About a Book

There’s a scene in RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6 when a really bitchy queen, Gia Gunn , reads another contestant, a plus-sized Darienne Lake , by saying in a confessional, “There’s apparently room for everybody.” That’s how I feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel , by JaredDiamond . There is apparently room for anybody to win a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, if this book can do it. Diamond’s thesis is that Western Civilization hasn’t been a successful exercise in modernization (from automobiles to space missions) because we are inherently better than less sophisticated groups across the world. Instead, geography and the access it afforded people to grains and animals gave way to advanced technologies (guns and steel) and germs, as well as the antibodies for those germs. At its heart, the book is an argument against racist tendencies to attribute particular advancements to race. Page after page, however, Diamond manages to be boring and pedantic. I felt like I was back in a coll...

In Lily Brooks-Dalton ’s vividly written Good Morning, Midnight , two scientists face the end of the world separated from each other, but somehow together. Brooks-Dalton should be commended for showing these two characters, warts and all, grappling with the end, and finding more of their humanity as the end nears, and for beautifully describing the landscapes they inhabit. Augustine (Augie) is a once-upon-a-time womanizer, aging and working in the Arctic Circle , and refuses to evacuate the frozen tundra when word reaches him and his colleagues that the apocalypse is upon them. He intends to be alone as the world ends but instead he finds Iris, another who has been left behind. Seemingly millions of miles away, an astronaut named Sullivan (Sully) is part of a six-person crewed mission to Jupiter. On its return to Earth, the shuttle finds it has no communication with its home planet, and nowhere to go. The book follows the pasts and presents of Augie and Sully, as they eac...