing identifiers such as year of birth, gender, and doctor s name. As computing grows ever more sophisticated, these patient dossiers are increasingly vulnerable to re-identification, which could make them a target for identity thieves or hackers.

Paradoxically, comprehensive electronic files for patient treatment a key reason medical data exists in the first place remain an elusive goal. Even today, patients and their doctors rarely have easy access to full records that could improve care. In the evolution of medical data, the instinct for profit has outstripped patient needs. This book reveals the previously hidden story of how such a system evolved internationally.

This investigative narrative seeks to spark debate on how we can best balance the promise big data offers to advance medicine and improve lives, while preserving the rights and interests of every patients. We, the patients, deserve a say in this discussion. After all, it's our data.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: At the beginning of chapter 11, "The Patient's Data Tower of Babel," I realized how much has changed in the 10 years since this book was published. It needs a second edition.

Not at all poorly written, and still *very* useful for orienting newbies to the scope and scale of this disaster; just check it out of the library, and keep in mind how much worse it's gotten.

Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) says "$17.95 please" for an ebook to get on your device. Library it...it's out of date, but still urgent to know about.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST, (Heredia Detective #13) is first one to make it into English

DARK ECHOES OF THE PAST (Heredia Detective #13)
RAMÓ DÍAZ ETEROVIC (tr. Patrick Blaine)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon.com link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first novel by multiple-award-winning Chilean author Ramón Díaz Eterovic to be translated into English―a landmark event for fans of crime fiction.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can’t stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they’ve come to him…

Virginia Reyes’s brother, an ex–political prisoner of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was killed in an apparent robbery. Yet nothing of value was taken. The police have declared the case closed, but Virginia suspects that things aren’t quite as they appear and turns to Heredia for help. Heredia couldn’t agree more―but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something Virginia’s not telling him.

Heredia knows this is not a simple crime. His investigation proves it. Drawn back into a world where murderers nest, secrets are to kill and die for, and Pinochet’s legacy still casts a long, dark, and very threatening shadow, it’s all Heredia can do to crawl out of it alive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love a late-life career change story. I love a PI who drinks whiskey, takes mysterious women's troubles seriously, and reads books in the book I'm reading.

I'm annoyed that book thirteen is the first book to be translated from this long-running series. I'm still more annoyed that, after then translating book four, AmazonCrossing abandoned the project. "I guess they didn't sell enough of them" is an idiotic statement when referrering to a "they" that controls over half the US book-sales market and is part of a multi-billion dollar company. Define "enough" please.

Okay, the story itself: Dark as a black kidnapper's hood on a moonless night. Dark as a victim locked in a car trunk on a one-way trip to torture and death's mood. That's what it's about, after all. What happened in Chile under the US-backed Pinochet regime was full of stories like Virginia Reyes' and of course like her dead brother's.

Oh wait...maybe I have a glimmer as to why this series wasn't continued, and even maybe why the translator chose this one to start the Englishing with. Some glimmers of why I never heard much about the series crease my brain at last.

There is darkness at the heart of every empire. Look a millimeter under the shiny surface that's there to dazzle and entertain you and stories like this one are common as pig tracks. Kudos to Translator Blaine for using the dazzle to be a magnifying lens for the ugly, horrifying acts you're dazzled into not seeing. Have none of us really understood "The Lottery"? Or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"? And those two, going back fifty, seventy-five, years weren't the first in their "look past the surface" genre.

A tense, intense, dark and twisty ride through the ugliest parts of an imperial project we still operate today. The definition of extraordinary rendition exists because of this story's well-explored historical roots. It should disgust and shame us all.

Authorial styles arise from decisions on how to present ugly facts. I found Author Eterovic's style, as ably translated by Patrick Blaine...you can feel a op-flight translation just like you can top-flight prose in your own language, and this is the stuff...right up my alley.

Recreational stress with a side order of ugly history, anyone?

SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH FLORIDA, good story I feel is being misunderstood by not-targeted readers

SHAKESPEARE IN SOUTH FLORIDA
CHRISTOPH PAUL & CAROLINE MACON FLEISCHER
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this coming-of-age romantic comedy, a 17-year-old virgin film nerd, Joseph Caldo, who sees himself as a real-life art film, experiences first love, first sex, and first heartbreak in the surreal setting of South Florida while trying to make sense of Shakespeare’s stupid plays.

