Closer Than You Know by Brad Parks

Hardcover, 402 pgs, Pub March 6th 2018 by Dutton Books, ISBN13: 9781101985625

Brad Parks’ compulsively readable standalone crime thriller is nearly flawless. The author takes risks by making his protagonist a woman, a young white mother married to a black man. While he might make a misstep or two in how a woman might react to rape or a first-time mother might react to being wrongly accused of several crimes and then having her child taken by social services, he has a strong enough case that we keep reading to see how he will explain it all.

Technically, the book moves smoothly between points of view, from accused, to police, to perp, to innocent victim. Our own opinions are in flux as we get pushed and pulled with every new development in the case against the mother. She is a victim several times over, and we can explain her reticence to spill her guts and tell all she knows to her attorney by first considering her foster-care background.

The whole builds up to a situation in which good people can get hurt by other well-meaning people because everyone is being manipulated by normal human perceptions and reactions. Preet Bharara, former Chief Prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, recently wrote in his memoir that one thing he learned in his time at one of the most visible courts in the land that “[a]nyone is capable of anything.”

I read this book at first because the author is the son of one of my brother’s best friends, but I am pleased to be able to report that the skill, talent, and sheer dare-devil chutzpah of the author is on full display. Brad Parks takes risks but is able to pull off the heist. Congratulations, Brad Parks!



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A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel J. Levitin

Oh, boy, I wish every one of my fellow citizens had the information shared in this book as part of their reading regime. On one hand, it would make it much harder to convince people with statistics. On the other hand, it would be much harder to convince people with statistics. Come to think of it, I think nowadays most people mistrust statistics, unless the statistics back up their own opinion.

How many times I received end-of-quarter reports from some mutual fund company showing showing growth and profits exceeding other companies’ but their graphs do not have the axes on their bar charts or line graphs labelled. Even one so discrepant in the moneymaking arts as I know this for a sham report.

Levitin does a couple of things in this book: he describes common ways to use statistics to disguise facts. He points out common errors the best-intentioned of us make (like doctors determining probabilities in positive cancer screens) and leads us to the way to find answers. He demystifies “expert testimony” by pointing out that expertise is typically narrow.

Donald Trump features in this book, both quoted directly and by implication:

“Truth is the default position and we assume others are being truthful with us. An old joke goes, “How do you know that some is lying to you? Because they begin with the phrase to be perfectly honest. Honest people do not need to preface their remarks this way.”

In the last third of the book, Levitin tells us how to think straight: deduction and induction, logical fallacies, framing risk, and belief perseverance, ending with a separate chapter on Bayesian probability. Finally, he gives four case studies to see if you managed to understand what he’d been telling you all along. He ends with a physicist’s explanation of new ideas and what we really don’t know for sure.

Levitin is very good. The material in his book parallels an earlier book I’d reviewed, Psy-Q by Ben Ambridge, which takes a fun look at the ways we can deceive or stun our friends. And, truthfully (?!), I found Ambridge's explanation of Bayesian probabilities a little more understandable and applicable. But if you are like me, you need to review those proofs again and again every which way before you can explain it yourself. Psy-Q is a Penguin Paperback Original.

Both these books would be very useful for high school or college students or educators. These experts (now I wonder if I can use that term ever again) try to make it easy for us whose expertise lies elsewhere. It seems that most Americans may have learned only half of what they needed to from this book, so learning what we didn’t the first time around will be useful for the rest of our lives.

Below a short video intro by Levitin explaining logical fallacy which will give you some idea of the audience to whom he is speaking:




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Summer Reads from Four Bloggers

Porter Square Books

When: June 21, 2012
Where: Cambridge, MA
Porter Square Books

[Courtesy of http://portersquarebooks.com/]

Four bloggers shared their best recommendations for summer reads with us:

• Trish (Me!) of The Bowed Bookshelf @bowedbookshelf
• Tahleen Ovian Shamlian of Tahleen's Mixed-Up Files @tahleen
• Gail Yates of Ticket to Anywhere @Irisheyz77
• Marie Cloutier of BostonBibliophile @bostonbibliophl

I went first, and explained that although I read fiction and nonfiction, I chose fiction for this summer. You can click the book titles listed below to see why we chose each title.

Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hyland

If Jack's in Love by Stephen Wetta

It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories by James Lasdun

Revival by Scott Alarik

Tahleen reviews young adult books and she had a mix of great titles that she'd picked from the past several years.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Paper Towns by John Green

Gail reads a mix of genres: fantasy, young adult, romance, science fiction and she has chosen the best of her blog for your delectation this summer.

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

Hold Still by Nina LaCour

The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Hourglass by Myra McEntire

Marie, the Boston Bibliophile, chose some of the books in the past months that have rocked her worldview.

Pure by Andrew Miller

Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua

Absolution by Patrick Flanery

Sorry to be getting this list out late to you, but think of it this way: summer is in full swing. If you missed on your choices so far, take a look at ours and begin again. You won't be sorry.

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