Reviews Written By: A34ZMJ0W0206GQprovided by Amazon.com |
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 | The SONG OF THE DODO: ISLAND BIOGEOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF EXTINCTIONS | |
 | "excellent work!" | 2008-12-26 |
| This is a fascinating look at evolution and biology in the microcosms of islands. There are plenty of fine works out there about evolution, and lots of good books about biodiversity, but here the central question is "what happens if we have a very limited environment? an environment where there may not be any predator species, an environment which may have only limited interactions with other environments?" So, for example, he recounts the investigations into the return of biota to Krakatoa (this has been done before). But he also looks closely at Hawaii, the Galapagos, Komodo, and other islands. Quammen visits most of these places--from inhospitable islands off Baja California to Mauritius and other spots--he wants to see firsthand. Some of the islands are not islands in the usual sense--small pockets of jungle left in Brazil, mountains in Nevada, for example. If you're a small animal that thrives at, say, elevations over 9000 feet, you probably are not going to be able to cross 30 miles of desert to reach another mountain. The tepuis of Venezuela could have been covered here as well. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book for me were two tales. The first is about Mauritius and the extinction of the dodo. Humans are of course the culprit, or so we assume. But it turns out that a significant contribution came from the introduction of the crab-eating macaque monkeys to this island in the 1600's. How they got there is a deep mystery--pigs, chickens, goats, etc, are understandable, but the macaques are not very good pet material, to say the least--suspicion falls on the Dutch. The second tale is about the extinction of a number of native birds on Guam--a rapid and measurable decline, with a traceable line of disappearance--from the south to the north. Much like the recent problems with honeybee populations in the US, there were lots of suggestions and finger-pointing--DDT, etc. The culprit turned out to be a poisonous bird-eating tree snake, introduced inadvertently from the Solomon Islands. On Guam the snake had no natural enemies and multiplied--prodigiously. It is estimated that there are 13000 of these snakes (which grow to about 5 feet) per square mile on Guam. That's a mind-boggling 20 per acre. Think of your little house in the US on your quarter-acre lot, and then imagine that on your quarter-acre lot are 5 5-foot long poisonous snakes. These are tree snakes and so climb well. If you have ever (as I have) seen a 5-foot long blacksnake sunning itself on your second-story windowsill and you're cursed with an imagination, think of walking out your front door and having a large poisonous snake drop on you from the overhanging gutter. Quammen is a great storyteller. By visiting the locations, he can make things really come to life, so to speak. I was never particularly interested in visiting Guam, and I'm not scared of snakes, but now Guam has even less attraction! This book does a really fine job in showing how evolution operates, and it also addresses important environmental issues. A fine work indeed! | ||
 | The Story of Life | |
| "compact, concise, wonderfully written" | 2008-12-26 |
| Let me say first that you're not going to get an exhaustive thousand-page scientific tome covering vast amounts of detail. The book aims at breadth rather than depth--it might serve as the text for Geology 101 or the like. You get lots of drawings of represenative sample of life from the earliest stages up to the present. Each chapter has a nice map showing the continents that existed. So the strength here is the flavor of life rather than the minute details. There are plenty of books about, say, the Cretaceous that are rife with detail. But the problem might be that you're losing track of the overall view of the development of life. The book also covers the catastrophes--the mass extinctions. There are tables that plot the number of species in the different eras, and explanations of what caused the declines. This is not a book that deals heavily with controversy, although controversies are discussed. So you'll see the Conway Morris view of the Burgess Shale, and the Jay Gould view as well. This is basically a very well-written introductory work, and it is one that will whet your appetite for more detailed books. | ||
 | Maine Cottages: Frederick L. Savage and the Architecture of Mount Desert | |
| "excellent book on architecture, beautifully photographed" | 2008-06-28 |
| I wish that more books on architecture could be this good! First of all, the title is a bit misleading. Many of Savage's works shown here are not, and never were intended to be, cottages. So in addition to private dwellings, there's an inn, schools, firehouses, garages, etc. Second, for the private dwellings, what we think of as cottages nowadays and what was thought of as cottages back in 1900 or so are very different. I remember reading many years back about a 1900's cottage in Aiken, S.C., which had something like 40 bedrooms, plus about 15 servants' bedrooms. The book shows High Seas, built 1911-12: 23 rooms plus a servants' wing with 5 servant's bedrooms--this was, at the time, a cottage.