Caldo has no real social life, unless arguing about film online counts. Having seen so many films while struggling romantically, he has formed a theory that women pick romantic partners the way they pick which movie to watch. He’s definitely not a blockbuster, a rom com, or even a horror film, he’s more of an indie art film that is unfortunately funny. He worries he’ll never find the person who will accept and love him, the way that he accepts and loves his favorite obscure films.

That is until he meets Alexia at his grandmother's retirement home. Alexia was court-ordered to do volunteer work for her DUI but it's cool, Caldo has issues too, and it feels like they have a real connection. But there's also Valerie. The new girl at Caldo's awkwardly small school. She's a straight-A student who is attending on scholarship and is assigned the difficult task to mentor him in Shakespeare's plays. The two opposites have nothing in common except for being romantics who do nothing but fail at romance.

With first jobs that go very wrong, untimely food poisoning, and fake prom dates, Caldo unintentionally reenacts Shakespearian tropes in the heart of South Florida. Humor award-winning author, Christoph Paul, and Caroline Macon Fleischer's Shakespeare in South Florida is a quirky romantic comedy about being 17 and falling in love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Unless you're rich, a model, athlete, or a cocaine dealer, South Florida is not as glamorous as people think. It's somewhere between Hell and Purgatory."

Word.

It could be just me, but a lot of people who've read this book and weren't thrilled by it seemed to me, as I was surveying the opinion landscape around the rewad, to be fundamentally off the mark in interpreting the read. Maybe it's me that's wrong, but what I saw in the very things the reader-response reviewers took issue with and exception to, was deliberate, calculated stylistic choices.

I myownself read this as Caldo's book, the way a seventeen-year-old would write a book with maybe some stuff that isn't necessarily *correct usage* but says what he needs to say. I can't say the typos were deliberate...I only possess a DRC not a finished copy...but it gave me the feeling I was right there, in that moment, with Caldo while he figures out what the hell all these feelings are by reaching for what he's been told are Humanity's most relatable romantic thoughts and expressions (Shakespeare) and mixing it up with the cultural zeitgeist-bearers he hears and his peers accept as authoritative on love (Billie Eilish).

Author Christoph's over thirty, so I've no authentic clue as to whether he got it right for the seventeen-year-olds I want to read this book; but I grew up being told Holden Caulfield spoke to my generation of boys, which he didn't, so I'll hold off on that conversation. I'm old enough to be Caldo's grandpa. I see what I think Author Christoph's tryig to do, and I approve, like my mother approved of what Salinger was trying to do in Catcher in the Rye. I saw how different the twenty years between Salinger's book and my reading of it had made the world, yet still *got* the story and liked it a lot. No such time-gap exists here, so I hope it will be even more intimately relatable.

In a slightly muddled way I'm trying to get across the fact that I think most who rated this story lower than my four stars did so out of a misreading of what was being done in the book. I saw the same words but from a different, more immediate and more personal angle, framed by authorial intent to speak to an audience that only peripherally includes me.

If I had a late-adolescent grandson I'd give him this book. I think we'd have a grand time reading it and talking about it.

It's not a costly ebook, so maybe read a sample through my proffered lens and see if you don't put it on your ereader for real.

THE MADNESS PILL: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, can be a tough read but has a hopeful ending

THE MADNESS PILL: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia
JUSTIN GARSON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia.

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.

Centered around Solomon Snyder, the psychiatrist who ultimately did identify the madness pill, and the community of doctors and researchers he worked with, THE MADNESS PILL recounts the drug-fueled quest to cure schizophrenia. A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, Snyder worked steadily for decades to replicate the illness, ultimately finding in 1970 that amphetamines could trigger a schizophrenia-like state by flooding the brain with dopamine. Five years later, he went on to discover the dopamine receptor and proved that antipsychotic drugs work by disabling dopamine neurons. Snyder’s dopamine hypothesis inspired a generation of researchers to part ways with psychoanalysis and look for the biological basis of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Using first-hand research and interviews, THE MADNESS PILL is at once a raucous history and insightful portrait of a remarkable scientist who turned psychiatry into a respected science by transforming how mental illness is treated.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I did not think I'd review this book all that politely. The publicists who wrote the synopsis above used two words in particular that felt...off, odd, even a smidge dishonest, in my mental ear: "rollicking" and "raucous." A scientist's life's work decribed in storytelling superlatives, not scientific ones like "groundbreaking" or "paradigm-shifting"? ::side-eye::

