Most research collects data on men, and if one thinks it can be applied to women, think again! Not only can research be unhelpful with regard to women, it can be detrimental. Criado Perez looks at the lives of women and how much better women‒as well as society‒would be if women's contributions, as well as their needs, were actually taken into account. Well-researched, well-footnoted work. Written in a spunky, engaging style. Very eye-opening.
Planet of the Apes: Visionaires by Dana Gould, adapted from Rod Serling's scripts, with art by Chad Lewis (2018) 112 pages
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf (2020) 280 pages
X-Men: Days of Future Past by Chris Claremont with art by John Byrne (1981) 184 pages
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (2018) 159 pages
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells (2018) 150 pages
I really like the GraphicAudio dramatized adaptations available on Hoopla. They are narrated by David Cui Cui with a full cast of actors providing the other character voices. I'm going to make my way through the whole series because they are each short and that works for my commutes. Murderbot is an unnamed construct (part robot, part organic) Security Unit. Corporations are still very much in charge in this future. He was contracted for Security on a certain planet and under mysterious circumstances he murdered many people. After an attempted memory-wipe and going rogue, he is a free-agent Sec Unit with a lot of guilt. Murderbot is what he calls himself. No one else does. As a character, he is coded as being neurodivergent. He is always anxious and prefers watching media, particularly sci-fi serials, to in-person interactions. Each of these three novels contain some futuristic corporate intrigue and a couple scenes of laser gun action. Murderbot has a quirky way of looking at the world. He is the only recurring character. These three all feel a bit expositional. There is a larger hinted corporate conspiracy that may have major reveals in the fourth book, and characters from book one may return.
Archeology is fascinating to me. This is a well-written science book that is not too academic. Sykes presents a great overview of the latest findings and new interpretations of old findings to thoroughly explore all that we know and understand about Neanderthals currently. Each chapter begins with an italicized paragraph to put you in the mindset of our stone age kin, and these can be quite poetic in describing their environment. I found the chapter on the variety of stone knapping techniques to be a bit difficult to push through. However, all the chapters are great at challenging our assumptions of what we think we know about their lives.
Jenna Metcalf, 13, has lived with her grandmother since she was three, when her mother disappeared from the elephant sanctuary that her parents ran after a dead body was found. Her father had a breakdown and has been living in a mental facility all these years. Jenna has never fit in anywhere, and spends her life reading her mother's journals, while keeping her eye on missing persons reports online, hoping that her mother is still alive and will be found someday.
After earning enough money babysitting, she reaches out to a detective (Vic Stanhope) whose name strongly resembles the name of the police investigator who came to the elephant sanctuary the night of the murder/disappearance. He spends most of his time drinking now. Not one to hedge her bets, Jenna also finds the name of a psychic (Serenity Jones) who used to be famous for finding missing people until she provided dramatically bad information for a senator and his wife, whose baby had been kidnapped. Serenity now makes a living giving ten-dollar readings. The three of them begin to work together, after several fits and starts. The pieces begin to come together in chapters delineated by the various characters' points of view. The results were not at all what I was expecting. Tremendously good read. And fascinating facts about elephants provide a superb framework for the story.
Elizabeth Zott is not your average graduate student in chemistry for the 1950s. For one thing, she's female. She's been undermined, underpaid, and sexually assaulted, but she is very, very smart. She meets her match when she goes to Calvin Evans' lab to obtain some beakers, because her own lab is severely under-resourced. Fast forward six years, and she's making a living on a television cooking show, insisting on doing it her way, not dressed in sexy clothing like the network wants. And she teaches the in-studio and television viewers the chemistry of cooking, with the viewers—mostly women—whipping out notebooks.
I don't want to add any spoilers for those who aren't aware of the storyline and/or are in the midst of watching the Apple TV series. But I need to say that this book is one of the most circulated books since it was published in April 2022. It's only now starting to find its way onto the library's shelves, rather than to constantly fill holds. I finally got my hands on it and it was so worth the wait!
I read this non-fiction graphic novel on the Libby app. The chapter breakdown is Listen, Watch, Click, Touch, Listen. Within these sections Radtke references various social psychology studies. She shares personal stories and probes our American cultural habits. Certain pages combine visuals and text in an especially meaningful way that I wish I could share as a meme on social media. However, the overall connection between the concepts felt disjointed. Each old generation blames new technology for breaking down how connected we are to those close to us. Radtke also shows that technology should not be the scapegoat for our sense of isolation. Loneliness is surely a complex concept to study. Ultimately this doesn't entirely succeed in tying together the different approaches to thinking about loneliness into a deeper understanding of the issue, and what to do about it, if we see it as a problem.
Author/biologist John Shivik writes animatedly (pun intended), beginning with animals he has known and characteristics that made them special to him. He also informs us that animal research was set back 100 years because of a biologist who decreed in 1896 that studying animal personalities was plain wrong. Until recently, researchers who indicated that animals had personalities would be considered to be "unscientific, wishy-washy, and subjective sentimentalists." That attitude has now shifted. Shivik's book compiles recent studies, some quite impressive, based on their length of time and the number of animals studied, about how animals can be categorized into Myers-Briggs personality groups and then followed to learn more about them. Just a small sampling of animals studied this way: spiders, bees, fish, bats, dolphins, cougars, elephants, monkeys.
Present at the Creation : the story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider by Amir Aczel. 271 p.
