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Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman. PublicAffairs, $32 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5417-0435-0

The ability to think outside the box determines whether new businesses take off or founder, according to this competent treatise. Maples and Ziebelman, who founded the venture capital firms Floodgate and Palo Alto Venture Partners, respectively, contend that successful entrepreneurs build their enterprises around an unintuitive insight, suggesting that Airbnb’s “was that people would trust booking rooms with locals in the same way they trust booking with hotels.” Such insights often involve taking advantage of new technologies, the authors write, noting that Lyft won big by betting on the rapid adoption of GPS-enabled smartphones. The straightforward advice on launching a startup emphasizes the importance of establishing trust between cofounders, keeping investor pitches concise, and positioning one’s product as an antidote to the status quo. Maples and Ziebelman provide probing insight into what made Tesla, Twitch, Twitter, and other relatively young companies successful, though a few of the case studies miss the mark. For instance, the authors describe how educational services company Chegg gauged interest in textbook rentals by creating a website for a nonexistent rental service that was designed to crash before customers could complete the transaction. The authors applaud Chegg for finding an inventive way to test proof of concept before investing in the project, but the endeavor’s dishonesty feels ill-considered. Still, aspiring entrepreneurs will find some sensible suggestions. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future

Jonathan Mingle. Island, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-1-64283-248-8

Ordinary landowners square off against the powerful Dominion Energy company in this riveting report on a successful effort to thwart the construction of a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia’s fracking fields across Virginia to North Carolina. Journalist Mingle (Fire and Ice) tracks the project from 2014, when residents were first informed that a pipeline would be built on their properties. The planned pipe, at 42 inches wide, would be the largest ever to cross the Appalachian mountains; residents feared a pipe over such an uneven and erosion-prone terrain would easily be damaged, leading to poisonous leaks that would harm their health, local ecosystems, and national parkland. Nancy Sorrells, a Shenandoah Valley resident who led one of many grassroots campaigns against the pipeline, predicted that a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy would defeat Dominion and encouraged other groups to throw up as many roadblocks as possible. Mingle traces these labyrinthine legal efforts and Dominion’s counterstrikes, including eminent domain seizures. In 2020, the battle reached the Supreme Court, which sided with Dominion; nevertheless, not long afterward Dominion abandoned the project due to mounting costs. Mingle provides illuminating background on the fossil fuel industry—including its yearslong public relations campaign to relabel methane as a benign-sounding “natural gas”—and transforms “regulatory wrangling” into a propulsive story. It’s an impressive account of a David-vs.-Goliath struggle. (May)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Super Slick: Life and Death in a Huey Helicopter in Vietnam

Tom Feigel and Larry Weill. Stackpole, $29.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8117-7566-3

Weill (In Marcy’s Shadow) and Feigel recount the latter’s Vietnam War story in this by-the-numbers memoir. Feigel was drafted into the Army in February 1969 at 21, and, following basic training, went through advanced training in helicopter repair. In November, he reported to the 336th Assault Helicopter Company in the Mekong Delta, where he worked repairing and maintaining helicopters. Two months later, Feigel volunteered to fly a maintenance mission and subsequently decided he preferred being in the air to working as a “hangar rat.” Going on to serve the rest of his tour of duty as a crew chief, he took part in scores of missions, many of them dangerous and more than a few of them lethal. The authors recount many details about those flights and just about every other aspect of Fiegel’s tour of duty; evocative descriptions of helicopter-related battle action are complemented by largely unrevealing accounts of everyday life in the warzone. Novelistic in its presentation, with many reconstructed quotes and a few sidebars and flash-forwards (including a brief overview of Feigel’s post-war struggles with PTSD), this tells a familiar Vietnam War story solidly enough. It’s best suited for completists. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual

Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider. New Press, $24.99 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-62097-854-2

