Guns and Why Americans are Crazy for Them

Gladwell, Malcolm.  The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic.  New York: 

         Little, Brown and Company, 2026.  ISBN: 9780316603782

 

 

Do you have an opinion regarding the amount of gun violence there is in the United States?  Do you have any idea on how the United States treated gun violence in the past?  Do you have opinions on the absurd gun laws on the books now and court rulings?  Malcolm Gladwell addresses these questions and more in The American Way of Killing!

 

Malcolm Gladwell opens the book with an interview of a Chicago ER doctor who had grown up in Chicago.  He had lost 15 close friends or family member to gun violence by the time he was 30 years old who has to teach 4th graders how to deal with gunshot wounds.  Gladwell then pivots to difference in murder rates in the United States versus Canada and Europe. He wants to figure out why the United States is such an outlier on gun violence.

 

Part One: Dishonest Conversations has three chapters.  "A Shooting Lesson" starts with the difference between crime and violence and the difference in what harm different guns do. "The Slave Owner's Lament" covers the motivation and writing style of the writers (principally James Madison) of the 2nd Amendment to the U. S. Constitution and the slippery slope the Supreme Court has been skirting in a number of cases.  "The Cornwell Effect" looks at the amount of practice ER and trauma surgeons get on gun shot wounds and how their skill disguises the damage that gun violence does to society.

 

Part Two: Misdiagnosis also has three chapters.  "The Quarrel Was About A Very Trivial Thing" discuses what we get wrong about why and how various crimes happen and how/why the U.S. justice approach does not work.  "Zero. Zero. It's Not Gonna Happen" discusses the number of police in U.S. cities versus European cities and how this plays out in relation to the amount of criminal cases solved.  "Becoming a Man" examines how emotional management training can play a part in crime reduction.

 

Part Three: Moral Absurdity has two chapters.  "Nobody Appears to Have Liked Sir John Knight" is a deep dive into The Sullivan Act and the legal hoops the Supreme Court jumped through to repeal it.  "The Footnote" is a look at the inequalities in regard to who dies from violence in the United States.

 

The epilogue - "Getting Outta Dodge" - is a rereading of how folks out West dealt with gun violence.  They banned the guns.  The epilogue is also a summarization of all the points made earlier in the book.

 

If you are interested in learning why the United States is such an outlier among civilized countries in regard to violence, pick up this book, read it, and share it!  

 

The State vs Information?

Siegel, Jacob.  The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.  New York: Henry Holt, 

         2026.  ISBN: 9781250363121

 

So what is information?  And how is information related to personal knowledge?   To public knowledge and action?  To politics?   To government control?  These are the types of questions Jacob Siegel tries to answer in The Information State.

 

Jacob Siegel opens the books with a brief dive back into history - back to Aristotle and Plato, up through the Middle Ages and then settling in with the invention  printing press to discuss the growth of censorship and state intervention in the spread of information and opinion.  Starting with World War I and the Wilson administration Siegel gets down into the weeds in regard to the details of how the government involvement in information control grew through World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terror, and then ending with the birth and explosive growth of the World Wide Web and social media platforms.  Siegel also spends time on the opposition to government control that grew up in the same time period.  Unfortunately, the latter part of the book reveals a bias that slants his coverage of events and organizations.  

 

If you are looking for information on how we got into the present political/information conundrum, you could read this title. but, with caution.  As with all titles, remember to read with care and double check their sources! 

The American West as Revealed Through Four Men

Hutton, Paul Andrew.  The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the 

         American West.  New York: Penguin Random House, 2025.  ISBN: 9781524746131

 

How up are you on the story of the American West?  Do you think that the story of western expansion only started when folks moved west of the Mississippi River?  Paul Hutton offers a correction to that view in Undiscovered Country by starting with the movement over the Appalachian Mountains in the 1700s and carries the story on until the closing of the Frontier in the late 1800s through the lenses of four men who helped open up the West for white settlers.

 

Paul Hutton starts his tale of the American West with the first of four men he focuses on - Danial Boone in the 1750s.  The first third of the book places Daniel Boone and his exploits in relation to the events of the French and Indian War, the settlement of the the Ohio River Valley, and the American Revolution and beyond.  The events of the American Revolution and the conflict with the Creek and Seminole Indians introduces the reader to the family of  Davy Crockett - the 2nd focus of this book.  Davy Crockett gained fame for his exploits of fighting Creek Indians and his hunting prowness which led to becoming a politician.  His fame also led to him  being the subject of plays and books.  Then, at the height of his fame, he decided to go West to Texas and ended up at the Alamo where his death just added to his notoriety. 

