The design of this book is amazing. And I feel like I've learned enough about the interior life of a cartoonist to be glad I'm a librarian, but grateful that talented, hard-working people like Adrian Tomine do such good work. PS: stick around after the credits for a bonus scene. PPS: are his kids the youngest artists to ever get their work published by Drawn & Quarterly?

If you’re currently able-bodied, you might not know how your classmates and neighbors with disabilities live. Yeah, I said “currently able-bodied”, because a lot of us will end up facing issues as our bodies get older and older. Unless you die young, you probably don’t have a disability yet.

There’s a lot to talk about when you talk about people with disabilities and how society affects them, and the author makes a fair attempt to cover all of it at least a little. Some of it is surprisingly cheerful (“the homelike, supportive atmosphere of group homes has been well received”—perhaps I’ve heard secondhand stories only from people who disagree) and some of it is realistically gritty (“there are laws and then there is justice, the latter being not so easily attained”).

The Disability Experience was written for teens who are currently able-bodied. That’s not a bad thing on its own, but readers who are disabled might find that assumption a bit unwelcome. People with a mobility impairment might be reading this to learn more about blind people.

The author (in my advance copy, at least) uses a lower-case d in “deaf” except at the beginning of a sentence, which contrasts with the Deaf custom of using a capital D to refer to Deaf culture, Deaf languages, Deaf education, and using a lower-case d only when talking about being deaf as an impairment. The pre-publication version also says “person with autism” instead of “autistic person”.

I’m hoping that issues like these can be corrected; as of yet I can’t recommend this book without reservations.

I am grateful to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

For a few hours each day, the River Thames in London recedes with the low tide, exposing literally millions of years of history in the mud of its banks. Hobbyists called mudlarks have brought precious artifacts to museums from the river of time, and in the pages of Thames Mudlarking you can see all this history laid before you with expert annotations.

I’m no student of history, so I was edified as well as gratified to read brief historical explanations of the small Anglo-Saxon village of Lundenwic that grew from the mostly-abandoned Roman city of Londinium to become a major international trading center. I had never heard of King Æthelberht of Kent (858–866 CE), but now I’ve seen his face on a penny that ended up in the Thames!

If you don’t plan to be near London or don’t want to acquire a three-year permit for £90, a copy of Thames Mudlarking is the next best thing. Better, in some ways: if you cut yourself handling the pages, you don’t have to worry about getting a disease.

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

I bought ASUP (dang, this could be a meta acronym if it had a really long subtitle!) as a birthday gift for my wife. When it arrived, she asked me to read it out loud to her and was reportedly delighted by my present.

Alas, there was no mention of why anyone had to give Carl uranium per se, since any strip of smoke-detector “americium” would have contained some uranium thanks to radioactive decay. (Hank! I will gladly claim to routinely carry 20 hats if I get an answer—you can feed two birds with one scone!)

After his work as the official White House photographer for the Obama-Biden administration, Pete Souza got catty and tweeted out his own photos that stood in contrast to the stream-of-consciousness monologue coming from the administration that followed. This is a collection of his greatest hits.

I can't. Reading this reminds me of humiliating trauma I would rather forget. But if you're my friend and you're straight-sized (not plus-sized), I want you to read this and understand it.

A really cute story about coping with, and embracing, life after having a cone placed around your head by a veterinarian. Relatable, right? For kids who have a cast on a broken limb, maybe it actually is relatable.

When we capture data that we observe and apply it to the world around us, what are we doing? We’re putting too much trust in our own point of view and in the ability of data to make a good representation of reality. We’re risking the privacy and safety of humans and other creatures. But we’re also learning about our world more comprehensively than we used to be able to.

Jer Thorp, a data artist with a science background, argues that we must think carefully and humbly about what information we capture, how we process it and use it, and how we communicate what we learn from it. “Potential harms seem impossible,” he points out, “when you don’t inhabit the futures in which they happen.” More than that, the people affected by the capturing have the rights to their own data. Māori genetic information belongs to Māori people, not to the scientists who gather it.

Beyond the ethics and the quantum observer issues with collecting data, Living in Data points out some breathtaking ways of communicating about it. One artist, for example, led his studio in using individual grains of rice (counted in a representative sample) to represent all the people in the world. That took over a quarter million pounds of rice, four tractor trailers full. The people of St. Louis gathered around, and walked on, 10x10ft maps of the city after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. They told their own stories on this new canvas.

Living in Data offers interwoven vignettes about the role data plays in our lives, past and present. It’s a conversation starter, excellent for book clubs interested in nonfiction, and while I may not change anything about how I attempt to handle my own data, I’ll be more aware of how data-related issues affect justice, privacy, ecology, the sovereignty of communities, and everything else.

I am grateful to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.