I bought this book on impulse because it was on sale and the picture on the cover was so pretty. Would this be a book of celestial maps? Well... sort of. SKY ATLAS actually ended up being more-- and less-- than what I thought it would be. In the beginning, there are a number of pictures of maps created by indigenous people and early civilizations (and even later ones!) as part of their mythological/spiritual beliefs about the sky, but then SKY ATLAS catapults into the scientific discoveries of the great minds from antiquity to the present day.
I actually haven't taken all that many hard sciences so some of this book was over my head, but I thought the author did a great job taking difficult subjects and simplifying them for the layman (layperson?). For example, comparing the theory of relativity to lying on a trampoline and then shooting a marble at the person (#rude) and the marble getting caught in the dip created by your mass. I understood that! There were also some really fascinating, tell-all-your-friends facts in here, too, like how an Egyptian vizier was executed for allegedly communicating with Saturn or how Venus apparently rotates at the speed that most people walk. Facts like these I could totally get down with and made the book totally worth it IMO, because knowledge is power! (Or... something.)
One of the best things about this book, though, is how inclusive it is. By including spiritual and mythological discoveries, Brooke-Hitching doesn't exclude indigenous people and THEIR observations of the sky. He also talks about the Middle East and Asia, and there are a TON of women scientists featured in here. Some of the things he talked about I had never learned and it was kind of cool to see how many women star-gazers there were and what their contributions to astronomy were.
Overall, SKY ATLAS ended up being a really fun and interesting read, kind of like Bill Nye for adults, and I think that the author has a really fun and accessible narrative "voice" that makes the book even more engaging, despite the difficulty of some of the subject matter.
I bought this book on impulse because it was on sale and the picture on the cover was so pretty. Would this be a book of celestial maps? Well... sort of. SKY ATLAS actually ended up being more-- and less-- than what I thought it would be. In the beginning, there are a number of pictures of maps created by indigenous people and early civilizations (and even later ones!) as part of their mythological/spiritual beliefs about the sky, but then SKY ATLAS catapults into the scientific discoveries of the great minds from antiquity to the present day.
I actually haven't taken all that many hard sciences so some of this book was over my head, but I thought the author did a great job taking difficult subjects and simplifying them for the layman (layperson?). For example, comparing the theory of relativity to lying on a trampoline and then shooting a marble at the person (#rude) and the marble getting caught in the dip created by your mass. I understood that! There were also some really fascinating, tell-all-your-friends facts in here, too, like how an Egyptian vizier was executed for allegedly communicating with Saturn or how Venus apparently rotates at the speed that most people walk. Facts like these I could totally get down with and made the book totally worth it IMO, because knowledge is power! (Or... something.)
One of the best things about this book, though, is how inclusive it is. By including spiritual and mythological discoveries, Brooke-Hitching doesn't exclude indigenous people and THEIR observations of the sky. He also talks about the Middle East and Asia, and there are a TON of women scientists featured in here. Some of the things he talked about I had never learned and it was kind of cool to see how many women star-gazers there were and what their contributions to astronomy were.
Overall, SKY ATLAS ended up being a really fun and interesting read, kind of like Bill Nye for adults, and I think that the author has a really fun and accessible narrative "voice" that makes the book even more engaging, despite the difficulty of some of the subject matter.
The intersection of feminism and pop-culture is one of my favorite topics because so often, when we see popular opinion pieces about pop-culture, the story is told from and about the cisgendered (and mostly white) male perspective. TOXIC was of particular interest to me because I came of age in the late 90s/early 00s, and that shit was toxic as fuck. I am still to this day unpacking some of the harmful messages that I ended up internalizing during that time period. And I don't think anything shows those unattainable and shameful standards for women quite as well as how the media talked about certain celebrities, who either couldn't or didn't want to follow the "rules."
I have mixed feelings about TOXIC because while the subject matter was interesting, the way the author talked about some of these women left a bad taste in my mouth. Take the Britney chapter, which dates itself because it came out pre-Britney memoir: the tone of the essay, while sympathetic, feels patronizing; and in retrospect, some of her remarks about Britney feel quite callous and at times even cruel, such as her analysis of the music video "Everytime." Ditum seems to take it as a mournful song about a breakup, but now we know that it's a heart rending ballad about the abortion Justin made her get that she wasn't allowed to talk about.
