This book paints a vivid picture of life in Naples and on a U.S. military base there. I enjoyed the depictions of the expectations of gender roles as well as the lure and threat of organized crime among people with limited opportunities. The protagonist is multilayered and compelling, and I look forward to learning more about her in future books. Recommended for all libraries.

Favorite lines:
"She'd survived this long by being professional, by being accurate and hardworking, and by not making any noise. Being noticed meant you'd done something to call attention to yourself, and this was never a good thing. Obviously, you never wanted to be noticed for fucking up--but a lifetime of working with men had taught her it was also bad to be noticed for doing something exceptional. Men were most comfortable when they didn't think of you at all--when they measured their value according to some standard that involved only other men. But when you distinguished yourself, they were forced to include you in their estimation of themselves. This only ever had one outcome, and it was always bad. Her life had been a tightrope walk of managing the feelings and perceptions of men so they would leave her alone--so they wouldn't stop her from doing what she wanted to do."

"She'd spent her life slowly deconstructing and eliminating those responses imposed on her by others, by a society that wanted women to behave in a very specific way. But she was coming to understand that defying the gender show more expectations of men meant that they wouldn't help her." show less

This light book had some cutesy coincidences and resolutions, but it also held my interest through a mature woman protagonist and careful discussions about the repatriation of objects of cultural heritage. Recommended for all libraries.

I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy provided by Edelweiss, and I have submitted my comments to the publisher via that web site.

The author of this book, who is the creator of The Points Guy web site, has an interesting background story about his love for airline and hotel rewards programs. He also offers fresh perspectives as a gay man and a father. The main insights from this book concern the complex world of optimizing rewards programs, and these sections would have worked better with more screenshots of airline and hotel web sites. Recommended for all libraries.

I enjoyed this book. There is a lot of laughable melodrama but also genuinely tender moments between the Musketeers, who present a refreshing view of masculinity where men show their emotions (I found little misogyny here). The pacing is a bit odd: the story rolls along steadily until the final quarter, where all of a sudden almost everyone--heroes, villains, horses, dogs--start dying. Recommended for all libraries.

This book's mystery was a good one, but the author's proud lack of sensitivity hampers the enjoyment of reading it. While he is quite pleased with himself for having a sensitivity reader and (as noted in the acknowledgements) doing due diligence to consult members of the communities that he describes, he cannot seem to resist making snide remarks followed by a fake apology of "Better a racist than a murderer."

The author offers good insights about the Neapolitan spirit and culture (such as the dual presence of life and death and good and evil), but his overlong interviews often ramble and become boring. He also makes no mention of the role of non Italian immigrants in Naples. Even worse are his homophobic comments.

I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy provided by Edelweiss, and I have submitted my comments to the publisher via that web site.

The author is a fantastic writer and, as a respected and accomplished journalist, had extraordinary access to people and places affiliated with the Louvre. There is something for everyone here: art of course, but also history, science (the Louvre houses a particle accelerator!), architecture, colonialism, sex and sexual identity, and politics. Each chapter is short and helps with readability. Highly recommended for all libraries.

As I have noticed with her other books, the author's style tells more than it shows. On the other hand, I love the realistic way she writes about sex: "The physicality of her encounters made her think something real was happening." Recommended for all libraries.

The subtitle of this book claims it recounts an "untold story" -- but Olivia Yallop covered the same ground in her earlier, and superior, book, Break the Internet: In Pursuit of Influence. I was disappointed that Lorenz does not cite Yallop, but to be fair I read an advance reading copy so perhaps the final version includes a bibliography/further reading section?

The author connects trauma and addiction in his usual style: "just the right amount of joy and wonder to make it go beyond tragedy." Recommended for all libraries.

This book is uneven. It proposes some interesting ideas about the role of technology in modern life, and the need for "bonding" (some might call it love), but the author interjects these topics into the story in an artificial way. While the sex scenes are erotic, the overall characterization is rather poor, and the narrative feels stilted. Some questions I found myself asking: "What is the appeal of exclusivity?", "How does exclusion prevent or encourage bonding/connection?", and "Are exclusivity and inclusivity always oppositional?"

