3.5 Stars

Best for:
Fans of gentle storytelling and humor.

In a nutshell:
Comedian and writer Gondelman tells stories from his life, usually with a humorous take, and often with a bit more self-awareness than one gets from such books.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’m most familiar with Gondelman as a panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and I follow him on BlueSky, but didn’t realize he had a book, so figured I would check it out.

Review:
This is a collection of essays that I enjoyed listening to, thought I can’t say that I am going to revisit it any time soon. Each story was mildly funny and/or heartfelt, and frankly this week I needed something that wasn’t all doom and gloom, but I didn’t find myself heavily relating to it or making a note to share it with my friends. It felt like a really well-crafted dessert.

Gondelman seems to put more thought into his words than some other comedians who write memoirs or collections of essays. This makes sense, as he’s also a writer, and is aware of the power of words. And he seems to put action behind his words – the chapter on watching the NFL to honor and feel close to his dying grandmother (and her memory after she passed) was balanced with him sharing his awareness of how problematic the NFL is, and actions he took in an attempt to counteract that.

Not that it was his goal, but after reading this, I feel fairly firm in my belief that I would enjoy just hanging out with him as a person. He seems genuinely interested in contributing positively to the world, and I think through his writing and comedy he’s doing that.

Four Stars

Best for:
Those who have a feeling that there’s something wrong with current systems of immigration and borders but wants to put some facts behind that.

In a nutshell:
Authors Bradley and de Noronha look at all the ways that borders — and the enforcement of immigration associated with them — are a negative for society, and offer some ideas for ways to abolish them.

Worth quoting:
“Borders do not materialize only at the edges of national territory, in airports, or at border walls. In fact, borders are everyday and everywhere, determining how people relate to partners, employers and the police where they live and work, and their access to health care and welfare support.”

“Campaigns for citizenship for particular groups of migrants function to reinforce the notion that you have to be a particular kind of person — a citizen, an insider, someone who belongs — in order to access fundamental rights.”

(I ended up underlining passages on nearly every page of the book.)

Why I chose it:
My partner read it and recommended it to me, as he knows I am highly skeptical of borders.

Review:
I am someone who, as of about six months ago, has held dual citizenship: US and UK. I moved to the UK in 2018 with my partner, who was able to secure a work visa for himself and a dependent visa for me. Because of immigration rules he was limited in the type of work he could do, and when he lost his job nearly two years after we moved here, we were trapped until he could find other work; if we let the country, we’d have to wait a year to reapply. By that point I had a job, but not visa sponsorship, so it didn’t really matter. We spent thousands of pounds on fees and solicitors to get the right to remain and then our citizenship, because we didn’t want to risk having to leave the country we now consider home. But we were super lucky because we had the resources to do all of this, and if it hadn’t worked out, we could have gone back to the US, found jobs, and built a different life there.

But for many people, migration is born out of necessity; they’re leaving challenging social or economic situations in their country of birth, or perhaps they’ve been trafficked, or their parents brought them when they were small children and they don’t have any connection to their ‘home’ country. I find it bizarre and frankly unreasonable to suggest that where people are born should be where they have to remain. I think the authors of this book would agree.

This book spans just eight chapters and looks at the impact of immigration controls as they relate to areas such as race and gender. It explores how capitalism plays into it, and how abolition of borders can learn from police abolition movements. This book was released in 2022, and so the sections on counter-terror, databases, and algorithms are already a bit out of date given the further surge in the horror that is AI (though they do talk about it a bit).

The authors aren’t naive – they don’t suggest we can just stop having border controls tomorrow, because that’s just not going to happen. They talk about non-reform reforms, which as I understand it are the sort of very minor, incremental things one can push for that don’t really help the longer term goal but might help a few people for now, but focus on alternatives that are abolitionist in nature. Things like not requiring the ability to work or to receive health care to be tied to immigration status. But what they think we should all be pushing for is abolition, and they give plenty of concrete examples of what that could look like, and why it’s not enough to just try to expand who counts in the citizenship bucket.

