* Cubed by Ernö Rubik

Yes, the author of Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All is indeed the creator of the eponymous cube–and I found the book to be every bit as frustrating as the puzzle. The author and creator needs us to know he’s very smart and has succeeded in many endeavors. He also goes on mansplaining tangents about creativity, how to organize one’s time, and many other topics. I hated it all.

** Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty focuses on the changes in the Texas laws that followed a Supreme Court decision that the death penalty, as enforced at the time (early 70s), was unconstitutional. Using a handful of cases, it describes how lawmakers, prison officials, defense attorneys, and inmates fought for death or life. The blow-by-blow can get a little tedious but it seems that the death penalty may, in fact, disappear. Perhaps…

* A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Like violence and vigilante justice? Then you will love A Small Town, in which, after a terrifying prison escape and an unsuccessful quest to find the escapees, the police chief of the small town of the title goes on an undercover road trip and killing spree. I suppose we are presumed to admire her feat, although it’s completely unclear to me why she cannot simply tip off the appropriate authorities with the locations of the suspects. At least a few could be caught completely legally, it seems. Others would be more challenging, for sure, but it’s unsettling to think that the killings could be thought of as appropriate. Less lethally, the heroine’s “happily ever after” ending as wife and mother seems embarrassingly 19th Century… 

*** Many Rivers to Cross by Peter Robinson

Many Rivers to Cross manages the feat of describing an investigation of two potential murders that could be part of a complicated, cross-border conspiracy–but might not–as an exciting, surprise-driven story that even promises a juicy follow-up. I could do without the systematic description of every piece of music the good inspector listens to, but the plot and the way it unfolds is always gripping.

** How You Say It by Katherine Kinzler

How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You explores how the way we speak–our accent, our particular dialect–very much shapes the way we are perceived by others, more, the author argues, than other factors I would have thought more essential such as race. I’m not entirely convinced, and the book is a bit messily organized, but the experiments it relates are very interesting.

** If Then by Jill Lepore

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future struck me as a strange book. It claims to describe the ill-fated trajectory of the Simulmatics Corporation, a very early big data/AI company, as we would call it today, but I felt its real aim was to tell us how evil big data and AI are–which is quite another topic, and not something that can be demonstrated through the story of one player, in any case.

Back to Simulmatics. Founded in 1959, it saw the possibility of using data–painstakingly gathered through face-to-face interviews and coded in unwieldy punchcards–to forecast the strategies of consumer good merchants and political campaigns alike. If it had stuck to breakfast cereals, no one would have cared much, but predicting the outcome of presidential campaigns or, worse, the Vietnam War, was just too much.

My favorite parts of the books were the descriptions of those ancient computers, large as rooms and less powerful than a simple electronic calculator; of the people tending to said computers, lots of women since the work was bencher men (ha!); and no internet to share data between machines. And, as today, the weakness was not so much the computers or their software, but the lack of good data sets. Some things never change.

*** I’ll Be Seeing You by Elizabeth Berg

I’ll Be Seeing You is the bittersweet story of how the author and her aging parents navigated their difficult transition from independence to so-called independent living as her father’s dementia worsened and her mother’s patience with him waned. She makes it very clear how hard it is to live with someone with dementia, although it seems her mother’s struggles were not always accepted for what they were (perhaps because her mother would not go along with the choices her daughters were making for her, however logical the choices were.) I particularly appreciated the substory of her mother’s struggling with losing her sister, and how hard it is to find oneself more and more alone with age.

*** Who Gets in and Why by Jeffrey Selingo

Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions is a fascinating account of how college admissions really work and should be required reading for all college counselors (and highly recommended to anxious parents, to boot!) The author dispassionately dissects the industry of higher education–and it is an industry, for sure, complete with ferocious marketing tactics and disingenuous customer manipulation, especially since the customers are under-age and impressionable. His thesis, that so-called elite universities are remarkable mostly for whom they attract and not the quality of their teaching, has much truth to it, but he could be more transparent about the fact that prestigious companies recruit heavily from those elite universities, and often exclusively from them.  (This is silly, in my mind, but still true, and parents and students should be made aware of it.)

*** Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Are you convinced that Neanderthals are brutish subhumans, easily overcome by clever Homo Sapiens? Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art sets out to demonstrate that it’s just not true, based on a carefully review of the latest research. It’s not easy, since they left very little behind, mostly stones cut to butcher or otherwise be used as tools, and hundreds of millennia have passed. Still, we discover that they had sophisticated techniques to cut the stones, butcher game, clothe themselves, and eat–and even engage in funeral rites. It’s a good thing they were pretty smart since their genes survive in many of us!

*** What we Carry by Maya Lang

What we Carry starts with a mysterious story her mother told her about how mothers sometimes have to choose between themselves and their children. And her mother, after a lifetime of devotion to her, suddenly refuses to help when she grows overwhelmed with postpartum depression. As she juggles her daughter, writing, and eventually taking care of her ailing mother, she unearths a completely unknown history of her mother as a young woman.  Beautifully told and a reminder of how very helpful it is to not keep family secrets.