A Briefer History of Time - Stepphen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

It feels like everyone who grew up in the 90s had a copy of A Brief History of Time kicking around the house. It was a book I recall picking up from time to time as a child, but I never made it more than a couple paragraphs. Published almost 20 years after the 1988 classic, A Briefer History of Time is for folks who felt that initial draw, but were overwhelmed by the complexity fo the ideas presented.

Hawking and Mlodinow do a great job whittling the already pretty short but conceptually dense original into something a layperson can readily grasp, providing a sort of guided tour through the history of physics, pointing out the major discoveries and peering into the coming horizon with speculation about what the future of science might hold. The concepts remain difficult—if they were easy, they woudl be inaccurate—but the authors do a good job of explaining through analogy, and offer generalizations that paint a fairly accurate picture without getting the reader snarled in a thicket of technical description. I still plan to read the original one day, but its briefer cousin is a welcome alternative for now.

The Life and Times of the thunderbolt kid - bill bryson

I have read all of Bill Bryson's books at least once (excepting his newest, which I just bought this afternoon and will start shortly), most of them twice, but The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid holds a personal record for me. I'm not sure how many times I have read it, but a conservative estimate would put it at six. It is my literary comfort food, the book I pick up with the most relish, the one that hits me in the belly with a pang every time I reach its final pages, when I know it will be a couple of years at least before I pick it up again.

Though most famous as a travel writer, Bryson's books--especially his later works--cover a wide range of subjects, from science to history to literature. If I had to categorize him as a particular kind of writer, i would do so (somewhat pretentiously, I admit) as a chronicler of knowledge. Whatever his subject, he covers it with verve, intensity,and an unparalleled wit.

Among his works, Thunderbolt Kid is something of an outlier. It is ostensibly an autobiography, but in Bryson's characteristic meandering style, it becomes as much a biography of his era—1950s America--than of himself. He uses his own experiences as springboards to a discussion of the broader period, its strengths, its mores, its foibles and quirks. He peppers the text with interesting facts and arresting anecdotes, including bizarre news stories that serves as epigraphs for each chapter. The result is a rich exploration of America's apotheosis, told without jingoism but with pride.

Bryson’s prose, as always, is excellent. He is quite possibly the greatest comic writer of his time, and in Thunderbolt Kid he is at the top of his game. There are parts of this book that make me laugh every time I read them, even though I know they’re coming from pages away. While I would argue that his greatest, most out-of-the-park lines actually appear in A Walk in the Woods (his description of a bunk bed mattress, in which he notes that the previous occupant “didn’t so much suffer from incontinence as rejoice in it” can get a belly laugh out of me from memory alone, pretty much at will), I think Thunderbolt Kid is, when taken as a whole, his funniest book, and also his most touching. I already look forward to reading it again.

Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell

The strength of Winter’s Bone lies in its simplicity. Ree Dolly is a girl from a community deep in the Ozarks where blood ties mean everything—or are supposed to—and the law isn’t trusted. She’s a mother to her two younger brothers, and to her own mother, who tumbled into madness some years before. Her father has vanished while out on bail, and the sheriff tells her that her house was posted as bond. If he doesn’t turn up, dead or alive, it goes to the county, and Ree and her family will be left homeless.

So begins an odyssey through the backwoods of Missouri, as Ree travels from house to house and town to town in search of answers. The Dolly bloodline flows into every corner of her world, but there are places where it runs too thin to protect her. The plot is spare, exposition flensed clean, resulting in an immediacy that further bolsters the comparisons with Cormac McCarthy, which were already inevitable from the subject matter and the writing style.

Woodrell’s prose is swift and lyrical, full of rich imagery that rises naturally from the words, rather than artful constructions of metaphor. At its best, it’s hallucinatory. though there were the odd passages that felt a bit overdone for me. One example: “a picnic of words fell from Gail’s mouth to be gathered around and savored slowly.” Such moments feel a bit self-consciously literary, but I’ll freely admit that my own writing could draw similar criticism, and probably does. Style is a matter of taste, and on the whole, Woodrell’s style is deft enough to earn its flourishes. It is not quite as transcendent as McCarthy’s but that’s a high bar to reach.