 

The third man in this book is Kit Carson - known for his bravery, his compassion for various Indian tribes, and his knowledge of the West.  He was involved in the beaver trade,  led John C. Fremont on various of his trips around the West, led troops in New Mexico against the Confederate invasion under General Sibley, then led scouts and troops against the Apaches and Navajos. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody was the final focus of the book.  Buffalo Bill Cody gained his name by hunting buffalo for the Kansas Pacific Railroad.  He also spent time as a scout for the Army, being involved with Kit Carson at times and being called to lead hunts for important folk such as  James Gordon Bennett, Leonard Walter Jerome, and the Russian Grand Duke Alexis, the 3rd son of Czar Alexander II.  Planning out these hunts came in handy later when the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show toured the East, Great Britain, and most of Europe.  Cody was not just a showman, he was also known as a brave scout by both the US Army and the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes.  He became friends with Sitting Bull and had him in his traveling show for a year along with Annie Oakley when they visited England and had opportunity to meet Queen Victoria and other nobility.  Paul Hutton closes the book with the 1893 Chicago World Fair and the meeting of the "World's Congress of Historians and Historical Students" where Frederick Jackson Turner presented his paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  

 

If you would like to refresh your knowledge of the push west from the East Coast or are just interested in any of the four men Paul Hutton focused on, The Undiscovered Country is a good place to start. 

Testing to Destruction, Sometimes!

Davies, Alex.  Kobuk the Destroyer and Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test 

        Engineering.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2026.  ISBN: 9781324051299.   

 

What do you know about Underwriters Laboratory (UL)?  Or the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC)?  Or how jet engines are tested against bird strikes? These are just some of the groups  and products that Alex Davies presents in his examination the role test engineers play in keeping us safe in so many ways!

 

Alex Davies opens with Kobuk the Destroyer taking part in the IGBC testing of "bear-proof" products which he uses as a leading to the rest of the book.  He discusses the Limits that test engineers such as those at Underwriters Laboratory use on safes, elevators, and a host of other products.  Then he delves into the never-ending chore of Fool-Proofing a product so that an ordinary person can use it with out damage to themselves or others, hopefully. The chapter entitled Disintegration highlights how Boeing tested a new model plane on the ground to see how much force it could take before the wings came off.  Unfortunately, the software was not tested to the same degree.  In Scale, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers got highlighted with their scale map of the Mississippi River and Missouri River basin created to help with flood control.  The Dynamics of products let loose in the wild provides real-world impacts on what happens in real life and how that affects testing.  The penultimate chapter - Intention - focuses on The purpose of the product and what effect that has the testing process.  Then, in the final chapter, Alex Davies takes the products into The Total Test Environment and brings all the concepts covered together.

 

For an enjoyable and enlightening look at the unknown world of test engineers, do pick up Alex Davies' Kobuk the Destroyer!  

 

Scientists Causing Trouble!

Kaplan, Matt.  I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being 

        Right.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2026.  ISBN: 9781250372277

 

 

Science is supposed to be a process governed by logic and evidence.  A hypothesis is presented, evidence is gathered and folks try to disprove the idea.  If they can't disprove it,  the hypothesis is accepted as fact.  That is the idealized view of science. But Matt Kaplan's latest title - I Told You So! - focuses on the contrast between how science is supposed to work versus how science is practiced in the real world.   

 

Matt Kaplan opens the book with a description of him attending the 72nd meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in North Carolina as the science correspondent for The Economist (he had been paleontologist before becoming a journalist).  There he encountered numerous scientists in an uproar because a PhD student named Allison Moyer had the gall to present a poster session that challenged some semi-deeply held beliefs about dinosaur color and how we could know what color the dinosaurs were.  Luckily, Alison had Mary Schewitzer and Jack Horner, two established scientists backing her up.  As Kaplan goes on to state in the opening, this is not an isolated occurrence, rather, this is almost normal because scientists are people before they are scientists and people let emotions, cherished beliefs, and prestige shape their responses to challenges.