The “very existence of public schools” is being threatened, according to this essential overview of recent right-wing attacks on the teaching of material concerning race, gender identity, and sexuality. Journalist Berkshire and education policy scholar Schneider (co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door) contend that such attacks are merely the latest iteration of the right’s longstanding agenda to privatize public education. By slandering public schools as radically left-wing, activists hope to siphon off students into charter schools and private Christian academies, starving the public education system of funding, according to the authors. Emphasizing that a common education is crucial to a healthy democracy, Berkshire and Schneider argue that broad resistance to what can otherwise seem like a niche culture war issue is necessary. Treating education as a public good critical to society’s well-being is also the best resistance strategy, suggest the authors; by pushing back against individual parents asserting overweening authority in the classroom as undemocratic, leftists can effectively counter right-wing bluster over “parental rights.” Berkshire and Schneider do a fabulous job highlighting hypocrisy (e.g., right-wingers harp on public schools’ subpar test scores as a means of pushing more students into private schools—where many states don’t track test results at all) while concisely cataloging the billionaires and think tanks funding this fight. It’s an invaluable primer on what’s motivating the public education culture wars. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond

Lee Quiñones. Damiani, $55 (192p) ISBN 978-88-6208-811-4

This vivid collection traces the creative evolution of Quiñones, who’s best known for his political graffiti in 1970s and ’80s New York City. In an introductory section, visual artist William Cordova notes that Quiñones saw subways and other public spaces as “platform[s] for ‘public address,’ ” where he could track people’s real-time reactions to his art. The collection showcases his 1979 “Stop the Bomb” subway car graffiti, such early drawings as 1977’s Jesus Christ Superstar (Heaven is Life Earth is Hell), and later gallery work that melded political messaging with futurist themes. Despite the hit-or-miss commentary from other artists interspersed throughout (Quiñones’s paintings “will forever ride high in the skyways like a shooting star racing as quick as a flash across the misty blanket of a New York night,” rhapsodizes Odili Donald Odita), the collection offers both an up-close view of the artist’s career and a window into a vibrant period of New York City art history. This captivates. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness

Tim Coulson. Pegasus, $35 (448p) ISBN 978-1-63936-652-1

Coulson, a zoology professor at Oxford University, debuts with an expansive if overly digressive chronicle of how billions of years of cosmic history set the stage for the emergence of humans. He explains that “13.77 billion years ago, the universe was a ball of hot energy” that transformed into electrons and quarks, the latter of which joined together to form the first protons and neutrons. Some nine billion years later, the planet Theia collided with Earth and kicked up debris that consolidated into the moon, which created tidal conditions crucial to the development of the first life forms. He details the extraordinary sequence of events that had to happen for life to appear on Earth; for instance, if Jupiter hadn’t moved around the solar system before settling into its current orbit, the space debris it absorbed would have been pulled to Earth, making it too heavy to stay in the habitable zone. Elsewhere, Coulson explores the origins of DNA and how consciousness emerged to organize the five senses. Unfortunately, tedious tangents about Coulson’s love for Australia’s Bungle Bungle mountain range and life in academia distract. Intrusive personal commentary drags down an otherwise enlightening whistle-stop scientific history. Agent: Rebeca Carter, Rebecca Carter Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI

Anil Ananthaswamy. Dutton, $32 (480p) ISBN 978-0-593-18574-2

This impenetrable primer from science writer Ananthaswamy (Through Two Doors at Once) unsuccessfully attempts to elucidate how AI works. He explains that it learns by scanning data for patterns and then makes predictions about what kinds of data are likely to appear in sequence. Unfortunately, the excruciatingly detailed breakdown of the roles played by probability, principal component analysis (“projecting high-dimensional data onto a much smaller number of axes to find the dimensions along which the data vary the most”), and eigenvectors (which are never satisfactorily defined) will sail over the heads of anyone without an advanced math degree. Biographical background on physicist John Hopfield, electrical engineer Bernhard Boser, and other pioneering contributors to machine learning does little to alleviate the labyrinthine discussions of their advances. There are some bright spots—as when Ananthaswamy discusses how statisticians deduced the authorship of the contested Federalist Papers by analyzing whether the writing more closely reflected the vocabulary of James Madison or Alexander Hamilton—but these highlights are few and far between, surrounded by bewildering equations and dense proofs for mathematical theorems. General readers will struggle to follow this. Agent: Peter Tallack, Curious Minds Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change

