The New York Times chooses Garbageland and Spook for its list of "100 Notable Books of the Year." Along with 98 other books, of course.
National Geograpic Adventure reviews The Last Gentleman Adventurer and Gone to New York: Adventures in the City this month (see New Nonfiction column to left). At least, I'm pretty sure that's where I saw both those reviews. Anyway, thumbs-up on both of them, per the reviewers. They're on my list. The books, that is. Not the reviewers.
Now we come to the question that has been plaguing me--no pun intended--since reading the Sunday NYT book review. Though it may be a lucid, well-written masterpiece of investigative/scientific reporting, still, why would anyone read The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu? It's not that I have anything against the book, per se. It's just that I can't imagine what good would come of reading it. So I can lie in bed at night obsessing over something I have NO POWER WHATSOEVER TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT? So I can storm the barricades and demand the government put all its energy and resources into fighting a potential global pandemic--as opposed to fighting global warming? or world poverty? or terrorism? or malaria? or AIDS? or nuclear proliferation? or future flooding on the Gulf Coast? or failing schools? the health-care crisis? genocide in Sudan? child-prostitution in Asia?
The point I'm making here is that every day we are fed an entirely new menu of terrible news and terrifying portents and awful things about which, I guess, we're supposed to become alarmed and outraged and to demand that Something Be Done. But if anything is done, then the news stories inevitably focus on how these efforts are riven with corruption and controversy and ineptitude and internal dissent and external threats. And we the public are, I think, supposed to become alarmed and outraged all over again and demand that Something Be Done about the Something Being Done that isn't Being Done right.
It's not that each of these matters isn't important or tragic or terrible, it's just that I'm not sure what it is I'm expected to do about bird flu.
Which is why I'm planning to read nothing but Wodehouse (P.G.) and Perelman (S.J.) this month.
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