Trumpy Productions Critical Nonsense

Steven D. Levitt

Imagine a book that helped half the world make more sense. This really isn't that book. But it does answer questions that some of us have sitting around half-formed in the back of our minds. Like "Can I axe why you named Shaniqua?" and "Why is my kid suddenly smart?"
Freakonomics takes on these questions and others very similar and much better worded. Levitt is a very young economist that has been taking the older economic community by storm. He doesn't have a theme to his work, he just sits down with a stack of numbers and people shut the fuck up and listen.
The section of this book that stood out for me most dealt with abortion. Levitt states, and then backs up, that Roe vs. Wade was Americas most effective piece of crime prevention legislature. About 15 years after the legalization of abortion the nation had a huge drop in crime, about 76%. The states that had the highest rates of abortion had the largest drops in crime.
This is the type of subject material dealt with in this book. It's not pretty, and it's not politically correct, but it is mind boggling. I actually plan on reading this book over again, and will read anything that Levitt writes from here on out. This book is fantastic.

The Planets
by Dava Sobel

The first thing that hit me about this book was the enormous sense of relief that I had because I had borrowed it from the library. This book clocks in at an amazingly expensive $25 for about 270 pages of sparse writing. Each page hold only about 2 1/2 paragraphs on average. I would be more understanding if there were some color illustrations, or some maps, or something to justify the extra cost, but it seems the printing price was driven up only to make the page number and footer on each page show up in light blue. Bah. I notice now that Amazon has knocked the price down to only $12.47, which is a little more reasonable.
Each planet in this book, and also the moon, is given its own chapter with its own style. Venus is filled with poetry, Uranus is written about in a letter, and Earth has some dumb shit stuff that isn't really needed. This book isn't meant to be an informative piece of science writing. I kept needing to remind myself of this as I was reading it because a good portion of it is a repeat for anyone with an even passing knowledge of how planets were named, discovered, or thought about.
Sobel is best known for her book 'Longitude' which had rave reviews and I have never read. If given enough good of a review by someone I knew, I might read it. But this book just seemed like too much of a waste of time.

Next update: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman; Something From the Nightside by Simon Green; Dhalgren by Samuel Delany