Book Review – The Fiends in the Furrows

The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror by David T. Neal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though I could’ve done worse for a quick summer read, overall this anthology wasn’t great. It got off to a good start with the first story or two, but then the problems set in. I abandoned two of the stories, one for excessive world building and the other for excessive (and frequently kinda random) adjectives. Animal abuse was also a frequent theme, which automatically isn’t a relaxing reading experience for me. One of the stories I liked had proofreading problems that made the flow choppy. And so on.

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Book Review – 101 UX Principles

101 UX Principles: A definitive design guide by Will Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At last someone wrote a book about UX principles that’s actually about UX principles. This is aimed at designers, coders and other folks working directly in the title realm, not at mid-level managers trying to wedge user experience into a project management scheme. All of Will Grant’s advice is excellent. Even the points I didn’t entirely agree with were well made and worth at least considering. And though my focus tends to be more on the graphic design part of the process (roughly 20% of the book), I nonetheless gave enthusiastic amens to the technical points I don’t work with directly. Grant’s principles tend to focus on how to improve user interfaces rather than how to create them, so this might not be the best starting point for absolute beginners. But anyone who has mastered the basics and wants to get better at what they do will find plenty of useful tips here.

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Book Review – White Coat, Black Hat

White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine by Carl Elliott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I may be in a bad position to review this book. I picked it up as part of a research project on medical ethics that’s more focused on the Nazi krankenmord programs. And no matter how bad corporate dishonesty and greed get, they still don’t reach quite that far down. That said, Carl Elliott makes some excellent points about some of the pharmaceutical industry’s practices that definitely need to stop. However, he also points out some places where dancing with the big pharma devil has produced laudable results, such as cooperative efforts with AIDS activists back in the 1980s. Thus the narrative often washes the coat and hat in the same load of laundry, with a resulting tendency for things to come out looking grey.

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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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