 

Kaplan looks at issues of bullying, bias, fabrication, sexism, personality conflicts, and other issues that plague science by interweaving the stories of a number of scientist, doctors, and other researchers (both historical figures and more recent scientists) into a coherent story.  Among those discussed is Ignaz Semmelweis who advocated the use of carbolic wash to prevent puerperal fever in Austria, Alexander Gordon, who was chased out of Aberdeen, Scotland, for suggesting that medical staff was spreading puerperal fever, Pierre Louis who created the medical trial by accident while investigating bloodletting in France during the 1800s and one of his students Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the Supreme Court justice) who got chased out of medicine because of his views on puerperal fever.  Holmes got his revenge on his critics by becoming a teacher of anatomy and physiology at Harvard who helped train the next generation of doctors on his theories. Then there is Louis Pasteur who played fast and loose in regard to his claims and would go out of his way to sabotage those he felt might claim his fame.  Carl Woese changed the classification of bacteria.  Katalin Kariko created mRNA which led to the Covid-19 vaccine and other possible vaccines but faced numerous challenges as immigrant scientist  before she found success.  Joseph Lister was another who used a microscope to start to identify bacteria in the 1850s.  Then there is Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei who each had strong allies that helped defend them from attack.  Kaplan rounds off the book with brief discussions of authorship, power dynamics, and funding in relation to how science currently practiced.

 

So if you have an interest in science, read this title!  I Told You So! will get the reader thinking about how science could work if scientists were not people first.  A highly recommended book!  

Is It Just a Pain in the Head?

Zeller, Jr., Tom.  The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction --- and a Search for 

         Relief.  New York: Mariner Books, 2025.  ISBN: 9780358507758

 

Do you ever have headaches?  Since the answer is likely, yes, Tom Zeller then wants to know if you ever have had not the normal run-of-the-mill headaches that can be cured with an aspirin, an Excedrin, or Tylenol, but rather the head-splitting pain of a migraine or head-banging pain of a cluster headache since these are the focus of The Headache.

 

Tom Zeller, an American journalist and cluster headache sufferer, opens with his own personal struggle with cluster headaches and his search for relief.  He then launches into a quest to discover why he has this debilitating reoccurring headache problem. He explores the science of headaches, focusing on the confusing and confounding science of the head.  Over centuries folks have been searching for cures and causes behind these head pains with limited success.  All sorts of reasons are suggested as to how the pain starts and what may cause it to die away for awhile, but the best minds in science are still acting like blind men examining an elephant and arguing over their findings.  Since each person experiencing these head pains are unique, what may be a trigger for one person does not bother another.  Likewise a cure for one can be a dud for another.   And often over time the seemingly wonderful cure stops working for particular individuals.  To compound things more, since the science of headaches is not a highly regarded field of study, funding for research is limited.  In all, this adds up to a very frustrating mess for headache sufferers  who are still desperately hoping for some relief.

 

If you suffer from migraines or cluster headaches, know someone who does, or are just interested in exploring aspects of neurological science, pick up The Headache and join Tom Zeller on his journey!  

 

Talking Marines!

Davis, Scott.  The Last of the Old Breed: An Oral History of the Final Marines From World 

        War II.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2026.  ISBN: 9781250429933 

 

How much do you know about the Marines in World War II?  Besides the Marine Monument In Washington, DC, which celebrates Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima.  Well, if you want to hear from actual WW II Marines, Scott Davis has a volume for you in The Last of the Old Breed.  He spent ten years interviewing veterans and their families and then weaving their individual tales into this book.

 

Scott Davis opens the book with what various individuals were doing before World War II came to American soil at Pearl Harbor and the reaction to this attack and the preparation by the Marines to get into action.  There are chapters on Guadacanal, New Georgia, Tarawa, New Britian, Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa interspersed with chapters on Marines spending time in Samoa, Australia, New Zealand, and the home front.  Scott Davis would provide the individual's name, age at the time of the interview, and their unit and then a snippet of their tale relevant to the particular chapter.  He closes the book with three chapters - "Home Alive by '45," "Life After War," and "In the Shadow of War" which provides context for the veterans' lives after they came home and what they did along with some interactions with family members.  At the tail end of the book is an appendix listing all the Marines who contributed to the book, an appendix of various awards given to the Marines in the book, and an appendix discussing the 121st Naval Construction Battalion - the Seabees - attached to the Fourth Marine Division.

 

If you are looking for first-hand accounts of WW II Marine veterans, pick up Scott Davis's The Last of the Old Breed and listen to their tales.