Also of interest...in understanding the misunderstood
Candy; Perv; Love and Math; The Map and the Territory
Candy
by Samira Kawash (Faber & Faber, $27)
America’s love affair with candy has been “a sweet ride shot through with periodic suspicion,” said Melanie Rehak in Bookforum. Samira Kawash, founder of the blog CandyProfessor.com, has now written an ambitious history of the U.S. sweets industry, chronicling how waves of moral panic have been met by crafty public relations moves. Kawash herself articulates at least one point in candy’s defense with “marvelous precision”: It’s blessedly honest about being unhealthy.
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Perv
by Jesse Bering (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
Many of the fetishes explored in this new book on human sexuality seem “ripe for lampooning,” said Michael Washburn in The Boston Globe. But even when psychologist Jesse Bering is discussing people with an erotic interest in wasps, he “does an admirable job” of showing us why such niche interests are not so different from garden-variety turn-ons. Even pedophilia is a sexual orientation rooted in early development, he argues, and treating it as such would help pedophiles keep their urges in check.
Love and Math
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by Edward Frenkel (Basic, $28)
Love and Math rates as “an admirable attempt to lay bare the beauty of numbers for all to see,” said John Matson in Scientific American. Seeking to redeem a field that many outsiders consider arcane, mathematics professor Edward Frenkel shares stories about how, as a young man of Jewish heritage in the openly discriminatory Soviet Union, he had to study high-level math on the sly. Still, Frenkel has to begin explaining such math eventually, and “some readers may balk” when he does.
The Map and the Territory
by Alan Greenspan (Penguin, $36)
Rather than learning from his mistakes, Alan Greenspan “seems determined to repeat them,” said Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post. The former Fed chairman begins his first book since 2008’s financial crisis by admitting that economists should have seen it coming. But in listing the probable causes, he offers no hint that he might have played a role, then blames old bogeymen, like federal entitlement spending and overregulation. If there’s any logic to his argument, it’s “hard to discern.”
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