| Y - The Descent of Men by Steve Jones, 252 pages Steven Krise 29 April 2008 | Yankees in the Land of the Gods by Peter Booth Wiley, 542 pages James Donahue 26 February 2004 Really well-written history of the Oerry expedition that forcibly opened Japan to international trade. Wiley goes blow by blow with exquisite (and sometimes excruciating) detail through the story. Best part though is use of Jpse and Am sources so that you see both sides to every event. (First book read for comps; get ready for some Nippon-omania!) |
Yanomamo: The Fierce People by Napoleon A. Chagnon, 214 pages Steve Gadd 27 August 2003 Another perspective-broadening volume in the Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology. The Yanomamo are a tribe living in the jungles between Brazil and Venezuela, subsisting mainly on cultivated plantains. The groups of 50 to 200 individuals are mistrustful of their neighbors and warfare is a major feature of the culture, resulting in about one in four adult males dying of violence. Interesting also for the detailed look at the inevitable process of Westernization and cultural influence from outside. |
Yarn Harlot by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, 219 pages Jennifer Dear 29 June 2006 Hilarious. |
Year Zero by Jeff Long, 406 pages Mike Gadd 07 May 2002 |
You Are Here: A Memoir of Arrival by Wesley Gibson, 224 pages Jaqi Ross 26 February 2004 Not recommended; this book tries to be too many things at once. |
You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, 704 pages Kristin Schrock 02 June 2002 This book nearly killed me. I hate this book with the passion of a thousand suns. But somehow I managed to finish it. At page 150, the hero realizes, "You can't go home again." Then he goes on other adventures for the next 450 pages or so, to come to the same conclusion at page 700. And there's something in there about America dying but there still being hope. So, in short, you can't go home again. We. Get. It. |
You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) by Dave Eggers, 352 pages Brad Snyder 07 August 2007 Two friends on a trip to Senegal, Morocco, Estonia, and Latvia, grieving another friend and giving away money. |
Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism by A James Gregor, 260 pages James Donahue 14 September 2002 An excellent monograph which describes Mussolini's transformation from the leading Socialist intellectual in Italy to the founder of the Fascist party in about six years. Gregor always does a great job of showing the logic and rationality behind Fascist thought rather than just reducing Fascism to meglomania, blind hatred, insanity, and venerial disease. |
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, 229 pages Steven Krise 19 April 2008 "There is a fundamental design in the skeleton of all animals. Frogs, bats, humans, and lizards are all just variations on a theme. That theme, to [Sir Richard] Owen, was the plan of the Creator. Shortly after Owen announced this observation in his classic monograph On the Nature of Limbs, Charles Darwin supplied an elegant explanation for it....There is a major difference between Owen's theory and that of Darwin: Darwin's theory allows us to make very precise predictions. |
Youth by J. Coetzee, 188 pages James Donahue 01 April 2005 Suffering mightily through my comps, stuck skimming books and memorizing half-formed thoughts, Donahue reaches over during irregular bouts of insomnia to read about someone who is worse off than him, a boyish Afrikaaner in love with poetry but enslaved to the London business world, in love with Woman but hapless with women, a believer in the Sublime yet only because he has never truly tasted the banal. Think: the be-colleged Misirian-meets-Bridget-Jones-meets-Camus. |