non-fiction Archives - Andrew Blackman

January Reading Roundup

Reading 5 February 2019 12 Comments

Better late than never! Here’s my reading roundup for January. It was a month in which I did a lot of travelling, driving from Greece to Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and now Croatia (via Romania again and a brief stop in Serbia). So I didn’t spend as much time reading and blogging as I wanted to, but I still managed to read some excellent books to start 2019. The Great Passage by Shion Miura This was my contribution to the Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza (which you can still… Read More

Review of Border by Kapka Kassabova

Reading 4 May 2018 2 Comments

Have you ever read a book that seemed to contain all the right ingredients but somehow failed to live up to your expectations? That’s how I felt after reading Border by Kapka Kassabova.

“Rogue” sociology?: Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh

Reading 16 January 2014 6 Comments

What a difference a title makes, or even a subtitle. The version I read, the US edition which I received as a review copy, had the subtitle “A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.” This irritated me throughout the book, because I kept expecting Sudhir Venkatesh to “go rogue”, and he never did. He perhaps got a bit more emotionally involved with his subjects than sociologists are supposed to, but he was always scrupulous about not affecting the outcomes, about being ethical and honest and reading… Read More