Disclaimer: I received this ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 3.5 stars Lucy Parker’s Act Like It and Pretty Face were a spectacularly good debut and follow-up from a new author, that both guaranteed I’d read anything she delivers. Her London Celebrities series is, generally, a clever setting for a series of romances, with the West End theater scene primed to offer drama from classic artistic temperaments, professional-romantic entanglements, tabloid interference, the world being a little too small, and so on. We’re […]
Evolutionary Biology is on notice
3.5 stars I like Cordelia Fine and her work. Part of that, I’m willing to admit, may be confirmation bias — she clearly identifies herself as a feminist and is very upfront that her work is reflective of that viewpoint. But I was also trained as a scientist, and from that perspective my position is that many of her critics and detractors (and I’ll note here that for brevity’s sake I’m not including in this category people who have fundamentally sexist views and who probably […]
Slightly Slightly
Mary Balogh is a stalwart author in historical romance with whom my experience is very limited. Her Bedwyn Saga appears on NPR’s “Best Romances” list from several summers back, which I am still pretending to tackle in a very time-insensitive fashion. There are a total of six books in the series, and this review is for the first and last of them. If the rest of the books are like the first book, I will probably not read them, but if they’re more like the […]
Outdated, but easy to see why it’s popular.
I’m afraid I don’t really have much interesting commentary to contribute to the discourse around Freakonomics. The first edition was published over 10 years ago, and I strongly suspect that the contents seemed much more “rogue” then, than they do now, in the thick of a Big Data revolution where these type of interdisciplinary data-mining projects to form sociological hypotheses have become altogether common and trendy. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner have a good sense for interesting topics and an accessible approach to exploring them, as […]