Debra Hendrickson. Simon & Schuster, $27.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-5011-9713-0

Pediatrician Hendrickson debuts with an affecting report on climate change’s dire effects on young people. Hendrickson—who practices in Reno, Nev., the “fastest-warming city in the United States”—recounts such heartbreaking stories as watching a mother struggle to comfort her four-year-old son, who was hospitalized after wildfire smoke gave him respiratory problems, as he squirmed with discomfort caused by the nasal cannula feeding him oxygen. Profiles of young people across the country underscore the climate crisis’s devastating scope. For instance, Hendrickson shares the stories of a boy from Houston, Tex., who was traumatized after barely escaping severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey when he was five, and a sixth grader from Phoenix, Ariz., who died of heatstroke after going on a hike on a 112-degree day in 2016. Such accounts are harrowing, and Hendrickson describes in disturbing detail how the body is affected by air pollution and extreme heat (the latter, she explains, leads to reductions in blood volume as the body dehydrates, reducing the regularity of heart rhythm due to low blood flow and causing the breakdown of muscle, which releases toxic proteins). This visceral study is not easily forgotten. Agent: AmandaUrban, CAA. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera

Ricky Ian Gordon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (480p) ISBN 978-0-374-60572-8

Composer Gordon’s ungainly debut autobiography teeters unsteadily between illuminating and off-putting. Beginning with his birth on Long Island in 1956 and plodding forward to 2024, Gordon provides an exhaustive and often lurid look at the art and experiences that shaped him. Early sections focus on Gordon’s sexually tangled youth, during which he developed an incestuous attraction to his father (never acted upon) and, by 15, equated “older heterosexual men... having sex with me” with affection. A love of music, and opera in particular, grounded him. Admitted to Carnegie Mellon at age 16, he studied piano, composition, and acting. While discussing the intricacies of his own compositions, Gordon touches on how artists including Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim influenced him. After he graduates from Carnegie Mellon and makes a name for himself, the book dishes on these and other legendary figures, sharing uncomfortable anecdotes about “sitting with a... clearly jonesing Liza Minelli” and developing tense rivalries with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Adam Guettel. The effect is overstimulating and undernourishing, with affecting threads about addiction and AIDS-era New York crowded out before they can be fully developed. Gordon’s rationale—that other artists might benefit from knowing about his “messy, disgusting, glorious, shameful” evolution—fails to justify this undisciplined ramble. It’s a disappointment. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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A Hunger to Kill: A Serial Killer, a Determined Detective, and the Quest for a Confession That Changed a Small Town Forever

Kim Mager, with Lisa Pulitzer. St. Martin’s, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-27488-5

Ohio police detective Mager’s chilling true crime debut recounts her 2016 interrogation of serial killer Shawn Grate. Arrested after a woman escaped from his home in Ashland, Ohio, Grate was initially booked for rape and kidnapping. But as the hours ticked by and Mager began to question Grate, she realized she might have stumbled on the most consequential case of her career. Over the course of a week, Mager convinced Grate to open up to her, offering him cigarettes and coffee as he confessed to kidnapping and torturing one woman, then two, then five. As their conversations progressed, Grate shared details of his difficult childhood and his lifelong interest in serial killers, and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to confess to Mager. The interviews ended abruptly after a jailhouse informant came forward to warn Mager that Grate was planning to kill her, but she’d gotten enough to convict him; he was sentenced to death in June 2018. Drawing on her interviews with Grate, his escaped victim, and his half-sister, Mager delivers an unflinching study of a killer. This hums with the intensity of a real-life Silence of the Lambs. (July)

Reviewed on 05/03/2024 | Details & Permalink

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