Previous SFF Author: Alyson Noel
Stan Lee: A Life (Centennial Edition) by Bob Batchelor
Bob Batchelor’s biography of Stan Lee, titled unsurprisingly Stan Lee, is a solid if somewhat stylistically flat look at the life of a man who has had a huge cultural impact. People who pay attention to this sort of thing won’t find a lot new here, and may even find the book’s gloss over things a bit frustrating, but for casual fans of Marvel movies who have a first-time interest in where this behemoth began, the book suffices.
September 29th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Fandom, The Next Generation edited by Bridget Kies & Megan Connor
Fandom, The Next Generation, edited by Bridget Kies and Megan Connor is a collection of essays exploring, unsurprisingly, fandom, but with a particular focus on transgenerational sources and fan communities. I.e., those fandoms centered around “rebooted or perpetually rebroadcast media texts” whose long-lived and/or resurrected nature maintains and creates several generations of fans — those who came to the text in its original form, those who discovered the text in later years, and those who came to the text as an adaptation or reboot.
September 2nd, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 1.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte
2022 has been a banner year for me in terms of non-fiction reading, and that trend continues with The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us, by Steve Brusatte, an epic and vividly told survey of how evolution bit by bit equipped our ancestors with the tools necessary to at first survive and then thrive. As with Brusatte’s earlier work,
August 10th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Sylvia Ferrara, translated by Todd Portnowitz
Sylvia Ferrara is an Italian scholar/researcher/professor who has devoted much of her life, both in solo work and (more importantly and effectively to her) in collaboration, to learning how writing developed/develops and to deciphering a number of scripts that have stubbornly resisted translation. In The Greatest Invention she offers the fruits of that research in often fascinating, sometimes dizzying, sometimes frustrating, always exuberant fashion.
The dizzying part comes partly from the way Ferrara flies all over the place in space and time,
July 1st, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black
As just about any child can tell you, roughly 65 million years ago a nearly ten-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the earth in the Yucatan, unleashing planet-wide firestorms, geography-changing tsunamis, and years of acid-rain and dark days. In short, it was not a good day for Planet Earth. Or for the more than 75% of animal species wiped out by the impact, including, of course, its most famous victims, the dinosaurs. In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (2022), Riley Black gives a wonderfully evocative and vivid accounting not just of those horrible days following the asteroid’s impact,
June 20th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The World According to Color: A Cultural History by James Fox
Most people wouldn’t think of a squashed fly as the gateway to a world of beauty and art, but that was exactly the path art historian James Fox took, describing in the opening pages of The World According to Color (2022), how when he “first started seeing color at the age of six,” after his mother swatted a fly and James:
leaned in to examine the carcass … [It] looked like a precious jewel.
June 7th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Phasers on Stun! by Ryan Britt
Phasers on Stun!, by Ryan Britt, is a breezily informative and fun look at the many (and I mean many) incarnations of Star Trek over the decades since it first appeared on television in the late 60s. While it’s true there isn’t a lot new to say about the original series, and to a lesser extent The Next Generation, Britt still manages for find a few nuggets to offer something fresh to fans,
May 17th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins
In Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, Jackie Higgins smoothly and successfully merges what could have been two popular science books — one on animal senses and one on human perception. Instead of separating the two subjects, here Higgins uses one as a vehicle for exploring the other.
More precisely, by examining a dozen animal species and focusing on a single sensory trait they possess, Higgins casts a clarifying light on our own sensory abilities,
April 29th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
How to Build a Human: In Seven Evolutionary Steps by Pamela S. Turner and illustrated by John Gurche
I often tell my first-year college students that when they start out doing research, they should begin not with the academic journals, which so many of them do, and not with the newspaper or magazine articles, but with books written for young readers. Because what they want is something that is brief, broad, shallow but informative, easy to understand. Something that strips out the overwhelming details and provides them a strong foundational understanding of the major points so that when they do eventually research more deeply,
April 22nd, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World by Oliver Milman
I’ve spent the past 27 summers minus two driving from New York out west to hike/camp with my family for 4-6 weeks. That’s 25 cross-country trips (including twice to Alaska but not counting the two I took before meeting my wife) and lots of driving during those trips as well. So much so that I often end up driving as many miles in June and July as I do the other ten months out of the year.
April 1st, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Previous SFF Author: Alyson Noel
What a fascinating exploration of Edwige Fenech's contributions to the giallo genre! I love how the post highlights her unique…
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…