As usual the author uses droll humor to discuss the modern myths about the Ptolemaic rulers (notably Cleopatra VII) while acknowledging that much of Egyptology is conjecture because of incomplete--come on, it happened a long time ago!--evidence. He emphasizes that, "in antiquity, especially Egypt, the symbolic always obscured the truth. What really happened was of secondary importance, or even irrelevant." It does make the reader consider the nature of, and societal/political uses for, "history." Recommended for all libraries.

In the afterword of this book, the author reminds readers that she is a sociologist, and her field focuses on the "how" of human behavior. I would have liked to know the "why" (which she frames as the domain of psychologists), but because the scammer who perpetuated this fraud refused to be honest and provide their motivations, we will likely never learn this information.

Most of the book details the "how" of the fraud, and the author captures the sheer volume, details, and tedium of online chat/email communications that can be part of modern dating. The process by which the author and the other women who were duped expose and confront their scammer is fascinating. What is most disturbing is that the person who abused their vulnerability and yearning for love is now employed in a profession that involves a huge amount of trust and intimacy with women.

This book utilizes an interesting narrative structure, beginning with a character who believes his shit doesn't stink--although the reader smells something funny right away--and then turning to the women in his life to tell their own stories and right the wrongs he has committed. The first narrator contrasts his "nice guy" act with the "appalling misogyny and glamorization of violence" of extreme abuse that is usually vilified (for good reason of course). He refuses to realize, however, that his own acts of coercive control and insidious microaggressions are also harmful, precisely because they are pervasive and often overlooked by society. Recommended for all libraries.

I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy provided by Edelweiss, and I have submitted my comments to the publisher via that web site. This book proposes a novel scenario: Rebus is in prison! And he solves a murder mystery--in prison! There are also a few linked crimes that occur in the non prison world, allowing Clarke and Esson to take the lead. None of the mysteries is particularly insightful, and the resolutions seem a bit forced. Recommended for longtime readers of this series.

These linked stories bring the tragedy of Pompeii to life (and death) and humanize this historical event. Because readers know how the story will end, we might feel "no fear; just an endless, horrified sorrow" as we bear witness to the ways in which people face death, including denial, terror, resignation, and acceptance. This ancient tragedy reminded me of the current wars that the world is experiencing, and the near future climate emergencies that we will likely face. Highly recommended for all libraries.

Ancient Roman "peace" involved a lot of violence: intermittent territorial rebellions as well as the regularly occurring phenomena of slavery, gladiator/animal fight shows, and domestic violence. The author seems to relish the complexities of warfare, which hold no appeal for me. I do, however, appreciate his assertion that the conditions of peace and prosperity ensured that "even the most flyblown settlement might boast a library."

I wish there had been more showing, less telling, and fewer mock playful exclamation points(!).

A nice explanation for the book's title and the role of older individuals in society: "The only route to relevance at our age is through tongue-in-cheek nostalgia, but that is not--let me be very clear--our ultimate ambition. Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them."

This book was an excruciating mistake to read. The plot is incoherent, with plenty of gratuitous violence. The narrator tries to be hard boiled but winds up just being an asshole. Especially offensive is his cheerful misogyny: he characterizes every woman as either a sexual possibility or a fat one dimensional object of derision. Not recommended.

In a concise, inclusive, and warm tone, the author conveys the ability of solo travel to enrich one's life. She defines transformational travel with three directives: 1) Challenge your preconceptions; 2) Try something new; 3) Get uncomfortable. There are many useful ideas for becoming a mindful, aware traveler rather than a passive consumer. Recommended for all libraries.

The author makes several insightful observations on human nature in this compact novel. Recommended for all libraries.

A description of a news reporter identifying an intriguing story could also describe the delight that a reader feels when starting a promising book: "There was nothing better than this, the feeling of stepping onto the precipice of what was definitely worthwhile when you still didn't quite know what it was."

For a typically implausible thriller--seriously, it should have been subtitled What Not to Do in a Hurricane (hint: evacuation orders are orders, not gentle suggestions!)--this novel's plot is quite good. Even better than the story, though, are the observations about traditional Indian culture, where widowhood is respected while divorce is pitiable, and family relationships.