My review is inelegant because I’m still thinking through all of the information. I agree that immigration controls and enforcement should be abolished; the area I’m always a bit fuzzy on is about how one then would have ability to support and keep cultural differences alive in the current era. Nations are not monolith, so maybe that’s my answer, but in a very tiny example: if people in place A want to prioritize funding, say, bike paths, and people in place B want to prioritize funding bus lanes, what form of government would allow for those decisions to be made without any sort of delineation of area? Do all eight billion people vote on everything? Is there a president of the world? How does law governing other things work in this scenario?

I don’t think my questions above negate the benefits of border abolition. I’m just once again finding myself agreeing with the premise of a book, and understanding the evidence, and being on board, but being stuck without answers to some of my basic questions. And that’s what keeps this from being a five-star book for me.

4 Stars

Best for:
Those interested in forensic anthropology. Not for those who find the discussion of death (and specifics surrounding the investigation of it) to be traumatizing.

In a nutshell:
Forensic Anthropologist Black shares her experience with the dead and the living.

Worth quoting:
“If we cannot influence it, perhaps we shouldn’t waste precious time worrying about it.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve been interested in the field of forensic anthropology for awhile.

Review:
If you’ve read my reviews a bunch of the years (or if you know me in real life), you’ll know that for a time, a major part of my job was planning for the response to mass fatality incidents in King County, where Seattle is. Part of that involved working closely with two colleagues, one of whom was an amazing forensic anthropologist called Dr. Kathy Taylor. She died a few years ago, and I miss her. She was amazing to work with, and shared with the author of this book something other than a career field: she cared deeply about those she encountered through her work, and wanted to do her best to ensure families were reunited and the unidentified were known.

The author of this book, Sue Black, works out of Dundee, in Scotland, and has had a fascinating career. The book covers her life and her work, interweaving personal stories with some well-known ones. She talks about training in anatomy, and her own early experience with death in her family. She also shares how she handled the deaths of her parents.

One chapter deals with how identification is made, using age, sex, ancestry and stature. She handles the topic of sex v gender extremely well in my opinion, and talks through why, for example, it’s much easier to determine the age of a child through bones than it is to determine the age of an adult.

She has had a storied career and helped many people, including traveling repeatedly to Kosovo to help identify victims in that conflict, as well as pushing the UK to develop a world-leading capability in disaster victim identification. The chapter on that was one I found most interesting, given my background.

The book has some gentle humor but is always respectful of the living and the dead. She talks a great deal about reverence and respect for those who donate their bodies after death so others can learn (that’s on my list, though the university I currently have listed is about 6,000 miles away, so I should probably update that), and also shares interesting nuggets of wisdom. For example, I learned than anyone with a tattoo (I’m included there) may have ink in their lymph nodes? Fascinating.

3 Stars

Best for:
Fans of nature writing that also has a background story.

In a nutshell:
Author Boothby became fascinated by author Gavin Maxwell and the life he lived in Scotland, and spent time living where he did.

Worth quoting:
“…a genius doesn’t necessarily make for an easy person to live with or to know.”

“For once in my life I knew what it was to have purpose. Up until then, my life had been goal-orientated, which is all very well, but once you achieve a goal, or fail, what then? Set yourself up with another? Set yourself up to win, or lose? Over and over?”

Why I chose it:
I love Skye and the Highlands and pretty much all of Scotland (it’s why I live here now), and I also enjoy quality nature writing. Plus, otters!

Review:
There are two different books in here. Not literally, but there are stories that are related, and some parts are fantastic and other parts are more challenging.

Boothby read one of Gavin Maxwell’s books at a young age, and became enthralled with the life Maxwell led. I’d never heard of Maxwell before reading this book, but he’s apparently a well-known author who was also an unpleasant man who took in wild animals and kept them as pets. He was a complicated man by all accounts – the kind that people write books and stories about, even though as individuals they were probably deeply unpleasant to spend time with.

