Small Favor - Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files, Bk. 10)

 I haven't read a Dresden book for quite a while.  The last one was good, but I'd still had a bad taste in my mouth from one several years back.  This book, however, cleared that up.  This book was lots of fun and engaging without the waffling inconsistencies of other books.  It was a read solid book and I don't plan to wait as long to read the next one.  

Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just about Everything Book - Randi Hutter Epstein

 Everyone should read this book. It's a pretty wild ride from our first observations that nerves don't do all the communicating in the body through folly and happy accidents to controversies of modern hormonal medicines.  It is intense, but fascinating from beginning to end.  This book not only has the factual, and frankly amazing, timeline of the human understanding of hormones but keeps intact the sexism, racism and hubris rife in the medical community.  

This book is a journey that begins with doctors and surgeons unanimously declaring they had solved all anatomy problems by discovering the nerves and the rest was only minor details, thorough rooster castration and reinstallation of testes elsewhere in the body to the brown dog affair (spoiler alert: they used to dissect dogs alive to show how the nerves work because, despite knowing the nerves transmitted pain, somehow never dawned on people that these dogs were in excruciating pain being fileted alive).  Then the book travels through a few of the major players and their lives like Dr. Harvey Cushing and his brain collection to Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and her unwillingness to quit due to pregnancy leading to her jokes about having a 8.5 pound 5-month-old fetus. Starting with the horror of brain spongiform disease acquired from pituitary gland injections to make short children taller to political arguments about using hormone blockers at the onset of puberty for trans children.  This book brings to life a seemingly boring topic in a way I've rarely seen before and I highly recommend it for anyone with a curious mind.  

Bitcoin for Beginners & Dummies: Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Book - Giovanni Rigters

 This book was not as detailed as the first I read in terms of history, but it did have a list of some of the most popular cryptocurrencies and exchanges detailing their pros and cons.  This book was important for that part.  It gave a run-down of the various coins, what they were tied to and how they came about so you could judge if it sounded like a quality investment or not.  It detailed the exchanges and how safe they are as well as what you can trade on them.  It also discussed the various ways to store your crypto and how to get or recieve them.  This was a good book for a basic overview of actually using them, instead of largely theory like the first book I mentioned.  

Gender Trouble - Judith Butler

 This book was difficult to slog through because it's basically reading a sociology dissertation.  There were, however, several important and insightful arguments in it, but I would have preferred a cliff notes version.  I'll save you some trouble (gender or not, ha!) and detail what I thought the most important take-home bits were below.

This entire book boils down to the idea that femininity is defined as the opposite of masculinity, therefore anything that negates or works outside of the non-masculine rule breaks the narrative and people's brains implode.  This sounds both too simplistic and at first appears difficult to place or understand due to lack of examples, but I'll offer a few from the book that, to me, really cemented the concept.  

- Lesbians! What use does a lesbian have for a man? Nothing as far as personal life enrichment is concerned. (Sure, one would hope that no one ignore nearly half the population based on their sex, but men have been doing this for centuries, so it's not like it's unheard of.)  So what are the two tropes about lesbians recycled ad nauseam?  1) The two hot femme lesbians who are just showing off for (male) attention.  2) The angry butch lesbo who is there to take down the patriarchy, violently if needed.  In both these stereotypes the woman is only relevant in her stance to either pleasure or harm men.  There is no sexy lesbian for the bi girls trop.  No butch leading hetro women in a feminist movement.  There is never any reference to the quiet relationship between two women outside of how it impacts men.  Occasionally, you'll hear about some bible-thumper housewife up in arms that her little girl's teacher is a lesbian and she may teach the child to be a lesbian! Then the child will never grow up to marry a man and make babies and follow the #lifescript! I believe we have all heard this story at least once.  But how many times have you heard of that bible-thumping housewife freaking out that her little girls teacher is 55 and still not married? I haven't.  Because at 55 the teacher is no longer a sex object and doesn't matter to men, however she could still get married to a male and that makes her just the right combination.