One victory for y'all, publicists. This story as told by Author Garson does indeed rollick raucously through Solomon Snyder's life's work in neurochemistry. I'm a big proponent of talk therapy for those able to benefit from it. Those who can benefit include me (happily) when, after a major crisis that was stabilized by antidepressants, aka neurochemicals, I entered another phase of talk therapy that has presented me with ongoing benefits that I remain deeply grateful for.

Schizoaffective disorder and the multitude of brain-chemistry malfunctions related to it is not adequately addressed by talk therapy. Until Solomon Snyder got to pokin' around because there was zero progress towards curing this life-ruining disorder, there was no good outcome for its sufferers on offer anywhere. It's still a horrendously difficult condition to manage even with neurochemical models explaining some root causes of its symptoms, and chemical therapies helping manage some of devastatingly painful results of its symptoms.

Author Garson is chatty in his presentation of the facts uncovered by Sol, as Dr. Snyder seems to be universally referred to after a time, and his collaborators and even enemies. (No one who changes paradigms is going to be without enemies, detractors, and ill-wishers.) The chattiness and the organizing principle of Sol's personality and perspicacity leads to the strange sense that we're getting to know *about* Sol, getting to know how he affected people and worked with them...or didn't...but not to *know* him. The research, the systems of conducting it, aren't glossed over or lingered on. It's very uncomfortable stuff to our twenty-first century eyes. Sol was in the thick of it. He did wonders for people who previously had little to hope for; getting there, he caused harm and suffering. Those who suffer with experimental animals are strongly cautioned not to read this story; those who feel raw about issues of consent are not going to find this subject matter at all easy to contend with.

There truly is no light without shadow.

Light there is, all in despite of the dark tunnel traversed to get to it. I have known eople suffering with schizophrenia who, when medicated, felt worlds better than without these hard-won treatments. Some have not felt the positive effects outweigh the frustrations of the side-effects that come from altering one's brain chemistry long term. My sample size might not be huge but is exactly in line with the results reported, and analyzed, in Author Garson's story. The names of the chemicals, the names of the drugs, the explication of the functions of them...all of that's a lot, and be ready to use Google often. But the reason to keep your attention on the page is that this detailed information is the foundation of the genuine miracle that is the help offered to previously unhelpable sufferers.

I was so buoyed up by this end result that I was able to consider the abusive and unethical (by today's standards) actions committed and/or not opposed at any point in the process as distasteful, but not disqualifying of the results as very much positive. I do not feel that way about, say, watching a Weinstein-produced film now that I know the crimes he committed, or the awfulness of that transphobic conversion-therapy supporter whose wizard books I once enjoyed.

I offer my ethical calibration for your reference only. Your decision about learning the good with the unpleasant in search of help for the mentally ill is not for me to do more than inform. I felt all the way through the read that I'd've been even happier had Author Garson discussed ethics in specific and open terms as we went along but the way he chose to address the issues passed my muster. Barely...more would've been better.

Again I strongly caution those sensitive to animal suffering to avoid this entire topic. It will not reward you commensurate with your own distress.

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
ADAM H. JOHNSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.

How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media's role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitised Israel's war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people.

Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonisation of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I read "deep, original data-driven analysis" in the book's synopsis, I realized the read was going to be tendentious, probably ill-sourced, and reflective of the need to marshal supporters of anti-war, pro-Palestine leanings into willingness to take action. That's exactly what I got.

Since I am all those things I find it hard to fault this read for being what it's supposed to be. If you are not all those things, or are anti-all those things, you'll be very unpset by this read. I myownself think you might should read it anyway.

