Food for thought – Ring Reads

‘Fair Play’ a Mis-shelved Mystery

The cover for Louise Hegarty's Fair Play, featuring an illustration of a very charming-looking English manor casting a long shadow toward the large letters of the title.

There’s a reason murder fits so cozily inside some mystery stories. In these stories, there’s a reason behind everything; the hurt isn’t arbitrary and it isn’t senseless. In real life, too often we don’t have the answers behind our pain.

‘Breakneck’ Takes Aim at U.S., China’s Flaws – and Promise

The cover of Breakneck, with the title, subtitle, and author superimposed in sans-serif text upon a photograph of a woman in what appears to be traditional Chinese clothing standing on ground surrounded by vegetation. Behind her, rising out of a body of water, is the smog-faded image of a building being constructed.

Breakneck reads like being cornered at a party by someone itching to rant about both the U.S. and China’s approach to growth and policy. Fortunately, this rant is well researched and reasoned.

‘Feather Detective’ Gives Voice to One Woman’s Quiet Efforts

The cover for The Feather Detective, featuring an illustration of what appears to be a colorized and stylized version of the titular figure, Roxie Laybourne, with over a dozen trays of colorful and largely tropical bird specimens.

Roxie’s life is fascinating on its face, but Sweeney’s writing lets it shine with an effective choice of details and events to illustrate such an illustrious life.

‘Flower’ a Gripping, Sobering History

While the prose and structure is a nice read, there’s no making this subject matter go down easy. But then, forced family separation, rampant human rights violations, and elusive justice should never go down easy.

‘Race’ A Nail-Biting Cross-Country Roadtrip

The cover for Eric Moskowitz's debut, The Longest Hardest Race, featuring a colorized picture of two early Ford Model-Ts racing down a dirt road. The portrait of a fairly young Henry Ford is superimposed just beneath the title.

The Hardest, Longest Race at its core is about the struggle between the past and the future, between what’s true and what gets remembered.

Half-Broken a Near-Future Tale of Hope

The cover of Ode to the Half-Broken, featuring a humanoid mech looking down at a cyborg dog while crumbling buildings tower above them both.

In the acknowledgements, Suzanne Palmer calls Ode to the Half-Broken a book with grief threaded throughout every page. But for a book about grief, it brings a hopeful message that’s sorely needed.

‘Forest’ a Rallying Cry for Conservation

When the Forest Breathes is an important book detailing important work. It just also happened to be a very depressing book. But then, that seems less the fault of the trees than the state of the world we’re inflicted with.

‘Little Bosses’ a Hard but Crucial Book for Understanding Today

Multi-level marketing companies haven’t had a good reputation for a while, and recent publications like Hey, Hun, a behind-the-curtain look at MLMs through the eyes of someone who was sucked in by one, or the 2018 podcast The Dream, which examines the promise and cost that many of these companies have on their supposed “consultants.”Continue reading “‘Little Bosses’ a Hard but Crucial Book for Understanding Today”

‘Before I Forget’ A Pleasantly Gentle Story of Forgetting

An illustration of a loon on a small bit of blue water is in the center of this otherwise tan-colored cover, which also features the title and author name in hot-pink sans-serif font.

Before I Forget is a sweet, swift read that focuses on the emotions surrounding memory and self, though it shies away from some of the gnarlier aspects of end-of-life caregiving.

‘Captain’s Dinner’ Focuses on Legal Drama, Not Cannibalism

The cover to Adam Cohen's Captain's Dinner, which features the title, subtitle, and author on a detail of what looks like an 18th-century painting of four men in a rowboat on choppy sea with dark clouds overhead.

There’s a delicacy in writing about history. For one thing, having the benefit of knowing the end of a series of events from the beginning makes it easy for us to criticize the actions of those who lived it. It can be tricky, too, to not overlay the norms and expectations of today to thoseContinue reading “‘Captain’s Dinner’ Focuses on Legal Drama, Not Cannibalism”