Maxwell lived in the West Highlands, and author Boothby decided to make a pilgrimage there many times, finally settling down there temporarily to serve as caretaker to the lighthouse and former home of Maxwell. He lived in a studio attached to what was turned into a holiday cottage that is rented by tourists, and gave tours while also keeping up the land. He looked for otters, and tried to commune with the spirit of Maxwell in that space.

The Maxwell storyline led to the book being written, and provides a bit of a connective tissue throughout, but the parts of most interest to me are the descriptions of the area and the people beyond Maxwell. Boothby discusses the old lighthouses and how they were staffed and maintained, about the challenges of living in harsh conditions. He describes the land and the weather and the plants and animals in ways that one could picture. That part of the book is intriguing and what kept me reading; the Maxwell bit much less so.

I might have given this book four stars, but at one point Boothby describes two women on a yacht as ‘blubbery.’ Come on dude. Unnecessary and also just bizarre choice. Which then makes me wonder about the author even more than I already had.

3 Stars

Best for:
Fans of the genre.

In a nutshell:
Jane Finn has some important war-related documents. Unfortunately, she has been missing for years, and even though The Great War is over, those documents are important. However, through a few seemingly random interactions, friends Tommy and Tuppence end up trying to track Jane down.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’ve been enjoying her books and plays, and so placed holds on whatever the library had, and this was the first to become available.

Review:
I didn’t enjoy this as much as the The Unexpected Guest, but it was still an interesting read. I think one of the challenges for me was that there were quite a few characters that I had some trouble recalling exactly who was who, and how they were related to each other. I also knew I had to accept the premise of these important documents about the war, but it was hard to understand exactly why they mattered so much since the war was over, so the sort of … desperation everyone had to get a hold of them didn’t make tons of sense to me, but I have a feeling I just misunderstood or didn’t catch the part where it was explained.

As usual, there were a few twists in the book, but unfortunately one of the main one’s I had figured out very early on in the book. Probably just a lucky guess, but when it was eventually revealed, instead of feeling like ‘oooh, go me, I figured it out,’ I felt a bit disappointed. Not what one hopes for in a book. I did, however, enjoy the language. Most of the books I read are at most 20 years old, but this book was written over a century ago, so it’s interesting to hear the word choice and the style of speaking.

This was Christie’s second ever book, so I can see why it might not be one I enjoyed as much as others, but it was still worth the read.

4 Stars

Best for:
Cat lovers. Those who enjoy a slightly melancholy, but also hopeful, look at everyday life.

In a nutshell:
Five individuals seek assistance from a mysterious clinic.

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
My sister gave it to me for Christmas. She knows me well.

Review:
I read most of this book in one sitting – where I am, 2 January is also a holiday, and I enjoyed the return of sunny weather by sitting indoors devouring this sweet book.

The book is broken down into five stories, featuring six cats and five humans who are in need of some help in their lives. One hates his job and says he wants to know how he can just get on with it as he needs the work. Another is a sexist man who feels diminished at work and in his home. The third is a woman who is dismissive of her young child’s concerns. The fourth is a woman who runs her own company and is tired of being the only one who does everything the ‘right’ way. Finally, the last is a woman who has lost her own cat.

Each person finds their way to the clinic via recommendation, but not directly – it’s always a friend of a friend’s cousin or someone they run into at work who recommends the clinic. And the prescription is always the same – a cat, for a week or two. And the cats do help – but perhaps not in the expected ways.

Two days ago I celebrated the 13th anniversary of ‘gotcha’ day of our two rescue kittens. We moved them across the world with us, and they are the center of so much joy (the cuddles! The playfulness despite their age!) and frustration (the puke! The multiple visits to the vet each year!). They’ve been in my life for nearly a third of it, and it’s wild to even imagine them not being here. I love when a book like this can capture how important cats can be in the lives of their caretakers.