Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company

A short book demands a short review, so here goes: Steve Martin manages to be funny and thoughtful in this book without ever making you feel like you're in the middle of an SNL skit, and that's a difficult feat when your subject matter is a man whose idiosyncrasies beg to be mocked. Instead, Martin takes us inside the mind of Daniel Pecan Cambridge, who can't cross streets if it involves stepping off of a curb, requires that all the lights in his home add up to 1125 watts (imagine how this impacts bedtime), obsesses over the realtor across the street, and makes frequent--and complicated, due to his inability to curb-hop--trips to Rite-Aid. This novel makes you think about how easy it is to get stuck in a rut and how dangerous that rut can become. It's written quite beautifully--I suppose, after Shopgirl, Martin's writing skills should be less surprising, but the fact is that he's got more literary talent than half the bestseller list. At only 160 pages, this book is just right for a three day read, during which you'll find yourself thinking about Cambridge frequently, and after which you'll be left with the hazy afterglow of a very pleasant experience with an ending that wraps things up perfectly.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germ, And Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

This 400 page summation of 13,000 years of history is hard to put down when it begins and hard to finish when you reach its final quarter. Diamond’s friendly style draws the reader in immediately, making the book feel not only lively but vitally important as well. What could be more important or interesting than the reasons why the world has turned out the way that it has?

Without a doubt, this is an important book, and not because it won a Pulitzer. Diamond makes a convincing case as he argues against notions that were quite popular when he wrote this at the close of the 90s. He refutes the notions of The Bell Curve, which used pretend science to claim that blacks were destined by genetics to be less intelligent than whites and Asians. Instead, he shows that the reasons why Europeans ended up dominating most of the world instead of Africans or native Australians or Americans are myriad, but boil down to a reasonable set, including: Eurasia’s size advantage; the fortunate combination of ancient plants and large animals available for domestication; its east-west axis, making the spread of plant and animal domesticates easier by keeping them in the same climate; and its relatively mild barriers, like the Urals, which posed less a division than rain forests, high mountains, and deserts in the Americas and Africa.

The thrilling opening and friendly style are eventually tempered by a repetition of these primary causes; Diamond explores numerous situations around the world, from New Guinea to the New World, and makes essentially the same arguments about each region, adding only nuances for the particulars of each place. It’s the beginning of the book that’s got the goods—the fourth part, especially, is a litany of details that are less captivating because the reader has learned enough to predict many of them.

Still, this is a very useful book for understanding the world, and it will arm you with facts to use against anyone who claims that a person’s intellect can be predicted by his or her race. Diamond also shows how present conflicts on the world stage are very similar to ones that have been going on for 40,000 years, casting modernity in the same light as prehistory. And, while the fourth part is slower than the rest, the epilogue explains why Europe leapt ahead of Asia in the last millennium, an explanation that is both fascinating and worth learning from.

Why did Europe colonize America and not the other way around? If you’d like to know, read this book. It’s weighty stuff, but it will reward you richly.