From the introduction, it's very clear that Gary Bass is not going to spare anyone. He doesn't spare Japan for failing to engage with their own imperialism while being very explicit that much of the court was conducted by European colonial powers because it was their colonies that suffered, not them. The Soviet Union was killing a quarter million Japanese in Manchuria even as the trials went on. and that the United States has faced no serious repercussions for targeting civilians during the war (which is perhaps understandable) or since (which is much less understandable if there is truly to be a law of war).
The Deep Sky is the story of a crew of late teen/early 20s women (mostly) who make up the crew of the first interstellar spaceship. Their goal is to establish a colony on a planet orbiting another star, hence why everyone has to be capable of bearing children. There's mention of one trans dude and a couple of possibly non-binary folk, but by and large the crew is female. The story alternates between episodes on board and flashbacks to crew member Asuka's time on Earth with her family and in the ultra-competitive institute that is both training and selecting crew members.
When the story begins, Asuka and her friend Kate are about to go on a spacewalk to investigate an anomaly on the exterior of the ship. They decide to race, and Kate reaches the anomaly first and thus is the person who dies when the bomb goes off.
Despite …
The Deep Sky is the story of a crew of late teen/early 20s women (mostly) who make up the crew of the first interstellar spaceship. Their goal is to establish a colony on a planet orbiting another star, hence why everyone has to be capable of bearing children. There's mention of one trans dude and a couple of possibly non-binary folk, but by and large the crew is female. The story alternates between episodes on board and flashbacks to crew member Asuka's time on Earth with her family and in the ultra-competitive institute that is both training and selecting crew members.
When the story begins, Asuka and her friend Kate are about to go on a spacewalk to investigate an anomaly on the exterior of the ship. They decide to race, and Kate reaches the anomaly first and thus is the person who dies when the bomb goes off.
Despite being told these are highly competent people, the crew never feels like a crew trained to work together. They neglect their duties. They let personal animosities not only interfere, but drive them. To do anything at scale, you need a competent team, not just a set of competent individuals. The book seems to miss that.
To be fair, the entire sabotage plot wouldn't work like it does if this was a competent team. It'd be a very different book.
All that aside, at about halfway through the plot became less navel-gazy and I was finally able to suspend disbelief well enough to read through to the end. When something is actually happening, such as Asuka finally doing some investigation or the saboteur stepping up attacks some of the flaws can be ignored.
The safeguarding of authentic facts is essential, especially in this disruptive Orwellian age, where digital …
Chapter 1 is pure polemic. ironically, it has no real evidence of the value of evidence. though perhaps this will be a properly outlined book that makes subsequent chapter detail the evidence for evidence.
Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. …
Competence porn with a somewhat preposterous setup
3 stars
Standard Jack Reacher. Teacher blows into town. Gets hassled and rather than move on, decides to mess with the people who hassled him
The preposterous part is the entire town of Despair Colorado is complicit. Even more preposterous is that no one talks. They just run Reacher right out of town for mysterious reasons. But if you can suspend disbelief on that, the rest falls into place.
A police procedural where the police work seems like police work. Looking up documents. Canvassing for surveillance camera footage. Interviewing witnesses. Getting warrants.
The main police character, Manon Bradshaw, is annoying AF with her dating life though. I think that's intentional by the author though.
Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. …
Solid overview of Seattle bicycle activism in Seattle
4 stars
More an overview of bicycle activism than bicycling activity and culture, and much of it feels like a history of car expansion. Really good parts are how the early bicycle clubs turned explicitly into car clubs and drove the first car expansion in Seattle. Also, the book does not avoid the racism that touched both cycling and car expansion.
What if you took a very modern female chemist who expects everyone to treat her based on her brains, skills, and accomplishments and dropped her in a misogynist chemistry lab in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Rather than go along to get along she is blunt, direct, and uncompromising. Things go about as well as you would expect for an unmarried mother who challenges the powers that be and the status quo.
I'm guessing a lot of people will love this book because Elizabeth Zott is uncompromising and fights the good fight. It wasn't enough for me, and I bounced off the first half of the book because it is really slow, setting up the character and situation with a litany of sexism.
But I think the part that got me the most was that the setup felt too constructed. For example, a secretary from Zott's employment becomes the typist for a minister who just so happened to have been a pen pal of Zott's former love. Everything was just too neatly tied together.