The section about Paris reads more positively, but suffers the same limitations because it also came out pre-memoir (her most recent one, I mean; she has two). I liked this chapter a lot because I really like Paris Hilton and I think the author, to her credit, really manages to capture how clever and self-effacing Paris is. However, the essay about Aaliyah was painful to read. Mostly because the focus of the essay is not so much about Aaliyah herself but how she was a victim of grooming. R. Kelly is more prominently discussed in this essay than she is, and the way Ditum talks about her, like a helpless martyred waif who was frozen in time like a bug trapped in amber, made me so upset.
I don't feel like the Amy Winehouse and Kim Kardashian chapters were very well done at all. Neither of those essays really capture how dynamic and conflicting those women are. Kim Kardashian seems to be a celebrity that people really struggle to write about because I've noticed this is a theme in other celebrity-focused books I've read. I think it's really difficult to juggle the fact that while she portrays herself as a selfish and vapid celebutante, she is an expert deflector, and she and her mom have turned their name into both a brand and empire. She also is the recipient of a metric ton of shit talk. The way people talk about her and her body (particularly during pregnancy) can be so traumatic that I am honestly in awe that she can leave her house without crying (because that is what I would be doing if it were me). Amy Winehouse was a similar recipient of that level of hate, especially in the late aughts and early 2010s. And, like, I really don't think this essay captures how she was basically destroyed by her fame; addiction almost felt like her way of self-medicating from the stress she received from being in the public eye and that is devastating. It feels very Valley of the Dolls, which basically had the message that the standards are women are such that to make do, you have to be drugged up... or perish trying.
I didn't really care about the two essays on Jennifer Anniston and Chyna, so I skimmed those.
TOXIC said some interesting things and reminded me of some very disturbing aughts trends that I'd half-forgotten (like Tila Tequila), but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you are just really interested in 2000s celebrity culture and want to read about it in a book that almost seems to emulate the same gossipy tabloid formula that it sets out to criticize.
I bought this like ten years ago, back when I was SUPER obsessed with nonfiction. I still like nonfiction but now it feels like a chore to read and I have to be in the mood for it, unless it's a memoir or one of those really poppy books about science.
THE MEDICI GIRAFFE is a book that sets out to explore how animals have, historically, been used as displays of power. It starts out with Alexander the Great's fascination with elephants and their potential for use in his armies and ends with William Randolph Hearst's private zoo, plus an epilogue that sort of skirts around China's use of pandas in global diplomacy.
This book's biggest flaw is that the topics are not cohesive. Apart from the chapters being about rich, powerful people who kept animals (or slaves-- more on that in a mo'), the people they talk about are pretty different and it didn't feel like there was a unifying theme.
So here are some bulleted thoughts.
Alexander the Great's chapter was one of the best because I loved the idea of this dude creating a two hundred strong herd of elephants that he then couldn't be fucked to train. Elephants scared horses and also men, so the armies that had them, had to have handlers who got the horses used to them and were adept at managing the elephants. But Alexander had so much conquering to do that he didn't take the time. They were basically useless. The Ptolemaic dynasty kind of feels anticlimactic after the elephant hilarity, but I did get a kick out of Ptolemy's younger son literally having a name that means sister-fucker because he married his sister. Loooooool. The Greeks apparently hated that and thought that was super gross (lots of gossip about "unholy holes"). I think he's also the guy who put statues of his mistresses everywhere. HILARIOUS. I love that kind of gossip.
Did not care at all about the Roman chapter that followed. Booooring.
Lorenzo de Medici's chapter was mildly interesting. Basically, he was like "fuck you, I'm a Medici, I own a giraffe."
There was a guy from Europe who owned a lion named Rudolph but apparently lions weren't as cool. I wished the side note about the Chinese emperor who told people to stop giving him lions as presents because he had too many was the main chapter. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in ancient China when the emperor was telling everyone that lions are totally last season, you guys. 11/10 would watch.
Josephine Bonaparte was apparently a crazy bird lady. She had so many birds. She had a lot of other animals too but then Napoleon got pissed off and told her to cut it out. The fact that she cheated on her asshole husband and had a ton of spite-birds made me like her more than I already did. After Alexander the Great's chapter, Josephine and her black swan army was the best chapter.