You get a coffee-table book with stunning photography of both buildings and landscapes (many of the landscape photographs have no houses visible in them). There is an old map of Mount Desert Island, and period drawings and paintings. There are old photographs of the buildings and of Savage, etc. What is a delight are original architectural sketches and floor plans for many of the buildings. The chapters mostly cover individual buildings, and there's accompanying narrative. Consequently, what you get here is a tribute to a man who was able to blend architectural beauty with the great natural beauty of Mount Desert Island: Savage was able to work superbly with the settings and the land. Sadly nowadays, too much architectural work is done by drastically modifying the setting, chopping down most of the trees: for too many people, and too many architects, the goal is that your expensive house should be conspicuous--a highly-visible tribute to your wealth. Savage took the opposite approach--the buildings were there for the people to enjoy them, and to relish the beauty of the land. Quite a book! | ||
 | Provinces of Night by William Gay, ISBN 1587881713 | |
| "lyrical writing" | 2008-06-26 |
(from my amazon.co.uk review: Gay seems to be getting some attention there) I've lived in Tennessee for almost 30 years, in the urban setting of Knoxville. I'm a caver, and the hunting for new caves takes me to small towns and deeply rural areas in rugged terrain, where one can be 40 miles from the nearest supermarket. You learn that there are places to be avoided, where strangers are not welcome. (You can also find such places in London, Glasgow, etc., as well as in parts of the English countryside.) The law can be far away and not impartial in some locations. Provinces of Night deals with small-town Tennessee rather than the deeply rural and remote parts. The central figure, Fleming Bloodworth, is not violence- prone, but violence is often not far away. There is humor and tenderness, as well as violence and death, but that's often how life can be. Tennessee is not a slaughterhouse, but it's not unusual to see "Three Dead in Cocke County Bar Fight" on the evening news. William Gay started writing at age 52. He seems to have been strongly influenced by the novels of Cormac McCarthy, especially those set in Tennessee (Suttree, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God--all set in Knoxville and the surrounding counties). The title comes from McCarthy's dark and brooding novel Child of God. Gay's first novel, The Long Home, has a flavor similar to Child of God, but Provinces of Night is closer to Suttree and The Orchard Keeper. Gay's writing skills are on a par with McCarthy: after reading Provinces of Night and The Long Home, I reread McCarthy's novels, and took a long pause when I encountered the phrase "provinces of night" in Child of God. I wondered in McCarthy was writing under a pseudonym. There's a great power and lyrical quality in Gay's writing. When I got halfway through Provinces of Night I began to dread turning the pages, since every page read brought me closer to the end. So I ordered The Long Home from Amazon, taking comfort in the knowledge that hundreds of more pages would be waiting for me. Gay's third work, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down, a collection of short stories, has just been published, and it contains some of the finest short stories I've ever read. Gay is a great new addition to our current Southern writers. He's the darker side to the rural South: for the lighter side read T.R. Pearson's whimsical novel A Short History of a Small Place. | ||
 | The Art of Coarse Rugby | |
| "rules? what rules?" | 2008-05-12 |
| There's much in this delightful little book that will remind you of Stephen Potter's "upmanship" books, as in gamesmanship. Potter, however, tended to emphasize the psychological ploys, and "winning games without actually cheating". You'll get the full gamut, however, in the Art of Coarse Rugby--psychology, rule-bending, and outright cheating. All done in good--or bad--fun. You'll read about the Old Rottinghamians, and their arch-foe the Bagford Vipers. You'll read about Slasher Williams ("so called because of his habit of letting his nails grow long in the rugby season"). It's suggested that one should always carry a small penknife, so that if you're ahead and worried about the other side catching up, you surreptiously puncture the rugby ball (in the Old Rottinghamian matches, spare rugby balls are an extreme rarity). If you have false teeth, leave them with the referee. If you need to bite an opponent, retrieve them from the ref, bite away, and return them to the ref. Having blood-spattered goalposts on your home turf can work wonders. Tell your rivals that you're taking up a collection before the match for an opponent in the previous match who had both his legs broken by a particularly vicious tackle by one of your players. There are suggestions about drawing up ambiguous instructions to help your opponents find your ground--hoping that 4-5 will get lost, and then if you must loan the other club a player, you always have a real ringer available. Bribing groundskeepers to close the field 15 minutes early when you're in the lead is a must. And so on. We're not talking about the Lions here, or the All-Blacks, just low-level club rugby. You'll find this book lots of fun! | ||
 | Rugby's Strangest Matches: Extraordinary But True Stories from Over a Century of Rugby | |
 | "interesting, but not necessarily strange" | 2008-05-05 |
| What you get here are about 150 anecdotal accounts of rugby matches over the past 130 or so years. Many are interesting, some are quirky, some are humorous, but others are rather forgettable. The descriptions run anywhere from 5-6 lines to several pages. You can read about a match where father and son both played, a match with brothers on opposite sides, things of that nature. These you might not find all that strange.
