Never Let Me Go (2005)

by Kazuo Ishiguro; Vintage International; In English; 288 pages. Life primed me to enjoy this novel: Ishiguro won the Nobel a few days after I first opened it and I already loved Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World for their rambling chronologies and narrator’s strong, if similar, voices (does Ishiguro …

Ghetto at the Center of the World (2011)

By Gordon Matthews; University of Chicago Press; 256 pp. The short version: this book offers a full, anecdote-filled entryway into a building in Hong Kong notable for its large presence of South Asians and Africans, Chungking Mansions. It provides evidence to the claim that laissez-faire governance, in conjunction with ghosts of British colonialism, leads to a society …

Who Got Einstein’s Office? (1987)

By Ed Regis; In English; 289 pages. The short version: Pretty much a hack job: variously purple, incorrect, biased, and confusing. This is science writing that is actually hyperbolically-laudatory storytelling; it's like visiting an 80-year-old professor to ask them about their field but leaving with a handful of garbled stories that you can't help but …

Logicomix (2009)

By Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos  H. Papadimitriou; Art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna; In English; 344 pages. A life story that doesn’t share in its subject’s obsessions, explaining what it is that keeps them up at night, seems to miss the point. This notion forms the core of the graphic novel Logicomix, a …