Agent Palmer

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman looks back at the last decade that actually felt like a decade. It’s hard to view this book as anything other than a transformation, but it’s also hard to ignore that reading this book puts you back there.

This book is a time capsule with the perverse insights that make you wonder about your own memory, the collective memory, and all with a sincerity, exuberance, and authenticity that feels proper.

Time capsules aren’t often great at relevance, but this book as “a construct amassed from American High School Yearbooks” by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Coupland is a time capsule that endures.

School Spirit is “an excursion through the soul of a dead and disembodied student lost inside the memories and infrastructure of a California High School.” That’s the premise, but as explained in the book, Kelly, our dearly departed guide, can visit other high schools.

If you want to go back to school to learn all there is to know of the known and unknown universe, you can’t do much better than the 365 pages of Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

“The Cosmos television series and this book represent a hopeful experiment in communicating some of the ideas, methods and joys of science.” This, at least in print form, is completely accomplished.