Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Everything is disarmingly self-aware; its bluntness preempts attempts to poke holes with admissions that nothing is complete. That—more so than the hot-take-style quotable excerpts that serve to draw attention to the text in the first place—is what makes it remarkable. Sapiens isn’t afraid to make the best claim it can given the facts as they are known, isn’t afraid to say, “This might all be wrong but here it is anyway,” and isn’t afraid to give all the information it can without trying to steer the reader into a comfortable line of thinking.

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David DinaburgNon-fiction, culture, history, humanity
Binary Star
Binary Star

Binary Star is a book about space, about interstellar space where our minds are the stars and our relationships are the void between. God, does that sounds clichéd. Nothing in Binary Star will ever be that clunky, that explicit. It is elegant, it has words that float just behind your eyes while you sit on the train, trying not to panic, trying not to think about how miserable things can be. Are. Were.

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David Dinaburgpoetry, radiance, dating, travel, vague
Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

The author speaks literally to you, the person reading the book. It is startling to have her stop her first-person account—the now standard casual-modern-non-fiction talk-text—and turn to the reader. She directly asks you a rhetorical question while calling you “you,” drawing attention to your own existence. She knows you’re there, knows she exists as a brief voice in your head, her own existence entirely out of her control. And then this sublime moment of flux is over as the tale moves on like it was nothing at all to upend the tacit conventions upon which the written word stands. She makes a salient socioeconomic point to facilitate a mental return back to nonfictionland; the reader can forget that they were a “you” that the author wrote something to and go back to being "the reader."

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David DinaburgNYC, Manhattan, Non-Fiction, first person
The Argumentative Indian
The Argumentative Indian

this is my major concern with The Argumentative Indian; it is a compilation novel of the author’s articles over the past decade. You see the same things, referenced again and again; compilation books are not only repetitive—how much text is wasted skimming the surface of the Gujurat Massacre ten separate times, rather than hitting it once with depth and vigor—but the tone is so disparate there is next to no authorial voice to guide you through the narrative. Any sense of uniqueness or cohesion on the part of an author is pressed flat by the need to match the format in which the text originally appeared; New York Review of Books; New Republic; Financial Times; et al.

Each chapter is stand-alone; you will undoubtedly pull the fantastic knowledge from the trove, but the cost is high.

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David DinaburgIndia, Musings
Behind Her Eyes
Behind Her Eyes

Behind Her Eyes is sold on its unexpected twist. And unless you’re insulated by extreme heteronormativity, I simply cannot imagine the twist in Behind Her Eyes being very surprising. It is telegraphed so far in advance I was sure it was a red herring. You really should stop reading if you care at all about reading this book yourself.

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David Dinaburgtwist, thriller
Death on the Nile
Death on the Nile

I, without question, am that easy to deceive. Or, at least, I tend to get swept away by atmosphere. My gullibility—which I prefer to term active engagement in creating experiences—aided my enjoyment of my first Agatha Christie novel as much as it did while touring Cairo and Luxor. I let the red herrings ensorcell me like an episode of Scooby Doo; I never tried to outthink the plot or predict what had—or might—happen,

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David DinaburgMystery, Egypt, Travel
Signs Preceding the End of the World
Signs Preceding the End of the World

Like and unlike Hamlet, Makina is contradiction; ageless intellectual force yet feckless and indeterminately ageless. Circumstances sweep both away: while Makina lacks Hamlet’s legendary dithering, she maintains his ephemeral ability to simply vanish, which—in a Hamlet-analogue that is so good it seems planned—means she verses like no other. Take a moment, please, to hear from the voice of the translator:

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David DinaburgFiction, immigration, American southwest
Certain American States
Certain American States

Later, no, I would see that it was the Flatbush of New York City: a number of stories in Certain American States are set in the New York that I know and love, the New York of middling affluence, of hope and transition and internal errors, cosmetic scars that cannot dig deeply enough for permanent damage. Stories of relative hardships, of ennui unmoored from deadly consequences of aimlessness. No threat of survival within these certain American states, only danger to potential, to the lack of the stunning success that was promised, a failure to reach the "better off than your parents' generation" fealty to which we were sworn.

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David DinaburgShort Stories, NYC
Circe
Circe

Circe isn’t misunderstood—she’s perfectly understood; she turns men into pigs because men see her body as their property and try to claim her with their strength. She needs no narrative overhaul for us to understand her actions; she needs no revamp to be sympathetic. The system is, and always has been, designed to quite literally fuck her over.