William Randolph Hearst's chapter was weird. The tone almost felt fangirly in parts but this guy was not a nice person. Also, his zoo animals seemed to be pretty badly treated, so that made me sad. I don't want to read about how he didn't listen to the zoo employee he hired to evaluate the health and comfort of his diseased and anxious animals (spoiler: he wasn't sliving for protection against animal cruelty) or how zoo visitors and zoo EMPLOYEES tortured the animals for fun. The only thing about this chapter that I liked was the fact that Charlie Chaplin apparently got a goofy grin while looking at zoos. YES.
The chapter that made me most uncomfy, however, was the "Human Animals" chapter, which was about Hernan Cortez and his colonization of indigenous Mexicans. I don't know, guys, something about writing about human slavery and sticking it in a chapter in a book about animals being used for power gives me the ick. Cortez was an asshole. The only good thing about this chapter was that it made me want to rewatch The Road to El Dorado, which is an excellent movie.
The epilogue about China's panda diplomacy was OK. Vox has a video about it which is way better. I don't think we like pandas because they remind us of ourselves. I think we like pandas because they look like black and white teddy bears who eat leaves.
Overall, this book was OK. I'm not going to keep it but I learned a lot of interesting things that I never learned in my history classes back in school. BRB, adding Road to El Dorado to my watch queue.
A HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE IN POPULAR CULTURE is a beautifully chaotic mess that deep-dives into the vampire mythos, tying it to actual science (rare diseases and processes of decomposition that "mimic" vampirism), goth culture, queer culture, and even actual historical figures who were slandered posthumously (most notably and infamously, Elizabeth Bathory). This is also an analysis of pop-cultural phenomena, starting from the gothic lit of the early Victorian era and ending with modern-day Dracula movies.
I thought this was wonderfully fun. The interviews with famous goths about their thoughts on vampires was quite entertaining-- she actually managed to track down and interview one of Bram Stoker's living relatives! Is it cohesive? No, but the wandering narrative is part of its charm. So many times while reading this, I found myself taking notes and thinking that Fenn seemed like the type of person that I would just love to be friends with. It was especially fun seeing vampires being discussed from the Gen-X goth lens, since vampires are goth in every sense of the word.
I'm a little surprised that she didn't bring up Fright Night (either of them) or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, though. I feel like Fright Night marries the horror and sex elements of the vampire quite nicely (well, in the original), and I think it's an even better vampire movie than Lost Boys. Likewise, Chelsea Quinn Yabro's St. Germain is a long-suffering, good-hearted vampire, who kind of feels like a direct response to the flamboyant deviancies of Lestat. They were contemporaries, too, and-- I imagine-- just as crucial in shaping vampires as mainstream, romantic figures. I definitely felt like there was a Dracula bias in this book, because it seemed like this author was curating vampires based on what she enjoyed, and while that's fine, people who are hoping for a more broad and impartial scope may be disappointed.
Overall, though, this was amazing. I'll definitely be keeping this for reference. :F
It's been a while since I picked up a book that would make my FBI handler itchy, and MOST DELICIOUS POISON seemed like just the ticket. It's written by a biologist who has a fascination for poisons, and, to quote Paracelsus, it's the dose that makes the poison.
Discussing everything from cocaine to capsaicin, MOST DELICIOUS POISON is a pretty exhaustive book that discusses some of the toxic compounds that hide inside the things that we ingest. He also points out, repeatedly, that all natural does not necessarily equal "good for you." A reminder I think a lot of people could use in the age of wellness influencers dispensing medical advice without medical degrees.
I'd give this a higher rating if not for a couple things. (1) I didn't feel like the book was organized all that well, and the overall effect was a grab bag of miscellaneous information. (2) The author really inserted himself into the narrative and sometimes this works, but a predominant theme of the book was the death of his father from alcohol use disorder (AUD). He brings it up repeatedly, even when it doesn't always makes contextual sense. As someone who just their father to brain cancer, I was sympathetic, but this was also very triggering and I wasn't expecting to see it in a book about poison food. (3) There's a single reference to autism spectrum disorder being listed with a bunch of diseases that could be potentially treated with mustard oils. I thought that was odd and something that could be potentially upsetting to readers.
Overall, this felt like a passion project and it did contain a lot of fun and interesting information, but the tone wasn't toning and I do think that the execution fell a little flat (which is probably why it has such mixed reviews for a nonfic book, which generally tend to skew high).