- The dreaded childfree!  Why do women who chose to be childfree get so much more pushback, from literally everyone, than men who chose the same route in life?  The internet is absolutely choking with stories of males walking in and getting a vasectomy nearly immediately (a few exceptions do exist) but females have years long battles spanning multiple doctors and even multiple unwanted/unplanned pregnancies before maybe, finally, getting the snip themselves.  The excuse given by these "doctors" to the women invariably falls into the "but what if you change your mind" category, often wandering into "what if a man forces you to change your mind" territory.  Parents, friends, co-workers, a random guy on the street, even the rare spouse, all cannot comprehend that a female wouldn't want to go through the most grueling and dangerous natural procedure of humanity, child birth.  Excluding the spouse and possibly the parents of only children, someone choosing not to have a child has 0 influence on any of these people's lives.  Yet they have to comment, must persuade this woman that she is wrong.  Men can get some of this from their mothers/MILs, but not from friends or co-workers and certainly not strangers on the street.  Why is everyone so vested in the woman having children then?  Because the one thing males cannot do is give birth.  Pushing out a child is the only thing a female can do that a male cannot.  Making that process the most important thing a woman can do.  So when she chooses not to, what standard has society left to hold her to?  Simply put: if she's not reproducing (or raising someone's children), she is not dichotomizing herself as everything that isn't male/masculine. Leaving her as ... what? in the eyes of society and social constructs. If she isn't the opposite of a male, what is she?

This is an insightful book, but it could be pared down to a long magazine article and still get as much out of it. 

The Nazi Occult War: Hitler's Compact with the Forces of Evil Book - Michael Fitzgerald

 I was rather disappointed about this book.  I expected a more detailed and sordid tale than the bland overview this book offers.  When you speak of a psycho like Hitler and his heavy dabbling in the occult, I was expecting some diary entries about his crazy rants from those close to him or even fanciful rumors, albeit with a large disclaimer about lack of verifiable authenticity attached.  It was super boring.  How does one make Hitler boring? This book was mostly "X went here looking for Atlantis but Y author thought it was over here and sent X there when his first expedition failed to locate it."  No details about why they thought it was there or who they contacted.  No journal entries or stories from relatives.  Just boring.  

However, there was one great aspect of this book.  The author details the finer points of how Hitler got involved in all that crap and how it obviously shaped his views and plans.  Who he met and the ideas he absorbed from these people were paramount to the stances he too.  He took ideas of hidden evil and horoscopes and the German superiority complex from these people he met prior to his political career.  I had always wondered how this messed up little man had cultivated such grand ideas about himself and the German peoples, this was it.  All the secret societies and left overs from the occult obsession of the late 1800's solidified into a political platform in Nazi Germany, which ironically, lead to their destruction too.  So overall, read the first third of this book and forget about the rest.. 

Crippled by Cryptocurrency - Atherton Cooper

 This was a clickbait-y title with the content of the book being a combination of ghost stories about crypto and sound financial security advice about any get-rich-quick scheme not specific to crypto.  The author goes on talking points about how if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Only invest what you can afford to loose.  Always double check where you are sending your money.  Research thoroughly before investing in anything.  He mentions Ponzi schemes multiple times, which have obviously been around for far longer than crypto.  The only difference now is that the form of payment used has changed.

While all of this advice is legitimate, the author grabbed the crypto part of this as a way to sell more books, just hopping on the band wagon, and nothing to do with crypto specific problems, but general internet safety.

Heidi - Johanna Spyri

 My grandmother gave me an illustrated abridged version of the book as a child and I never read it.  This Christmas my mother gave that book to my niece.  I realized I never actually read Heidi, so I thought I should finally get around to it.  It's a sweet story with excellent morals and a great young children's book, wholesome and straight-forward.  I would definitely read this to a young child.