War crimes are committed when there are wars. Both sides commit them. But do not lose sight of the fact that one side started this war. They're looking for you to believe they didn't start it, the other side did by doing something terrible. That terrible something did not suddenly occur in an otherwise peaceful and ordinary world, though. And that terrible something did not involve bombing runs by sophisticated jet aircraft, advanced anti-personnel drone attacks, destruction of thousands of homes, missile attacks on hospitals...in other words, we're being fed false equivalences to disguise a long-term and intentional act of ethnic cleansing, perhaps rising to the standard of genocide set after the Holocaust. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak authoritatively on that. I'll say that my reading of the bloviations from each side of the conflict leads me to think there is a case to answer and a darn compelling body of evidence to compel the case to be brought in the court of public opinion.

That's why this book exists. It's a highly emotional read. It's a highly emotional subject. It's part of an effort to break through the saturation-bombing of the pro-Israel lobby's PR firms.

Are there angels in this conflict, the pure and unsullied victims of hateful demonic criminals?

No.

There are only ordinary human beings who need, but don't have, the basics you and I walk outside our intact homes to access: streets we can use easily, food stores with the planet's abundance piled up for us to choose from, water pipes to quench our thirst, sewer pipes to take our waste away to keep us healthy, hospitals to care for frail bodies' failure points, living parents and children and loved ones who, when they leave our sight, are statistically likely return to us alive and as well as they left.

War is wrong. Always and eternally wrong. It is war that created this oongoing crisis. War is a decision, a set of decisions, made by people who want *something* so much they're willing to trade your life for it. Never theirs, or the wars would be short.

I don't think for a single second that Humankind will ever be free of war. If reading words could stop war there wouldn't still be any of them.

Reading words is a slow process, thinking about them slower still. Changing minds, firing up action in people who don't like doing hard things, that kind of thing that words *can* do, all has to start somewhere.

I ask you, please, for the sake of people you have never met and will never meet: Start the process in yourself now. Pay it forward, to the best of your ability, and know from the beginning that you won't "win" or "succeed" or "finish the job" because the work is never, can never be, complete as long as there are human beings.

But let's make sure the greatest possible number of people live out their "one wild and precious life" as poet Mary Oliver taught us to think of it.

VILLAIN (Hench #2) is Author NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS long-awaited and worth the wait sequel

VILLAIN (Hench #2)
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It took five years, but the sequel I've quietly pined for has arrived. I downloaded the DRC in February, started reading it in late March, and finished a final pre-review skim last night. I treated this read as a reward, an experience to be savored, because Hench was such a completely fresh experience that it made me rethink the messaging of superhero crap, made me consider how subversion can in fact look like participation or even celebration. I liked The Boys because it's taken that idea to its logical end-point; but it came after Hench had prepared me psychologically for its storytelling mode.

The Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka "the Draft," is the organization that's responsible for everything involving superheroes. They do the recruiting, training, and funding...who ever stops to think about the accounting and expenditures that enable superheroes to blow apart entire city blocks? can you even imagine the insurance bills?!...and they create the most compelling backstories for them that they can. It means only certain tropes survive time-testing as superheroes wreak havoc in order to "save" people from supervillains.

Who also have an organizational structure centered around Leviathan, for whom our dear Anna...formerly Electric Eel's hench, now known as the supervillain "The Auditor" (if that yclepture doesn't provoke horripilation you've never filled out an accounting reimbursement justification)...serves as right-hand person. Leviathan, after the end of Hench sees the biggest rival he has (Supercollider) fall to richly deserved intimate betrayal orchestrated by Anna/The Auditor, is too depressed by the newly unchallenging world he lives in to be effective in supervillainy. Anna/The Auditor needs to snap him out of it but, in a truly tropey twist, The Draft hires a new marketing manager. One who is Anna/The Auditor's equal or possibly superior in data analytics and statistical modeling...the secret superpowers that brought Supercollider down. Now Supercollider is permanently damaged, and dies as the Draft's medics are trying to "untangle him from himself," and the Draft's new marketer finds enough dirt to plausibly, if inaccurately, pin responsibility for his death on Leviathan.

Hijinks ensue.