The author includes many funny remarks that somehow make climate change induced disaster and murder laughable. For example, the protagonist wades through storm waters "much like the character Rose in Titanic, if instead of the Atlantic Ocean, the Titanic had sunk into sewage." Recommended for all libraries.

As an insider in the beauty industry (an editor at a major magazine) the author offers some good insights about beauty, vanity, and the societal meaning of those concepts. These clear eyed observations include:

* Based on search engine queries, "It's not that people were seeking the next big thing in beauty, so much as they wanted to know how to simply do beauty at all."
* "Consumer criticism doesn't so much change existing products as it inspires the creation of new alternatives."
* "Choice-based marketing is a convenient loophole to gesture an acquiescence of power to the individual while conveniently ignoring all the historical context and cultural hang-ups of why this is an issue in the first place. The personal choice becomes more about brand aesthetic than participation in the age-old practice."

She also provides an accessible, if rather simplistic, guide to appraising a product trial. One negative for me was the writing style: the many convoluted sentences, detailed personal anecdotes, and superfluous asides, in the form of parenthetical expressions and footnotes, were hard to follow after a while.

The author utilizes a combination of statistics, interviews, and personal reflections to characterize the disaster zone that social media has become in terms of beauty culture. Her personal essays feel long winded at times, but overall the book offers many insights about the harms of social media, which offers women "an aestheticised but anaesthetised self" and incentivizes us to act and think individually (wasting time and money) rather than joining together in collective action against patriarchy and capitalism. Recommended for all libraries.

This book surveys various timepoints throughout history, and in different countries, to describe the social implications of makeup/cosmetics. One pithy observation is that "beauty conventions remain difficult to meet, and women are punished for not fitting into them, as well as for trying too hard to fit into them." I appreciated that the author sought to provide the perspectives of non White individuals. She also used a good mix of published historical sources and modern social media voices. Recommended for all libraries.

This nonfiction book reads like a novel (or maybe the screenplay for a Hindi/Telugu film) and evokes many emotions: excitement, fear, tenderness, horror, and hope. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to be poor in India, especially when you choose your own marriage partner; one participant describes how her love is likely to "perish in the anonymity of poverty." Recommended for all libraries.

This book is not a comprehensive historical analysis, as I had expected and hoped. Instead it is a collection of loosely related--the main relationship being that the word "eyeliner" appears repeatedly/repetitively in all of them--essays that sketch a picture of how makeup imparts meaning. This book needs heavy editing. Some chapters are interesting, others are not, and the author leaves many questions unanswered. For example, various cultures expound on the health benefits of kohl, but have scientists tested those claims? (I did a simple article search in PubMed and found some evidence, none of which is mentioned in this book.) How do those purported benefits compare to the reality of using a lead compound inside the eyes?

I appreciated that this well written book gave me insight into the lived experiences of Jewish Americans. It also made me realize, however, that I could not care less about rich people, especially rich people who suddenly risk losing their wealth. That dichotomy makes a point that (in America at least) it is harder to talk about money than about religion. Recommended for all libraries.

Good fiction can illustrate truths better than nonfiction, and the author of this book excels at showing how sexual violence and microaggressions can erode a woman's spirit and self confidence. The story unfolds in a disjointed series of disturbing vignettes that show, as the protagonist says, "[W]hat happens to every girl. That her experiences will empty her. That there's a point when a girl becomes a meme, a facsimile transmitted, a carbon copy folded and passed along. That she'll end up a weak and staticky version of the original" and "...having made fear into a habit for so long that it is now instinctual." But an unexpected bonus is that, despite these heavy subjects, there is a lot of humor in this book too. Recommended for all libraries.

There are great books about the history of writing, the history of books, the history of publishing, and the history of libraries--but this book is not one of them. It is instead an overlong and tedious personal essay about what specific ancient books have meant to this author. The books includes plenty of conjecture, romantic thoughts about libraries and writers, and "I imagine..." instead of a dispassionate account of historical evidence, enough to make me think this book should be reclassified as fiction. Not recommended.