Just in time for Pride Month, 365 GAYS (plus one for leap year) is a comprehensive tome of many famous and inspirational LGBT+ people, spanning as many letters of that alphabet as possible (as well as including a handful of allies who performed exceptional works of allyship, such as Princess Diana, who helped normalize people who were HIV+ in a way that very few were willing to do at the time). The careers shown in here are amazing, from writers (Dorian Gray and Alice Oseman), to YouTubers (Troy Sivan and Jojo Siwa) to actresses (Kristen Stewart and Dan Levy) to politicians, activists, royalty, athletes, artists, scientists, and more. It's racially diverse as well, which is also wonderful, because I have read other books about LGBT+ folks that have, unfortunately, skewed very white. This is just a really great and important collection and the cover and illustrations are beautiful, so it's AAAART, as well.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
I kind of went into this expecting something different than what I got. I thought it would be more like this book I picked up about the history of Mustang Ranch, where it focused on the girls there and what the day-to-day was like of the prostitutes working the brothel. This book was more like an intro to Texas history with some random whorehouse trivia thrown in. I liked all the pictures and you could tell that this was a passion project for the author, but it was the most boring book about hos that I've ever read.
What a fun and unexpected surprise this was. A MIND LIKE MINE is a collection of famous neurodivergent people who have accomplished great things, ranging from past notables like Ava Lovelace and Vincent Van Gogh, to contemporaneous ones, like Serena Williams and David Chang.
As someone who lives with a mood disorder, I wish books like these had been around when I was younger. To those who are neurodivergent or living with mental health conditions, it's so inspiring to not only see people talking about their conditions like it's NBD but also being wildly successful in spite of the obstacles they face as a result of their conditions.
A MIND LIKE MINE is beautifully illustrated, and profiles on the people chosen are alternated with toolboxes on how to talk about those with diagnoses and conditions without being ablelist, and also a little bit about the disorders and treatments themselves. This is the type of book that's great for both the neurodivergent and people who want to be allies, and I really enjoyed some of the facts showcased in this book.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous activists who wear gorilla masks when they appear in public, and campaign against social inequality, inequality w/r/t the wage gap, and inequality in the art industry (especially when it comes to representation by women and people of color). I'd heard about them before in some of my other readings but I didn't know of any of their specific work, so it was cool to read a collection of their "Greatest Hits" and see how they put up flyers and did demonstrations to further equality and diversity.
It's worth noting that in the ebook, only about half of the "book" is actual content. The other half is a bibliography and index. This didn't factor into my rating but I know other people might be bothered by that. I liked the book but after a while, some of the campaigns started to feel redundant, especially with the most famous one (the one about how women have to be posing for a nude to appear in an art museum) being shown multiple times. I get it, it was a bomb campaign, but it started to lose its punch after the tenth time or whatever.
I think this is a better resource than it is a book of pleasure reading. If you're writing a paper on art or the history of feminism, I would highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this because they're cool. And it's important to illustrate (literally and figuratively) that the work of feminism is still NOT done, that women and people of color are still grossly underrepresented across multiple fields, including art, and that there are powerful people in politics who still campaign daily to not only prevent their rights from advancing but also to strip away the extant ones.
I did not know that this was a children's book when I got it but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. First, NATURE'S TREASURES is a gorgeous book. The edges of the pages are gilt and it has marvelous full-color illustrations and photos on every page. It is divided into three sections: animals, plants, and minerals, with a bonus section at the end about natural oddities (such as honeycomb and fossils). This is basically a celebration of the natural world, praising everything from pyrite (which can form cube-like crystals) to the fruits and leaves of various plants to feathers to seashells to the humble egg.
NATURE'S TREASURES is packed with all sorts of trivia. For example, giant clams get as large as a double-bed and actually get so big that they lose the ability to close and can live for over one hundred years! Puffins are also apparently the only birds that molt their beaks (they have a summer beak and a winter beak). Fossilized trees are basically living spectroscopes and they are sometimes called rainbow wood because you can tell what type of minerals formed in them based on the color. Oh, and ginkgo is so old that it predates plants that flowered or bore fruit.
