Wednesday, November 8, 2017

NONFICTION NOVEMBER: Mini Reviews




Doing Dewey, one of the hosts of Nonfiction November, posted some mini reviews of nonfiction books, which reminded me that I still have some NF books I'd like to review on my blog. If Monday's theme was Book Pairings, finding fiction and nonfiction that go together, these three books I read this year have absolutely, absolutely nothing in common.


A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal by Jen Waite (6 h 41 min, audiobook, read by the author)

A woman, after the fact, discovers she had married a sociopath. This memoir recounts how they got together, how it all fell apart, and what she learned about her awful husband.The structure is good with back and forth, present and past.




In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke (YA Sync free audiobook)

Irene Gut was a young Polish girl during the German invasion of Poland who manages to save a number of Jews. The depravity, and the slight hope, in humanity that Holocaust books always have is certainly here.  Not everyone was as dedicated to the German ideas, as Irene ends up working for a German major who, because of his love for her, lets a lot of things slide in the house.  If you liked The Hiding Place, I'd recommend this one as well.




Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, 96 pages

Apparently, this was a best seller in Italy, which just goes to show how different Europe is from North America. I teach physics, but I teach high school, Newtonian physics and modern physics is presented in the book. The ideas are interesting, bit also pretty high level and abstract. As usual, when I read quantum physics articles, I kind of understand it as I go, but couldn't explain any of it, or replicate any information within about two minutes of finishing. That said, it is short, and not indepth, and quite interesting.