On the other hand, however, are accounts of matches where the referee clearly was unfamiliar with the rules--an example being where a referee called a player offsides for holding the ball for a kicker on a very windy day. Scoring rules have undergone many changes, and there have been matches where confusion abounded about points being scored. There are tales that rival Mike Tyson's famous in-match dining habits ("The battle of Waldron's ear"). You'll also read about the player whose shorts were mostly torn off during a tackle attempt--and be reminded that play definitely doesn't stop in that event. So there's a lot of good material here--evn though some of the stories are not as interesting. | ||
 | The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes: Fifty Tantalizing Problems of Chess Detection | |
| "wonderful book!" | 2008-04-26 |
| This is a book I return to every year or two. The chess problems are presented in a thoroughly engaging fashion--the Sherlock Holmes aspect gives a bit of continuity, but it isn't a crucial part of this book. Some of the problems are not too difficult, others are very complex. The book explains the solutions and the reasoning well. There are several kinds of problems in the book. Some of these--especially the earliest--ask the question "what was the previous move?" At first (and second and maybe third) glance you might conclude the position is impossible. Then you find (or look up) the solution: the ingenuity whether you solved the problem or not is always enjoyable. Other kinds of problems include questions such as "Can black castle?" There's plenty of variety in these retrograde analysis positions. Smullyan's sequel, "Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights", is equally worthwhile. An additional book dealing with retrograde analysis that is well worth reading is Perez-Reverte's Flanders Panel (which pays some homage to Smullyan). This is a mystery within a mystery, involving a centuries-old murder and a painting of a chess game. The art restorer finds a hidden message "Who took the knight?"--although an acceptable translation would be also "Who slew the knight?" One of the chess players was a knight, and was the murder victim. Retrograde analysis is needed to figure out which piece captured the knight, and that's just the beginning. Retrograde analysis makes for a very different kind of chess problem, and with Smullyan you know that you're reading the work of a master! | ||
 | We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific | |
| "intriguing and eye-opening!" | 2007-12-24 |
| For most of us, sailing across 2000+ miles of open ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti (or vice versa) would be daunting enough even with using every modern navigation device such as a GPS. Consider that in 1927 with compasses, sextants, radio, etc, in the Dole Air Race from Oakland to Honolulu (the same distance as Tahiti to Hawaii) 3 out of the 5 planes that started out were lost at sea. Then consider that a thousand years ago the Polynesians in 50-foot twin-hulled canoes were regularly making such voyages without any kind of instruments, and that crossing 50 or 100 miles of ocean was thought almost trivially easy.
That a primitive (by European or American standards) people were skilled at ocean navigation was thought absurd. Kon-Tiki was an attempt to show that Oceania could be populated from South America by drifting on rafts and sheer luck of landfall. But it is now established that there was skilled and purposeful exploration and colonization--including Rapa Nui (Easter Island) which is 1000 miles from the nearest other habitable island. We, the Navigators is a fascinating look at "primitive" navigation techniques, and the author himself sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti using only these ancient techniques. So you'll see how the Polynesians used the sun, moon, and stars to achieve accurate navigation. They also used the ocean swells (as distinct from waves): islands reflect and deflect swells, so by careful observation, you can get a sense of direction to landfall. Land also changes cloud patterns. Birds were watched intently. New Zealand was one of the last places found and peopled--from 1600 miles away from the northeast, perhaps by watching birds migrate in that direction. Different kinds of birds travel different distances from land--some travel 40-50 miles, others 20-25 miles: by observing at dawn where the birds came from, and observing which direction they went towards sunset, and seeing what kind of bird it was, you could tell that there was land, and what direction it was, and how far away it was as well. On leaving land, backsights would be taken to help establish currents and drift. The book has lots of drawings and illustrations--it's a real treat! | ||
 | Blind to the Bones : A Crime Novel | |
 | "needs pruning badly--to about half as long" | 2007-10-17 |
