Tim Wise, Under the Affluence *** 1/2

I agree with Wise's premise –– that in our culture "the conditions of the impoverished, the underemployed and the struggling are justified as the inevitable result of inadequate effort on their part, or of cultural flaws, while the wealth and success of the rich are likewise rationalized as owing to their superior talent or value systems" –– and I believe that this misconception underlies our biggest issues as a nation. He is preaching to the converted with me. But would his book convince a less liberal reader?

Alas, I think the answer is no. Wise musters a lot of data to support his argument, but he would be less than fully compelling for three reasons:

• While explaining how the poor's condition is not the result of laziness or a lack of values, he buries his conceptual points under an avalanche of statistics.
• While arguing that it's the super-rich who have a value problem, he resorts to the anecdotal claims that he rightly derided when they were targeted at the poor. ("It's entirely the norm, it seems, for rich parents to pay psychologists thousands of dollars for a 'learning disability' diagnosis for their kids, so those children can get extra time on standardized tests.")
• He recognizes that progressives need a compelling counter-narrative if they're going to overturn the myth of the meritocracy, but he doesn't supply one or even the outlines of one. His thoughts on the subject sound naïve and utopian.

Blake Crouch, Dark Matter *** 1/2

Dark Matter is a science-fiction action story. The narrator is kidnapped by a masked man, taken to an abandoned power station, and injected with a mysterious drug. He wakes up in a different reality where people treat him as a returning hero. He escapes into an alternate version of Chicago, and tries to figure out what's happening. (It takes him a little longer than it takes the reader.) Soon he is traveling through many alternate realities and outwitting numerous enemies in a quest to return to his "real" life.

The heart of the book is in its chase and fight scenes, which are frequent, well executed, and keep you turning the pages. The scientific elements are largely there to motivate the action sequences, although they also serve to introduce questions about personal identity. Crouch surely wrote Dark Matter with a movie in mind.

Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World ** 1/2

Peter Singer is an influential and controversial philosopher, best known (to me) for his strong views on animal rights. Ethics in the Real World is "82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter."

Unfortunately, the essays are too brief to give me any sense of why Singer might be influential or controversial. They are really more like blog posts than essays, and for the most part they merely have time to introduce a subject from the news (abortion, organ sales, euthanasia, religious liberty, climate change), show how they raise an ethical question, and state his position on that question, which is inevitably the stereotypical liberal one. I got no sense of Singer's unique or well-argued point of view, nor did I learn anything about moral reasoning. Disappointing.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle ****

The Mortmain family lives in arguably romantic poverty at a ruined English castle. The father wrote a famous book years before, but now spends his time reading detective novels in the gatehouse; eldest daughter Rose laments her lack of prospects; our narrator Cassandra, a well-read and introspective teenager, writes in her journal. Their landlord dies and leaves his estate to his two American grandsons, whose arrival Cassandra immediately recognizes as similar to Mr Bingley's arrival in Pride and Prejudice.

There's not much plot in I Capture the Castle, but the story is thoroughly enjoyable because of Cassandra's charm. She is more insightful than a rural 17-year-old girl would be, but her feelings and actions sound genuine. The title alludes to her ability to capture the mood of the time and place. The book is is one of the few romance novels where the proper match for the heroine is not totally obvious from the beginning: Cassandra has complex feelings for multiple men. I also appreciated her observations about the differences between Americans and Englishmen.