Book Review – Fulvia

Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome by Jane Draycott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jane Draycott does an excellent job of giving a second chance to one of ancient Rome’s most reviled women. Of course for a woman to be remembered by Rome’s rabidly sexist historians was almost certainly to be reviled, most likely either for being avaricious or promiscuous or both. It was also Fulvia’s particular bad luck to be married to husbands who were themselves wildly unpopular with contemporaries in a position to heap scorn upon them (particularly Cicero). But what emerges here is a more even-handed portrait of a woman possessed of great wealth and married thrice to great power. In this light, Fulvia’s efforts to protect and advance the interests of her family are more understandable, even if not universally sympathetic. The text is both readable and enjoyable, making this worthy of consideration for anyone interested in writing women back into history.

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Book Review – The Lives of the Caesars

The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After reading a couple of Tom Holland’s books about Roman history, I was curious to see how he’d do translating Suetonius. Though I’m not qualified to judge the accuracy of the translation, readability is high. Holland uses plain English without resorting to excessive vernacular, which was particularly helpful in the more sexually explicit passages sometimes omitted from older translations. And of course in keeping with the original author’s prose style, the contents are a bizarrely organized parade of the best and worst in the lives of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors.

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Review – Insidious: The Red Door

Despite being a big Lin Shaye fan, I was relieved to see this series give up on the Scooby Doo prequels and return to the family from the first one. Unsurprisingly, hypnotically repressing memories of the whole journey-to-the-ghost-dimension thing just leaves father and son even more vulnerable when the same crap crops back up again. Maybe I was just in the mood for a dumb ghost story, but I really enjoyed this more than most of the other movies in the set. Mildly amusing

Book Review – What If? 2

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you liked the first one, I’m confident you’ll like this one too. Randall Munroe’s continuing considerations of absurd physics problems begins with the effects of the entire inner solar system filling with soup, and it goes from there. Brief chapters are a fun way to spend some time between other commitments and even learn some scientific principles along the way.

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Book Review – Neurotribes

NeuroTribes: The Untold History of Austim and the Potential of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a journalist, Steve Silberman takes a badly-needed neutral approach to a topic that’s frequently the subject of considerable axe grinding. As the author recounts, defining and determining the nature of autism has been a long process with many false steps, and some folks can be downright hostile about sticking to whatever stage they happened to get stuck on. Though the text identifies dead ends as what they are, it’s still reasonably respectful even to theories that turned out to be wrong. Indeed, in some places it’s a little too respectful. I would love to see a new edition of this book that reflects some of the changes in conventional wisdom, particularly about Hans Asperger’s level of collaboration with the Nazis’ eugenics agenda. Also as upper middle class parents were historically best able to advocate for their children, there isn’t a lot of focus on any other populations until toward the end of the book. Drawbacks aside, this is an excellent job of explaining the history of medical diagnoses and popular perceptions of people on what’s now known as the autism spectrum.

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Review – The Stoning of Soraya M.

Fundamentalist misogyny turns lethal in post-revolution rural Iran. Unjustly accused of adultery by a husband too cheap to pay alimony, the title character suffers the title punishment in a brutally graphic sequence. But in many ways the execution itself isn’t as upsetting as the events leading up to it, particularly after the victim realizes she has neither recourse to justice nor hope of escape. Mozhan Navabi and Shohreh Aghdashloo turn in particularly touching performances as Soraya Manutchehri and her aunt respectively. Worth seeing

Review – Meteor

I don’t know what’s more ludicrous: the science, the special effects, or Sean Connery playing an astrophysicist. And the fact that Connery has any competition for “worst part of the movie” should tell you just how bad the rest of it is. A giant title object speeding toward a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth should have been the ultimate 70s-era disaster plot, complete with a cast of actors who should have had better agents. But both the problem and the solution (blowing it up with nuclear missiles) are so ridiculous that the whole thing’s impossible to take seriously (and kinda not funny enough to accept as laughably bad, though it does have its moments). What would Jordy Verrill say at a time like this? See if desperate