The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918   Meirion Harries and Susie Harries
Far too much detail on all the tiny parts of the military buildup, excruciating. Lifeless prose that is really just an accretion of lists, the authors love nothing more than a list, the longer the better. Descriptions of the WW I battles are somewhat better, but also more useless detail. No real social, intellectual, or cultural history. I think they over-emphasized the centralization of government power, as demonstrated by the 20s and early 30s. After nearly 500 pages, don’t really feel like I have an understanding of the U.S. in these two momentous years. Too bad.

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language   Christine Kenneally
Well-written, informative, and scholarly overview of current research and thinking about the origins of human language. Very well organized. Deftly covers the ideas that have lead to linguists’ current understanding of how humans evolved language. The idea that language evolved, and the mechanism(s) of how it evolved, are new, so Kenneally spends a lot of time speculating on the future of the field. Other than the speculations, an excellent book. Learned a lot.

Ayako   Tezuka Osamu
700-page, bleak, brutal manga about a Japanese family from 1949-1973, nearly every member of which is disgusting. Murder, incest, all forms of deception, political intrigue. Didn’t really enjoy it, at all, but glad I read it, Tezuka is a huge figure in manga history.

The Searcher   Christopher Morgan Jones
Excellent thriller about a man who goes to Georgia (the country, not the state) to find a friend who has disappeared while investigating an act of terrorism. Like Jones’ other books with these characters, it is highly intelligent, convincing, and entertaining. Seems to me, it captures the complexity and brutality of the place. Very good.

The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty   Robert P. Crease Alfred and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber
Well-written, interesting, and informative discussion of the development of quantum theory and mechanics. Good history, and historical and scientific analysis, with special care for the impact on society and culture in general. Based on the course they teach at Stony Brook. Learned a lot, and enjoyed the read.

Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter   Thomas Cahill
Brief, popular, and pseudo-scholarly glance at ancient Greek culture, thought, and politics. At times, Cahill’s tone seems unjustifiably flippant and superior. Also, he couldn’t resist talking about Christianity in an inappropriate and irrelevant closing section. But I’ve loved the Athenians since I first encountered them, spent years studying and writing about Greek philosophy, so even Cahill couldn’t wreck that. Not bad, wish it had been better.

The Ancient Minstrel   Jim Harrison
A collection of three novellas, a form that Harrison mastered. The first of the three novellas is a slightly fictionalized memoir. The second is another of his exquisite portrayals of an idiosyncratic, wonderful life. The third is distilled from Harrison’s 2015 novel The Big Seven, or the novel developed out of this novella. Deeply sad that Harrison died recently, that sadness saturated my reading, especially the memoir. I will miss his rambling style and robust characters.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome   Mary Beard
A “history” of Rome that is more a meditation on all the possibilities than any actual occurrences. Much more about the Roman historians such as Livy and Polybius than what they wrote. She discusses writings about the three Punic wars without any information about the wars themselves. After 200 pages, I hadn’t learned anything about Rome except what we don’t know. Deeply disappointing.