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Cover of ELECTRIC TITAN

ELECTRIC TITAN

by scientists who have covertly witnessed her unusual skills who want to see if they can be leveraged to fend off the meteor. By novel’s end, despite some setbacks and a heartbreaking loss, Rosa ends up transforming herself and her world.Reardon, who shares in his “About the Author” note that he is “a brain tumor survivor since the age of 8, and handicapped since the age of 10,” offers insightful commentary and perspectives about disability through the journey of his teen protagonist. Readers learn about Rosa’s post\u002Daccident suicide attempt, frustration with and empathy for her ableist parents (“Hopefully, they would evolve. My new life was new for them, too”), and eventual epiphany that “Being in a hoverchair is only part of who you are. Once you realize that, no meteor could ever stop you.” This last comment is made by an astral temple deity in one of the goddess sequences—these scenes are an element of the book that can get somewhat esoteric. (Another goddess, for example, remarks that Rosa is “the one who will bring neo\u002Dcollectivism to Titan.”) Nevertheless, these conversations showcase Rosa’s intelligence and psychological makeup (supportive, strong Cordelia, a lovely secondary character, astutely suggests that “The goddesses come from your subconscious, right?”). The nonchronological structure of the narrative is at times frustrating\u003B some of the flashback chapters are not as compelling as the looming present\u002Dday threat. The way in which Rosa came to be in the apparently now\u002Dnovel (on Titan) circumstance of being disabled is also withheld until late in the novel and then explained rather hazily (the injury at Convalor is left murky, with the medical operation afterward seemingly responsible for the hoverchair issue). Still, Reardon creates a fascinating future world in which Rosa must draw on some “old” tech to save the day, and her mother, an “animac,” contemplates the disquieting knowledge that her battery life will outlast the lifespan of Rosa’s father."⭐ 5.0/5(3)

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Cover of ELEVATOR PEOPLE

ELEVATOR PEOPLE

by Earth’s alarmingly unstable human population. On Earth itself, a group of guests are gathered at Baltimore’s Zelles Hotel for a charity event. Eight of these guests—trust fund babies Angus and Keiko, wacky ex\u002Dmilitary man Carl, resourceful Kara, Buddhist Ellen, smart young former honor student Bernie, food bank volunteer Bailey, and bland and reliable Roger—find themselves trapped on an elevator that mysteriously takes them not to a floor of the hotel but a century into the future, where they quickly learn a few things. First, their disappearance is well\u002Dknown to history, which has dubbed them the Charity Eight. Second, lots of people disappeared from elevators in 2025 and are now reappearing in 2125. And third, people in 2125 aren’t happy about that fact—they dub the time\u002Ddisplaced new arrivals terrorist aliens and subject known “vates” to random mob violence. The elevator that deposited the Charity Eight in the future also promised to return them to their own time in two weeks, meaning they somehow have to survive that long. But if the Council has its way, will Earth be doomed? It’s an energetic setup, and Laws largely fulfills the premise’s promise of intrigue and deadpan comedy. There’s some lazy writing (characters “hightail it” or are “thrust into the hot seat”), but the novel’s sharp dialogue and winning cast of contrasting characters more than compensates. The Charity Eight are a terrifically engaging mixed bag of personality traits, which makes for richly entertaining reading as their trials demand all their adaptability."⭐ 4.4/5(19)

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Cover of ENGINES OF WAR

ENGINES OF WAR

by master-class worldbuilding, the third volume of Ford’s Age of Uprising trilogy concludes an epic fantasy narrative chronicling an empire torn apart by war." />⭐ 4.1/5(119)

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Cover of ENTANGLED TONGUES

ENTANGLED TONGUES

by the time of King Henry V, English had re\u002Demerged (per Kisch, Henry V was “probably the first king to speak and write English with ease”). In the years between 1066 and 1200, “about 900 words moved from French into English.” The author goes on to explain how different words from different backgrounds have survived, and how words have changed (house comes from the German haus, while mansion comes from the French maison). Then, there are additional considerations that often baffle those learning English, such as the language’s seemingly strange rules of spelling and grammar. A lot of information is condensed into fewer than 200 pages. Chapters progress in a conversational style\u003B the reader is often addressed directly, as in this consideration of the Norman conquest: “Your life will never be the same again and your language may never be the same, either. This is what happened to the English people in 1066.” As hundreds of years of English history are rushed through, the book has many fascinating points to make. (For example, Shakespeare used “not only French words, but also French sentence structures which sound odd to an English ear.”) All told, the book offers readers different ways of looking at what they say."

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Cover of EQUALITY IS A STRUGGLE

EQUALITY IS A STRUGGLE

by taxing the wealthiest in a clear and significant way.” So writes Piketty, who has made a distinguished career of explicating the whys and wherefores of inequality and its multiple causes. Much of Piketty’s writing here digs into that project, and it’s a credit to Le Monde’s readership that they’re not afraid of tables and hard data. Yet Piketty also writes with admirable clarity about several ideas that are key to his extended argument—and, in at least a sense, these columns forge a single argument in favor of democratic socialism. He observes, in that regard, that the unprecedented prosperity of the 20th century came about precisely because the “hyperconcentration of ownership and class privileges that characterized European societies before 1914” had been broken, with massive investments in human capital and decommodification of the social marketplace. Given the rise of Trumpism and its congeners worldwide, Piketty counters that those values should be restored, and by nobody better than the European states that showed the way in the first place, emphasizing “parliamentary democracy, the social state, and investment in the future.” Voilà: We come full circle to taxing the rich in order to fund health care, education, welfare, and states that observe “the rule of law and democratic pluralism.” Admittedly, Piketty writes, those states are mostly European, whose social economy is far ahead of that of the U.S. There’s some inside baseball—or perhaps soccer—here in Piketty’s essays on and against the Macron government and like causes, but most of these pieces will be intelligible to American readers without much background in contemporary French politics."⭐ 5.0/5(1)

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