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Koven Smith

5easypieces@book.dansmonorage.blue

Joined 1 year, 5 months ago

Arts grantmaker living in Austin, TX. Jazz, museums, pre-Kurtzman Star Trek, so forth and such as. Also in the fediverse at @5easypieces@social.coop.

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Koven Smith's books

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Dilla Time (2022, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 5 stars

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of …

Wish all music books were like this

5 stars

This book was fabulous. Well-researched and compelling, it doubles as a history of Detroit in addition to a study of both the musical and social importance of Dilla himself.

Sea of Tranquility (Hardcover, 2022, Knopf) 4 stars

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …

Fun, lightweight

3 stars

A breezy, fun(ish, given some of the subject matter) read. The resolution of the book hinges, somewhat, on a twist that is revealed near the end, and I must confess that I was finding the book far more satisfying up to the point that the twist was revealed. It just felt a bit too “plotty” to me in a book that otherwise revels in nice details.

In Memory of Memory (2021, New Directions Publishing Corporation) 5 stars

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment …

Maybe wonderful?

5 stars

I really struggled to get through this book--I kept losing track of who was who, and a more complete knowledge of Russian history might have helped me contextualize many of the events and anchor them in my mind. And yet, I kept coming back to it, and kept finding one insight after another. And the last quarter of the book was just utterly lovely. I haven't read anything else like it.

A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide (Paperback, 2020, Five Seven Five Books) 5 stars

I’ve put every single thing I know about civic tech into this little book. It’s …

Essential

5 stars

Maybe it’s the obvious thing to say, but I wish this book had existed when I started my career in nonprofit technology. Maybe there wasn’t a lot here that was new to me, but there was a lot here that reinforced many lessons learned the hard way, and a lot that the next crop of nonprofit technologists can learn from. Highly recommended.