This would make a great gift for a precocious kid who's into life sciences, but it would also make a gorgeous coffee table book for a nerd who loves art (because the illustrations in this book are, again, gorgeous). It's on par with some of those Eyewitness books, but more artsy, just to give you an idea of how this book is constructed. I also like that it doesn't balk at defining the scientific terms for kids.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
As a kid, I had two-- okay, three-- great loves: virtual pets, dinosaurs, and Ancient Egypt. In fact, I still think all three of those things are pretty neat today. But I only have a book on one of them, so today I'll be talking about ANCIENT EGYPT: THE DEFINITIVE VISUAL HISTORY, which is a coffee table book about... Ancient Egypt.
The production of this book is really, really nice. It's museum gift shop nice. It retails for about what you would expect to see it retail for in a museum gift shop, too, but I actually think it's worth it if you're really interested in the subject. This book covers early, middle, and late kingdoms, as well as the Greco-Roman period, and there's full color illustrations of everything from jewelry to statuettes to the tombs themselves.
There's also a ton of information packed in here. I skimmed through it pretty quickly, but thought it was interesting how even though people liked cats in Egypt, most of them weren't named (although some ancient cat ladies and cat men gave shout-outs to their kitty friends in their tombs), and I don't think they started showing up in art until about the middle kingdom and also the word for cat was "miw" (which I think is pronounced mew, lol). I also thought it was interesting how silver was apparently harder to find than gold (and therefore more prized).
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
This was such a frustrating read for me because I really wanted to like it. Unlike some of the reviewers for this book, I do share the author's politics, and I appreciated the way that Cooney discussed the colonist appropriation and whitewashing of Ancient Egypt, and how the way that we, in the modern world, glorify it is analogous to the way we (generic we) fetishize strongman leaders and absolute rule.
Unfortunately, some of these comparisons ended up feeling a bit like a stretch, which made the book feel like a painfully long TED talk or a padded-out op-ed piece. Learning that Cheops/Khufu was a jerk and Ankhenaten was just shy of a cult leader, for example, was really interesting, but it couldn't really carry the whole book, which had the dry tone of a textbook. It's clear that the author is passionate about her research and her views and I think that really comes across in the writing, it just wasn't as engaging as I would have hoped.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
I read this after MEGHAN: A HOLLYWOOD PRINCESS. I actually recommend you do that, too, because AHP is a biography of Markle before her life with Harry, and this book basically takes over where the other book left off. They are both also written from the same sympathetic perspective, and the details sync up nicely.
I bought this book because of all the negative reviews for it on Goodreads or Amazon from people who seemed to be anti-Meghan. Honestly, the hate this woman gets astounds me-- especially compared to the other royals. If you think it's due to anything but racism and classism, I suggest you check out this BuzzFeed article by Ellie Hall comparing the coverage that Meghan gets compared to Kate from the same media outlets. If you ask me, I'd say that Markle is guilty of nothing but "princessing while Black."
Having read FINDING FREEDOM, I will say that it reads like a puff piece, but it's an engaging one, and a harmless one, IMO. If you hate Markle, it probably won't change your mind, but if you're neutral or positive, it's a pretty fascinating read. I liked reading about Markle's interactions with her famous friends (including the daughter of PM Mulroney, Serena Williams, and Eddie Redmayne), her passion for cruelty-free and local goods (one that I share), and her not-so-fairytale romance with the prince. I kept annoying my family with facts I thought were interesting.
I respected Markle before reading this and I still do, now. I can't imagine the pressure of being in the public eye the way she does and I'm glad that she and Harry were able to do what they needed to do for the sake of their respective mental healths (and those of their children).
CULTURE WARLORD is a really intense and depressing work of journalism in which Talia Lavin, a Jewish reporter, goes undercover in the farthest-right bastions of the internet to interview, write about, and in some cases, catfish, some of the worst of the worst. Each chapter is an essay on various topics, ranging from millennial alt-rightists to "white" dating sites to incel forums to Christian extremists.
Like other people, I was a bit put off by the way this was organized and the way the subject matter was presented. With an author branded as "acerbic" in the book's blurb, I was expecting a more tongue-in-cheek style of writing to balance out all the awful, something in line with CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC, only less sympathetic: personal experiences and character portraits that build to the broader topics the author is trying to convey. I can see why she maybe chose not to do this: personal safety, perhaps, and a desire to not inspire more sympathy for these people by portraying them as "real" humans, but at times it made for some seriously dry reading.
