BookOwl

  4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* Sea of Tranquility is one of those books that absolutely breaks your brain, but in the good way, where you come out of it with a different perspective of reality. I read Station Eleven and really enjoyed its TV adaptation, so it was a no-brainer to pick up Sea of Tranquility from the library. While a relatively small volume, the story punches well above its weight. So, it’s no surprise then that this book won in the science fiction category in the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards. “My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that  now , after all these millennia of false alarms,  now  is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” Yes, Sea of Tranquility is a time travel adventure w...

  *Spoiler alert!* 4/5 stars Because this book is not written in the most optimistic of tones, upon finishing it I had to take some time to digest its findings before I wrote this review. Mindfulness and deep breathing were also required. Nine Black Robes , by knowledgeable court reporter Joan Biskupic, is a historic look at the Supreme Court’s dramatic swing to the right. One could be forgiven for thinking that this shift seemed to happen more recently, but Biskupic reveals that the Court has been for decades moving rightward incrementally. The culmination of decades of judicial appointments—at the high court and lower courts alike—influenced by conservative legal groups, such as the Federalist Society, was the striking down of the 50-year-old precedent of Roe v Wade that protected a woman’s constitutional right to make decisions about her reproductive life. (You have to laugh, otherwise you are going to cry. I am fun at parties.) Notwithstanding whether or not one feels th...

4/5 stars *Spoiler alert!* How to Stand Up to a Dictator is by Nobel Prize-winning Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa. This book chronicles her life in both the Philippines—where she was born—and the United States, where she came up in the journalism profession in its golden age. While it covers her whole career, it particularly focuses on her high-profile fights against former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Seeing the rise of disinformation on a global level, Ressa founded her own media company, Rappler, with a few journalist friends. The goal being to try and design a media company that was as agile in challenging disinformation as disinformation itself was given a massive platform combined with those knowledgeable in propaganda and censorship pulling the strings. Why should we care about disinformation and the concurrent rise of far-right elements? Well, democracy is inherently vulnerable when people cannot agree on the basic reality we all inhabit. Disinformation i...

  *Spoilers ahead!* 4.5/5 stars "The enduring lesson of the Trump years and beyond is that the law is a fragile arrangement of norms, suggestions, and rules. It is not, we learned, self-enforcing." Legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate , and host of the Amicus  podcast, has authored an outstanding book looking at women from all corners of the law uniting during the Trump administration to fight injustices of all kinds.  This is one of those books you need to fight back a sense of demotivating despair and nihilism when it feels like the world has become unhinged and chaotic. Especially after the Dobbs decision, which eviscerated whatever was left of Roe and handed it to the states to make their own decisions on how to regulate women's bodies. (I'll admit I felt extremely discouraged.) To my great shame, the only woman profiled in the book that I had previously heard about was Sally Yates, the interim Attorney General between the Obama and Trump ad...

*Spoiler warning!* 4.5/5 stars I was listening to a podcast episode recently that described our collective pandemic moment as a sort of disjointedness, that such crises like COVID-19 have disconnected us from the future we envisioned for ourselves, leaving us adrift in time. This disjointedness is a very powerful presence in The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.  The Sentence is a story of an indigenous Minnesota woman, Tookie, whose life was upended first by a stint in jail, then by the COVID-19 pandemic and the concurrent haunting of the bookstore she now works at by a dead customer (Flora). As someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, I interpreted this haunting as more psychological than the presence of a specter in a horror novel (not that the horror was any less real).  And after thinking about the book's title more, it made the book's various threads come together, the "sentence" representing everything from Tookie's fierce love of books, her incarceration, he...