The gods do it, and have always done it, and won't stop until someone with power equal to their own challenges their depravity. It is always a game or all a joke to those who hold the power. But not so to the ones “so very bad at getting away.” This is a direct indictment of a system and has the overarching and amorphous quality of a parable. Which is good, because that's what myths are. Circe is jerked around by a society that lets those in power say and do things that are fundamentally revolting; myths represent humans trying to understand the world, and this particular understanding is relevant now more than ever.

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David Dinaburgmyths, me too, retelling, Fiction
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

That’s the point; Star Wars is about Luke coming to grips with his (magical, destined, prophetic) heritage. Star Trek is about exploring a (fictional) universe. Picard isn’t coming to grips with anything. He’s doing his job. The audience doesn’t need to know how The Force works to be invested in Luke’s journey. The movie didn’t spend five pages of dialogue trying to pin down the BTU output of a Lightsaber. The precise energy signatures of the warp drive engineering bay is probably an integral component to whatever it is that appeals to people that like Star Trek. Probably.

Try setting Star Trek in the nineteenth century, perhaps during the U.S.’s Manifest Destiny inspired westward expansion. What, are they going to “prime directive” the native Shoshone peoples? Are we going to get fifteen minutes of discussion about what type of wood the wagon tongue is made from, and how much torque it can withstand because it is maple instead of oak? It just doesn’t work. Actually, strike that, it kind of sounds awesome. Oh wait, that happened, and it was called SeaQuest and it was terrible. Because, “They live under the sea, it’s Star Trek under the sea” was the whole premise. But it didn’t have the fictional Star Trek universe. That’s what people cared about! Tricorders and the Federation and what have you. Name a character from SeaQuest. Or an antagonist. Or some sort of characteristic of the world. Besides “the ocean.” Without Wikipedia. Maybe you know the name of the ship. I didn’t, but I just looked it up, and it’s “SeaQuest.” Seriously. That’s pretty lame. Check please.

But Star Wars? That story is about a lowly farm boy who finds out that his father is not only a high-ranking lord in the local political landscape, but that he has inherited both the legacy of magical powers and the prophetic destiny of dismantling the existing system. Also known as every fantasy story ever. It is set in space. That’s the twist! Robots and wookies instead of horses and elves. And it is glorious.

So, I’m pretty firmly entrenched in the fantasy side of things. Which is no good, at least from the perspective of trying to sell me personally on L. Ron Hubbard as an author.

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David DinaburgNon-Fiction, biography, Science Fiction
The Secret Chord
The Secret Chord

David, far from perfect, feels believable compared to standard fantasy or fable characters who are often touched by the divine or go on to unite kingdoms or forge nations in peace and harmony. For all its biblical foundation—God and prophets and a chosen people—Goliath was just a man, albeit a large one. David had children that grew up spoiled and violent; David was a man inflamed by lusts; David was an upstart and usurper:

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David Dinaburghistorical, Literary Fiction, bible, king david, goliath, reimagining
Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol
Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

As someone living in a predominantly female neighborhood in Manhattan—renowned for its air of “safety” over “excitement”—I was curious to find some rationale behind the observably more frequent clusters of women stumbling around on late Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings—hailing cabs and buying electrolyte-replenishing Gatorades—than groups of men. And while this anecdotal tale is completely irrelevant to any sort of methodical inquiry into the subject of women and alcohol, it is the type of digression that you should brace yourself for if you’re planning on picking up Drink.

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David Dinaburgnonfiction, drinking, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

It isn’t a failure that Time Reborn doesn’t answer questions—what is important is realization that the framework in which we do physics, rely on math, and oversimplify the world to fit our algorithms and equations is examined and excoriated as wish fulfillment. The digital age continues to reduce people to numbers and alters the world to fit the lens of self-effacing code. It is increasingly important to avoid a fallacious “natural” justification for mathematical simplicity in attempting to understand the universe, else risk giving credence to a "true" or "pure" mathematical view of markets or web traffic or any other social construct.

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David Dinaburgnonfiction, time, space, space-time, Physics
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

Quiet seems to want to claim a piece of “...the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year...” and lands firmly in the self-justification section. The anecdotes typically reinforce this dim view. Rather than appealing in a Mlodinowian style that provide a personal connection to the the underlying facts, many vignettes are simply synecdoche in the guise of specificity:

The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college, She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.

It’s not that the story of Ms. Liao isn’t compelling, it’s that she is meant to stand in for “Introverts” with a capital “i”. It reaches too far. That is what made so many sections of this book a complete slog; granular anecdotes are wedged into a framework that is then extended beyond their incredibly narrow scope.

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David Dinaburgnonfiction, self-care