To look into this only-slightly-distorted mirror world is to see 2026 explained without didactic shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing. It's all here, all the guilty parties are lined up for our scorn and contumely to be unloaded on them, and exactly like real life they are everywhere not just on one side. False dichotomies like hero-v-villain aren't allowed to stand; the acts perpetrated are equally awful, are not discernably different in their results. They're not different in their motivations, either; each "side" is only out to do down the other side and then justify the carnage for everyone else later.

It is here that I come fully into my love of Author Natalie's storytelling. The battling sides are not contesting opposing ideas, arguing through competing society-wide organizational plans, they're solely and entirely focused on hurting each other in increasingly horrifying ways. What that means for non-combatants is (yet again) not part of the calculus except insofar as the optics can be used against the other side.

As Leviathan re-awakens to his supervillainous purpose, Anna/The Auditor and her scoobygroup are stretched on practical and emotional levels to achieve Leviathan's purpose and counteract the Draft's new, high-powered team that uses Anna/The Auditor's innovative techniques against them. As in Hench, the emotional costs of violence, loss, betrayal, and fanaticism are personalized while the impersonal systems grind on propelled by the suffering people behind the major players.

I think Author Natalie took her time...I understand she re-wrote this book four times...to very good effect. I got invested again immediately despite the long interval between reads. I was deftly reminded of things necessary to remember instead of infodumped on; I was also shown how time has passed in the storyverse and the changes that has wrought on significant relationships. It's a fine achievement in storytelling craft. The ending is not A Conclusion. There is openness in its action to either another sequel (yes please!) or simply room for you-the-reader to headcanon something you'd like for the characters. It works for soap operas and comic book series, why not for a supervillain's difficult choices and incomplete emotional development?

I recommend the read; it's not utterly necessary to read Hench first, but why wouldn't you want to? It's a series with a lot to say about the world we live in, and what it says I agree with, so I'm recommending it to all y'all, even the superhero/comic book averse.

After all, that described me before this series came my way.

THE TRAITOR, last major novel of Kōbō Abe's to reach Anglophones

THE TRAITOR
KŌBŌ ABE (tr. Mark Gibeau)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.40 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan's military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan's past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe's tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer's most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe's literary mastery from a new angle.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An historical novel from its inception, this read is now itself an historical artifact being sixtyish years old, but is also framed as an historical tale recounted in a period earlier than it was authored. Translator Gibeau is the first to render the historic-historical novel into English. I was initially surprised this was the case; the beginning of the story is that quick to capture one's attention with its immediate postwar framing device. It's a long story, though, with all the pacingissues that can lead to (sadly) being present.

It was an enjoyable read for me, to be sure. I say that despite needing to stop and re-read some of the middle third of the book, where lots of names and dates and cultural touchstones are presented but not explained as they would be in a work of non-fiction. There is an Afterword from Translator Gibeau that provides context and explains some cultural resonances. It's a bit difficult to read that after the confusion of the midsection of the read and relate the information to the proper spots. I found I was curious enough about the Kempetai, for example, to go looking for information on the internet while I was reading.

I'm not really doing a very persuasive job of selling you on the read am I. In truth I think this read is one for the Japanese-culture vultures. I'd love to tell all y'all to get and read it but there would be much throwing of bricks and dropping of gloves if I succeeded and too many of y'all did not want to do that much work. The techniques of surrealist literature aren't overused here, as I sometimes feel they are in his more famous work; but they're present, so the allergic are informed.

The most interesting thing about the read to most people is likely to be the cravenness of the WWII character's motivation for seeking out the truth of the Meiji-era story he discovers, that provides the direct reason for the title. It's a punchy title, isn't it? I was almost put off by its sinplicity because I thought it might be a sign of a reductive storyline. In truth, it's the only possible title for the tale unwound for our pleasure because it provides a powerful pleasure of slow-dawning realization and deepening of the reading experience.

Note to the Spoiler Stasi: you won't spot it until the author wants you to. No I won't say more.

I hope to have piqued the curiosity of enough of y'all to give this not-easy, not-simple, very rewarding effortful read a shot. Please do, it is good exercise for your little grey cells with less than the usual puzzle-like story's obfuscation.

History lessons can be entertaining, and this newly-translated novel from the renowned author of The Woman in the Dunes amply demonstrates. Please give it a try.