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--> Nonfiction What we humans do to ourselves UNBOUND: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought the World to the Brink By Richard Currier 376 pp. Arcade Publishing   Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. While used occasionally before the last two hundred years, the term technology has been widely applied to human effort since then. In Currier’s book it is used to describe events that in some cases occurred millions of years ago and to eight different eras of human development critical to human progress. In his first section the author describes the primate baseline and how unique monogamy is in humans occurring in only three percent of mammals. He finds that monogamy while not perfect promotes “social stability.” Then drawing on very early man out of Africa such as “Lucy,” Currier describes how standing fully upright, forging fire-hardening sticks, and especially a bigger brain benefitted the early hominids in their ascent . Making clever use o...

Nonfiction Bouncing between boom and bust BOOM TOWN: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis By Sam Anderson 448 pp. Crown Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan I kept looking at this book and thinking, Nah, I don’t want to read about Oklahoma City and what do I know or care about professional basketball? But something kept making me look at it again. The cover perhaps? Whatever,  I was gobsmacked; Boom Town is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s been described by other reviewers as brilliant and kaleidoscopic. Yes and yes.  The book is indeed about Oklahoma City, the city that desperately wants to be world class but fails with regularity. Their airport, for example, is named for their native son, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator, Will Rogers. Will Rogers World Airport, this grandiose title even though no internation...

Fiction The smell of blood THE DEVIL’S WIND A Spider John Mystery By Steve Goble 272 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Steve Goble is back with the second entry in his new mystery series featuring a most unlikely and unforgettable sleuth – an 18 th -century pirate. The first book, The Bloody Black Flag , is also reviewed on this site. Honorable pirate Spider John Rush, an illiterate yet skilled ship’s carpenter, got his nickname because he used to tease his sister by eating live spiders in front of her. He never intended to take up a life of piracy – it just worked out that way, allowing him to make some decent money for his wife Em and their son Little Johnny, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. Now in his late twenties, he wants out of the pirate life, especially after barely escaping being hanged by the Royal Navy in the fall of 1722. He’d been working on the ill-fated pirate ship Plymouth Dream when her captain went mad and started torturing and murdering the cre...

Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time by Michael Palin Vancouver: Greystone Books USD $28 Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada CDN $37 Reviewed by John Wilson In the past century and a half, dozens of books have been published dealing with the lost Franklin Expedition but only a few have stood the test of time—springing to mind are Richard Cyriax’s magisterial Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition and David Woodman’s examination of the Inuit testimony, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery . Many are stylistically dated or poorly written or just plain weird, but for anyone wanting to add to the corpus of Franklin literature today, there is a much more dangerous pitfall—time. As Michael Palin puts it in Erebus , after Lieutenant Schwatka’s return from his exploration of King William Island in 1880, “The indignation that fuelled the search, the wounded national pride that gave it such imperative, and the appetite of newspapers…for the grisly detai...

Nonfiction Peace and purpose, compassion and forgiveness A BETTER PLACE A Memoir of Peace in the Face of Tragedy By Pati Navalta Poblete 256 pp. Nothing But The Truth Publishing Reviewed by Sala Wyman When an aborted robbery results in the death of Robby, her only son, Pati Navalta Poblete, Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, embarks on a personal journey of healing. She discovers, however, that becoming whole again is much greater than her own pain and terror. The quest for wholeness becomes one that encompasses more than herself, family and friends. It extends to a larger community of coworkers, business associates, and, finally, to the four men responsible for Robby’s death. Robby was 23 when he was shot and killed. On the day that he died, Poblete and her fiancé (her second marriage) had just finalized their wedding plans when she received phone calls from Robby’s grandmother and her daughter Julie. She remembers: I can only describe what happened next in bits and pieces. Fl...