I agreed with most of the author's points and I think this is a book that people should read if they want to learn more about some of the terrifying implications the rise of the alt-right means for the people they target. I'm also in awe of this author's bravery. Some of the people she encountered sounded legitimately terrifying; it just goes to show how far people go sometimes in the name of truth. But it's also a downer of a book, perhaps best read in small pieces. I binged it and I probably shouldn't have done that, as I'm seriously feeling the need for something light and happy now.
It's impossible to read this book and not hear David Attenborough's voice in your head. He's, like, the quintessential life sciences narrator. I guess this was originally published in the 70s but I'm guessing-- hoping-- it has been updated since then, since science is constantly evolving, and things are always being renamed and reclassified as we understand our world better. For example, slime molds used to be classified under the Fungi kingdom and have now, I believe, been reclassified into three classes under-- I think-- under the kingdom Protozoa.
There are all sorts of fun and interesting facts in here, like how the Grand Canyon is a sort of living timeline set in stone for scientists to peruse, or how scorpions do a fun little mating dance as they join claws, or how electric eels aren't actually eels, or how sea cucumbers launch their organs at you as a defense mechanism, or how hyenas casually talk about what's for dinner tonight, Zebra? before attacking a herd.
I'm giving it a three because sometimes the text can be incredibly dry and it's often disorienting how Attenborough starts out talking about one animal before flowing into another, or six, sometimes leaving you a little disoriented. The paragraphs are also incredibly long and dense, which makes this book feel more like a textbook and less accessible than his shows/movies. The pictures are lovely and break up the text in a nice way and part of me wishes there were more of them, even though I understand that full color pictures ramp up the costs of the book and sporadic insertion means less money.
Happy AAPI month! My project for this month is trying to read as many of the Asian-authored books I have on my Kindle that I hadn't been able to get around to for the rest of the year. THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES has been on my to-read list for the longest time because it's a collection of linked essays about the history of Chinese food in the United States.
First, a caveat: this was published in 2008 so it comes across as a little dated. Some of the statistics about immigration and demographics are probably no longer accurate now, but that's because it's a product of its times and not bad writing. Second, it bounces around a lot from subject to subject as a lot of other readers have complained. I think that was pretty typical of nonfic at the time, because that meandering style was kind of popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, but it doesn't really work quite as well here.
The hook for this story is about this year where there were 110 Powerball winners. When people looked into it, expecting fraud, they found out it was because the Powerball numbers were a match for the numbers on the back of a Chinese fortune cookie fortune. Everyone who played those numbers who got fortunes produced by that factory won. From there, the author does a deep dive into the history of American Chinese food, delving into the stories behind popular menu items like General Tso's Chicken, Chop Suey, Peking duck, fortune cookies, and even the takeout boxes themselves.
My favorite part of the book was actually near the end, when the author goes to the most famous Chinese restaurant in a variety of countries (Brazil, South Korea, Mauritius, UAE, etc.) and talks a little about how the culture they are in influenced the take on Chinese. I also liked the chapter on Peking duck, which talks about kosher Chinese food and the relationship between Jewish people living in New York and Chinese cuisine. I was a little disappointed that chain restaurants that do Chinese, like Panda Express or Pick Up Stix, weren't talked about, as well as the ubiquitous but entirely inauthentic dish, orange chicken, but I guess in a book like this it's hard to cover everything. The book also covers Japanese history a bit, talking about how the Chinese fortune cookie is probably Japanese in origin.
I think people who like nonfiction books about food will really enjoy this book. I certainly liked it a lot and thought that Lee was a great writer and had an engaging writing style. I just wish there had been a more uniform aspect to the book, though, as it jumped around a lot and some essays were better than others.
Bought on a whim and it did not disappoint! THE BIRTH OF KOREAN COOL is a fascinating look at S. Korea's international success when it comes to tech, pop music, food, and entertainment. Euny Hong, who went to school in Gangnam, infuses the pop history narrative with stories from her own time growing up in Korea, discussing how it started out as a relatively poor country with a GDP that was exceeded by places like N. Korea and Ghana.
This was honestly the perfect read for AAPI month because it offers such a fun insight into a country that often dominates the entertainment headlines now. I loved the narrative voice of Hong as she talked about everything from Psy's surprise success, to Samsung's glowup, to the popularity of once-scorned food like kimchi.
I hope she writes a follow-up because this was so entertaining. Only reason it didn't get a full five is because the tech portions were a little boring and I skimmed (eek). Apart from that, SOLID BOOK.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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