PositiveNature... vivid ... Through a mix of personal memoir and scientific primer, [Johnson] illuminates the history of astronomers and explorers who have been fascinated by this neighbouring world, known to the ancients as a ruddy dot shining in the night sky ... The strength of Johnson’s narrative lies in interweaving these better-known stories with her own development as a planetary geologist ... don’t expect to read much about Europe’s or India’s exploration of Mars — this is a strictly US perspective...Still, there’s no better guide to what NASA’s various Mars missions have revealed ... a true love letter to geology, on this world and others.
Daphne Merkin
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsIt may be obvious that a book about depression will be tough going. Merkin spares no detail in outlining the illness that has plagued her all her life ... Readers will need a fair amount of patience to wade through the personal details. There is a lot of angst over various family dynamics, and speculation about which parent or sibling must have been thinking what at which point in time ... Passages on suicide are among the most heartrending ... a frank, fearless, self-absorbed look at one woman's experiences. And as such, it succeeds in ways that other memoirs have not — by revealing mental illness not as the unwanted gift of a crazed genius, but as an everyday curse for everyday people.
James Gleick
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsGleick ricochets from concept to concept, counting on his smooth writing to carry advanced concepts. He drops erudite references throughout ... Occasionally Gleick gives the reader a break. A diversion into the history of time capsules is a delightful meditation on the nature of what society considers important in any given era ... Perhaps the best way to experience Time Travel is as for any dense book: by flipping back and forth through its pages, delving in for a period and then letting it rest.
Blair Braverman
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsEach of her initial forays into the north is hilarious and heart-wrenching in its own way. Braverman truly comes into her own when she leaves Alaska and returns to Norway, this time to the village of Mortenhals ... Braverman's Arctic is one of sex, drugs and violence. Yet among the brawling men of Mortenhals she finds order in arranging the village's old shop as a folk museum. Sorting Norwegian farm implements brings a long-sought peace, and she finds her northern home at last.
Hope Jahren
RaveThe Dallas Morning NewsDon’t be distracted by how pedestrian this sounds. At times upliftingly joyous, at times emotionally brutal, Lab Girl is unlike any other memoir — scientific or otherwise ... Throughout the comedic tales and the searing honesty, Jahren’s prose shines like a chunk of amber from her beloved soil. 'My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe,' she writes. 'It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away.' If Jahren will ever write about her lab again, none of the rest of us want her to walk away from it either.
Thomas Levenson
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsLevenson writes in a breezy style that emphasizes intellectual concepts over technical details. The Hunt for Vulcan is less a book about planets and physics than it is about the evolution of ideas.
David Jaher
MixedThe Dallas Morning NewsJaher does not fully explore the reason why spiritualists were so popular: the very human yearning to be in touch with loved ones who have died. It’s hard to overestimate the desire to hear from a late spouse or parent or child, and how strongly that desire can affect our need to believe in extraordinary happenings. The Witch of Lime Street is sure to be an important addition to Houdini studies, but it is neither a psychological treatise on the need to connect with the afterlife nor a triumph of skeptical reportage.
