PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleThe Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird is a feel-good story. That is, once you’re done feeling pretty darn awful about the way Americans treated these living symbols of national greatness throughout much of the country’s past ... [an] engaging and highly detailed cultural and natural history of the unofficial national bird ... Davis deftly brings alive the bald eagle as a real animal, separate from both the myths of its rapaciousness and the symbolic majesty that at times has made the birds emblems for organizations ranging from the National Rifle Association to the National Wildlife Foundation ... The Bald Eagle does bog down in stretches, mainly because Davis never met an eagle fact he didn’t like. Sometimes the minutiae, especially the extended account early in the book describing the origins and evolution of the bald eagle’s depiction on the Great Seal of the United States, slows the story down. More successful is Davis’ moving depiction of the toll that the pesticide DDT took on bald eagles at a time when the birds had finally transcended the numerous myths that nearly doomed them.
Chuck Klosterman
PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleHis extended description of the dreaded AOL login sequence, with its dial tone, beeps and white noise is positively masterful. He’ll deftly slip in a one-liner ... Klosterman deploys footnotes strategically, giving those readers who bother to read them little bonuses ... The Nineties experience is akin to ruminating in between bong hits on the world that is and the world that should be with a well-read pal who’s way more up than you on Nirvana—a band that receives considerable, perhaps excessive, attention from Klosterman ... Klosterman doesn’t thunder from the mountaintop and is modest about his conclusions, sometimes undermining himself within the same sentence ... And while this is a remarkably Trump-free book, The Nineties might help us all answer that 1980s musical question posed by Talking Heads, \'Well, how did I get here?\'
Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleAfter delving into Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros’ engaging and sometimes enraging The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis, you may find it difficult to remain passive about climate change for a whole lot longer ... The atlas uses Conklin’s beautiful maps, each crafted from a sheet of green macroalgae that she bleached in the sun and transformed into parchment, to illustrate case studies that focus on vulnerable locations around the world. It serves as a compelling overview of the diverse range of dangers that pollution and climate change pose to marine environments and coastal cities ... Climate change can be pretty overwhelming, and the atlas succeeds in taking the impacts out of the realm of the theoretical and making them real ... Despite the efforts of Conklin and Psaros, the book isn’t always the most relaxing read. They acknowledge that some readers will dip in and out rather than going cover to cover. And if your earth science days are somewhere in the distant past, it’s best to simply slow down and absorb such terms as foraminifera, syzygy and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum as they come up. The authors do their best to introduce and explain a dizzying array of scientific terms, and each chapter also takes an everyday word — technology, rights, power — and encourages readers to rethink them within the context of the natural world and environmental justice ... as dire as the situation may seem, Conklin and Psaros avoid eco-scolding and despair in favor of promoting awareness and individual actions.
Joel Selvin
PositiveSan Francisco ChronicleSelvin goes deep, drilling down to the musical localism of individual high schools, most notably West L.A.’s University High ... The image of an exhausted Tina Turner drenched in sweat after dozens of takes, then stripping down to her bra and asking to lower the studio lights before starting all over again, is unforgettable ... If Altamont marked the premature end of the 1960s, Hollywood Eden is the decade’s origin story, capturing the lingering 1950s and the transition in Southern California music from surfing and hot rods to the singer-songwriters of the canyons.
Laurence Bergreen
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleDrake’s enslaving history plays only a minor role in Bergreen’s epic of adventure and empire, which looks in far, far greater detail at the mariner’s circumnavigation of the globe, his defeat of the Armada, and, as the subtitle suggests, how his relentless plundering on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I helped fuel Britain’s rise ... Despite Bergreen’s best efforts, Drake remains a rather remote, often contradictory figure. Drake’s ultimate renunciation of slavery receives little attention ... Occasionally, Bergreen minimizes Drake’s excesses ... Bergreen aptly captures the times Drake lived in, as well as the perils and wonders of the circumnavigation ... One disappointment from a local perspective is that the book never addresses the questions of where (or even whether) Drake landed in California ... Bergreen’s book is unlikely to change the opinions of those who have already made up their minds about Drake, whether they regard him as a hero or an oppressor. But for anyone open to a comprehensive look at Drake, in all his contradictions, In Search of Kingdom is a lively and compelling history of a man whose blend of audacity, piety and cruelty changed the world.
Megan Rapinoe
PositiveThe San Francisco Chronicle... spirited ... One Life makes clear that Rapinoe’s battles go far beyond the struggle for pay equity and soccer glory. If not exactly a Rules For Radicals, the book (co-written with British author Emma Brockes) is as much about activism as sport ... Beyond a fair amount of well-intentioned sloganeering, Rapinoe illuminates her upbringing in Redding as the daughter of loving and conservative parents ... Powered by her just do it ferocity, Rapinoe isn’t an especially introspective narrator and flits from incident to incident without always revealing much about her feelings along the way. But if neither a great nor conventional sports biography, One Life may be an impactful one. It’s a big f— you (she does like her f-bombs) to the \'Shut up and dribble\' crowd that tried to silence the activism of Rapinoe and the likes of LeBron James ... The book is also a reminder to aspiring athletes about a world and responsibilities beyond the games they play. Rapinoe came of age before the rise of the youth sports-industrial complex and laments the negative messaging sent to kids who are fast-tracked for glory or dismissed as has-beens by age 12 ... makes it clear that Rapinoe’s greatest accomplishments may ultimately come away from the soccer pitch. She’s a new kind of American hero. Or, as Tom Hanks said at a gala honoring Rapinoe, \'a fine daughter of our great country.\'
