Review_NONFICTION
56 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 5, 2019
Review_NONFICTION
lucidly analyzes the phases of contentment
and consternation that professional couples
experience. After conducting over 100
interviews with “dual-career couples,”
Petriglieri identifies three challenging life
transitions—job promotions, having
children, and retirement—that are
reported as the most difficult times during
a relationship. Offering no easy tricks for
avoiding relationship or career hardships,
Petriglieri instead prepares readers for the
difficulties couples will likely encounter
and offers useful strategies that can assist
any couple struggling with work and love,
among them “career mapping” (setting
out mutual career plans) and “couple
contracting” (making specific, firm
commitments). All of her advice revolves
around the importance of open communi-
cation and kindness in sustaining healthy
relationships. This helpful work’s strength
lies in the clarity of Petriglieri’s observa-
tions and her closeness to the couples she
describes. Petriglieri’s guidance will
provide readers with practical strategies
for establishing a healthy, supportive, and
flexible bond with their partner. (Oct.)Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street
Capitalism, and the Decade
of Greed
David Farber. Cambridge Univ., $24.95
(220p) ISBN 978-1-108-42527-8
In this insightful study, Farber, a history
professor at the University of Kansas,
considers crack as a social and economic
phenomenon in the 1980s and ’90s U.S.
As Farber shows, for many young black
men during the period, who were largely
excluded from the labor market, selling
drugs was “an economic lifeline.” Drawing
on interviews, Farber explores how crack
was distributed (in Chicago by gangs, in
New York City by “start-up operations”);
the violence it triggered as crack kingpins
defended their territories; and the “con-
spicuous consumption” associated with
both crack culture and hip-hop (some
artists were dealers and some dealers were
aspiring hip-hop artist). Farber also illu-
minates the policies made in response to
crack, recounting how politicians of all
political stripes, supported by a large
majority of the American people, passed
punitive, racially biased drug laws that
treated crack dealers more harshly than
cocaine dealers. Black community leadersArtificial Intelligence:
A Guide for Thinking Humans
Melanie Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
$28 (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-25783-5
Mitchell (Complexity: A Guided Tour) a
Portland State computer science professor,
ably illustrates the current state of artificial
intelligence, debunking claims about
computers that match or surpass human
intelligence. She begins with a meeting
that she attended with Google’s AI team
alongside her
former PhD
advisor, Douglas
Hofstadter,
author of Gödel,
Escher, Bach,
who revealed he
was “terrified”
that a “superfi-
cial set of brute-
force algorithms
could explain
the human spirit.” Mitchell then examines
various areas of AI research, including
image recognition, question answering,
game playing, and translation. Each
example yields similar results; namely,
that computers can be trained to master
specific tasks—as with the vaunted
Jeopardy! win for IBM’s Watson program—
but not to learn new abilities in general or
truly understand meaning. Responding to
claims by AI developers, Mitchell suggests
that machines can never “fully under-
stand human language until they have
human-like common sense.” Moreover,
AI programs remain susceptible to errors
and hacking, in part because they are
surprisingly easily fooled. Taking care to
keep the text accessible, Mitchell lightens
things with amusing facts, such as how
Star Trek’s ship computer remains the gold
standard for many AI researchers. This
worthy volume should assuage lay readers’
fears about AI, while also reassuring
people drawn to the field that much work
remains to be done. (Oct.)Couples That Work:
How Dual-Career Couples
Can Thrive in Love and Work
Jennifer Petriglieri. Harvard Business Review,
$30 (272p) ISBN 978-1-63369-724-9
In her illuminating debut, Petriglieri,
professor of Organizational Behavior at
European graduate school INSEAD,O’Connor, for instance, through the lens
of her Catholicism—and their precursors,
following his formative theories about the
anxiety of influence. As a group, the essays
demonstrate some unevenness in depth
and timeliness due to being excerpted from
other works, but the volume is made
cohesive by Bloom’s predominating
interests in gnosticism, Romanticism,
and Shakespeare, and a critical language
free of literary theory or cultural politics.
Bloom’s values are aesthetic beauty and
rhetorical originality; he admires “self-
reliant, self-radiant” Emily Dickinson and
the “vast consciousness” of Henry James
and calls Ursula K. Le Guin’s “sensibility...
very nearly unique in contemporary fic-
tion.” Ambitious, authoritative, and
certainly arguable, Bloom’s compendium
is an achievement of immense use and
interest to literature students and general
readers alike. (Oct.)The Art of Taking It Easy:
How to Cope with Bears, Traffic,
and the Rest of Life’s Stressors
Brian King. Apollo, $22.99 (256p)
ISBN 978-1-948062-46-6
Psychologist and comedian King (The
Laughing Cure) explores the science behind
stress in this witty, informed guide. The
author uses a bevy of running jokes and
punch lines to enliven technical explana-
tions for how and why people experience
stress. His metaphors of coming across a
bear in the wild as well as being stuck in
traffic are also used to great effect to
explain a variety of stress responses, such
as perceiving a threat and feelings of
powerlessness. Reframing thoughts plays
a large role in King’s advice: “Stress is
simple a reaction to a perception of threat...
being able to consciously redirect choices
made by other areas of the brain is the key
to living a less stressful existence.” He also
provides breathing exercises, plans for
maintaining physical health, and useful
advice for setting attainable goals. An
interview with a former paratrooper and a
harrowing story centered on his brother’s
van breaking down while traveling provide
particularly helpful examples of how one’s
mindset can make all the difference in a
highly stressful situation. King’s enjoyable
guide to living with less stress will be of
help to any anxious reader. (Oct.)