| Not many mysteries/police procedurals can sustain 580+ pages: this is definitely not one of the exceptions. Name of the Rose, for example, runs 600 pages. But with that book there's much more than just a mystery--you're being taken to a very unfamiliar world. There's just too much in Blind to the Bones that really does not need to be present--it doesn't add to the story in any way unless what you want is a book that will carry you through a very long plane trip and then you can leave it behind somewhere. I found here that I wasn't really engaging with any of the characters--there was not anyone I emphasized with. Some books can make up for shortcomings with a sense of an unusual place or setting, so that problems with character development or dialogue can be at least in part overcome by the setting, such as an interesting historical location. But the locations here are not memorable or very interesting. There are too many threads in the book--some are meaningful, some go nowhere--it's not easy to keep track of them. Some books I want to reread within a year or two, others I may want to reread--e.g. a book about sailing in the Outer Hebrides. These I keep. Other books I'm pretty sure I will not want to reread, and unfortunately Blind to the Bones will thus be given to my local library. | ||
 | Deep Enough: A Working Stiff in the Western Mine Camps | |
| "the life of a western hard-rock miner" | 2006-08-08 |
| An excellent book about life in the western mining camps in the early 1900s. Born to privilege and wealth in New York and with a good education, Crampton ran away from home, riding the blinds to the western US. He worked as an ordinary stiff in the toughest conditions, but unlike most of his fellow miners, his education also let him work as an assayer and surveyor, and later as a mining engineer. So he became thoroughly knowledgable about all the aspects--from prospecting in Death Valley to being chief engineer at large mines. About the only side of mining that he didn't experience was a Wall Street mineowner. His education also gave him fine writing skills--this is definitely not an "as told to..." book ghost- written by someone else. You'll encounter a plethora of wonderful characters, and a wealth of old photographs. There are stories about gold, silver, uranium--all the kinds of elements you can hard-rock mine for. Crampton was trapped for 10 days when a shaft collapsed. He shows what can happen when you use a metal spoon (rather than wood) to tamp down a shot hole. He was nearby Ludlow and barely missed being part of the massacre, but had friends killed. Deep Enough is not a social "cri de coeur" as are "The Banditti of the Plains" about the Johnson County War in Wyoming or Sinclair's "The Jungle". It's very honest and heartfelt, and completely up close. Crampton enjoyed the life, the camps, the people, and the work, and it shows. If you want an honest view about what mining was like, this it it. | ||
 | The Colorado Pass Book: A Guide to Colorado's Backroad Mountain Passes | |
| "A great book!" | 2006-07-05 |
| I've been buying editions of this wonderful book as they come out--if you fly into Colorado and rent a 4WD from Hertz, Avis, or whatever, and want adventure--this is a great guide. The book describes 60-odd Colorado passes "suitable" for driving. This does not include any of the regular paved road passes, many of which are fun, but very few of which are hair-raising. The roads range from well-drained gravel to boulder-strewn ruts, and the book carefully delineates exactly what kind of vehicle is required and what conditions to expect. There are plenty of photographs, but no topo maps (which I would strongly recommend for some of the passes). My interest started when I read Marshall Sprague's Great Gates, about the Rocky Mountain Passes, and saw the description of Tomichi Pass as "the worst shelf trail in the Rockies for man, beast, or mountain goat". Many years later, after I had bought The Colorado Pass Book I drove over this route--which isn't too bad if you don't mind a very steep, off-camber narrow shelf barely wider than my car, with a 300' sheer drop down to my right and a sheer cliff up on the driver's side--if I had wanted to leave my car I would have had to go out through the tailgate! And there are even worse places, such as Black Bear/Ingram Pass ("extreme caution needed" says the Pass Book) where if you think you know what the word "switchbacks" means, you're mistaken! There are plenty of gentler passes described--so there are passes suitable for almost anyone. There's a lot of great history here--such as the rickety old wooden trestles on the Rollins Pass road--and you come to appreciate what people did to get to the mining areas in the late 1800's. You need to know what you're doing here--some of the passes are over 13,000 feet above sea level, and sometimes there are what are called "jeep traps" where you cannot go forward or back up safely. There are other Colorado 4WD books that cover non-pass roads as well as passes, but this book has always been my favorite. | ||
 | Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications | |
| "the best network flow book for computer scientists" | 2004-12-18 |
