Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time ***

The Devil All the Time has almost everything it needs to be a cracking good read: strange backwoods characters who show flashes of unexpected humanity, a plot riddled with violence and religion, and fine writing that straddles the line between hard-boiled and picturesque. (I also really like the physical feel of the Anchor Books paperback -- its heft, its font size, and so on.) However, the pieces don't fit together into anything bigger. The characters are well drawn but never develop; the narrative resolves without any build-up of complications or thematic resonance. The story kept me engaged throughout, but I kept hoping for something more.

Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science **** 1/2

Jackpot. I was casually browsing the Science and Mathematics section of the book store when I noticed Number with its recommendation from Albert Einstein ("Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands"). I'm always interested in the history of ideas, especially the history of ideas we take for granted like the concept of number. Number presents this history well, showing how the concept derives from the practical problems we solve with it.

Beyond its specific focus on number, I think Dantzig's book provides a clear, concise, practical demonstration of how human interests and cognitive abilities shape the reality of the wold we live in. Plenty of philosophers present their views on the objective reality of the world and its relation to our conceptual understanding of it, but none with the specificity of Dantzig and the single fundamental concept of number. He's an entertaining writer too!

Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans ***

Spies of the Balkans is a more conventional story than the other Alan Furst novels I've read, with somewhat less compelling atmosphere. The main character Costa Zannis is more aware of his role in the operation of which he is a part, and his motivations are less subtle or mundane than those of other Furst heroes. He also has a love affair that progresses in the instant fashion of novels, not the gradual manner of real life. In short, the book reads more like a traditional spy thriller than earlier Furst novels do, perhaps in an attempt to broaden his audience.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns ****

The subtitle of this book — The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — is somewhat misleading. While the book is over 600 pages, its focus on the stories of three individuals makes it more intimate than epic. And it's better that way.

The Great Migration is the half-century period during which a huge percentage of black Americans moved from the South to the North and West. The migration changed the face of the country in numerous ways. Wilkerson uses the life stories of three people from different parts of the South to illustrate her general historical and sociological points. She is a journalist, but she describes her characters as well as most novelists. This approach makes her arguments more vividly than an academic approach would have. I was especially struck by the story of Robert Foster driving across the Southwest to Los Angeles. (Foster is the most sharply drawn character.)

On the down side, the book was rather disorganized and repeatedly repeated itself. I'm afraid I'll never be able to track down the place where she made that interesting point about how migrants followed the major train lines, so that you know where a person came from by where they ended up. Or how the end of segregation led to vibrant black communities becoming ghettos.

Definitely recommended.