Book Review – Superfoods, Silkworms and Spandex

Superfoods, Silkworms, and Spandex: Science and Pseudoscience in Everyday Life by Joe Schwarcz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe Schwarcz delivers what he promises: a set of blog-post-sized considerations of the intersections between extraordinary science and ordinary daily existence. The author’s specialty is clearly chemistry, which forms the bulk (but not all) of the entries. Here and there he gets technical enough to lose readers whose familiarity with formal science education ended in high school. And his attacks on pseudoscientific con artists are obvious enough to be entertaining without being especially edifying. Overall, however, this is a fun and fascinating collection of technical trivia with a historical bent.

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Review – The Haunted Palace

Though the title promises Poe, the story delivers Lovecraft. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” crops up here and there. The rest follows the heir to the eponymous location possessed by the evil spirit of his ancestor, who resumes efforts to summon evil forces from another dimension. Vincent Price is the main draw of this otherwise largely forgettable production. Mildly amusing

Review – The Fear of Darkness

Anytime horror and psychiatry mix, there’s a good chance that a big part of the plot will turn out to be pure hallucination. Throw in a hearty dose of DMT, and there’s almost no chance that anything we see will be anything but imaginary. This production has a few interesting visual twists, so it’s a shame they were wasted on a largely non-functioning story. See if desperate

Book Review – Fall of Civilizations

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline by Paul M.M. Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Arguably this book could have been shortened to “greed.” Or at least some of the chapters could have been effectively summarized as “Rome” or “Spain.” And yet the fascinating parts of the deaths of civilizations lie in the details, here copiously supplied by the author. I particularly loved the range of dead societies covered by the text, from the ancient to the nearly modern, from the places everyone’s heard of to whole civilizations frequently omitted from high school history texts. Paul M.M. Cooper’s writing is engaging, neither frivolous nor academically stuffy. Though it took me awhile to get through it, I enjoyed the experience.

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Book Review – Pox Romana

Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World by Colin Elliott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Colin Elliott serves up an exceptionally thorough consideration of the Antonine plague, the world’s first pandemic to leave a written historical record and a contributing factor to the end of the Pax Romana period in Roman history. It’s amazing that such a relatively short book can include careful (and unfortunately occasionally repetitive) study not only of the disease itself but also its complex interrelationship with climate, famine, war and social mismanagement, all of which proved to be a deadly combination in the later years of the reign of Marcus Aurelius. This is worth a read for anyone with an interest in the history of either Rome or epidemiology or both.

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Book Review – More Weight: A Salem Story

More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As one of untold thousands of people who appeared in a high school production of The Crucible, I was curious to see the actual story unfold in sequential art format. Ben Wickey has a gift for both words and images, which works wonders for the parts of the narrative devoted to the judicial murder of innocent people. I particularly enjoyed the clear visual distinctions between victims and perpetrators alike, most helpful in cases where the names and circumstances are often hard to tell apart. I even liked the interludes where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wander the streets of Salem musing philosophically. The meandering, repetitive outro ended things on a down note, but otherwise this was a great read.

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Review – 28 Years Later

A quarter century (give or take) later, Danny Boyle’s rage zombies still hold dominion over the UK. Only now they’ve grown larger, more naked and considerably more boring. There seem to be three or four different stories going here, none of which meshes especially effectively with the others. See if desperate