| I've been using this book as the primary text for my class in "Network Flow Programming" (senior & graduate level) at the University of Tennessee for about 10 years. Prior to that time I had used Jensen & Barnes' Network Flow Programming (now long out of print). The code in Jensen & Barnes is in FORTRAN (not so fun or useful for CS majors) and the intended audience seemed to be OR. Ahuja's code is pascal pseudo-code for the most part, which usually translates easily into the C language that most of our students use. For CS students, there is excellent use of algorithm analysis (big-O) throughout the book, and there are long discussions about different approaches and algorithms and the complexity of each. There is a lot of mathematical notation, but my students have never had to worry about PDEs and the like here. Any good advanced CS student (graduate or undergraduate) will find the book very worthwhile. In my course the students must implement min-cost spanning trees, shortest paths, critical path/PERT networks (not in Ahuja), max flow, and min-cost flow. I would also recommend (for CS majors) Tarjan's excellent (and succinct) Data Structures and Network Algorithms. | ||
 | Bad Dirt : Wyoming Stories 2 | |
| "a fine follow-up to "close range"" | 2004-11-26 |
| I greatly enjoyed Proulx' Close Range collection of short stories, and Bad Dirt (subtitled "Wyoming Stories 2") is a very worthy encore. The Close Range stories gave a wonderful flavor to the rural areas of the state, the people, the land, the warm and the rough sides, both past and present. Some of the stories were humorous, others were harrowing, some were a whimsical mix. You'll find just the same mix (and a bit more) in Bad Dirt. You start off with a 12-page story about Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski (who turns up again in a couple of more stories) that begins in a nice straightforward fashion, and then takes off into a kind of humorous Proulx-Stephen King joint venture (or perhaps Proulx-King-Carl Hiaassen). Several stories center on the residents and the 3 bars in the tiny town of Elk City: I very much like reading another of Proulx' short stories when I feel that I already know the characters well (one of these is a kind of Proulx-Hiaassen mix involving rental alligators--it sounds bizarre, but the story works in a truly delightful way). The best of the stories is The Wamsutter Wolf, and runs about 35 pages. Buddy Millar lives in a $40/month rental housetrailer 5 miles out from the center of a small boomtown (almost all trailers). You don't get much for your $40 a month. His only neighbors live close by in an even grungier trailer--a bully who beat him up in high school, his wife and passel of grungy young kids, one of whom is a 4-year-old alcoholic (his father believes that learning to drink young avoids the problems that come with learning later). This is a horrifying and harrowing story-- stronger than anything I remember in Close Range. It's very tough, utterly realistic, and it left me wanting to see it expanded to about 300 pages as a novel. Annie Proulx and William Gay (I Hate To See The Evening Sun Go Down) are the two best short-story writers I've read in many years--and both write excellent novels as well. | ||
 | Last Citadel: A Novel of the Battle of Kursk | |
| "another fine WW II novel from this author" | 2003-08-31 |
| This has a flavor similar to that of the author's excellent War of the Rats. As with Rats, the chapters switch back and forth between Russian protagonists (a T-34 tank driver, his sons who commands the tank, his daughter who is a pilot) and two Germans (an intelligence officer and a tank captain--who is actually a Spaniard). As with Rats, or Len Deighton's Bomber, there is a good amount of technical detail--particularly regarding the T-34 and Tiger tanks--design strengths and flaws, what it's like to be in one, and this adds a lot to the novel. Too many war novels like to employ the device of having an evil antagonist--someone who relishes torturing prisoners, etc, and who gets his comeuppance in the end. Neither Rats nor this novel use this device, thank goodness. Engrossing and well- written! | ||
 | The Rider | |
| "the best cycling novel..." | 2003-08-24 |
| This is easily the best novel I've read about bicycle racing-- it's relatively short, no murders, no love interest, just bicycle racing pure and simple. It centers on a single minor 1-day race in southern France, 150 kilometers in the mountains, and a racer (Krabbe) who is decent but not professional caliber. The novel is part stream-of-thought, part flashbacks to Krabbe's other 300+ races, part anecdotes about the great cyclists from the Tour de France and elsewhere. If you want a baseball analogy, Krabbe would be playing in the low minor leagues, and describing the life there, and relating some tales about well- known major-leaguers--kind of a Ron Shelton [Bull Durham] of bicycle racing. In the Tour de France, the police keep the roads clear for the racers: in the Tour de Mont Aigoual, police are at intersections directing the racers, but you share the road with ordinary drivers. Krabbe describes speeding down steep mountain roads and having to plan in his mind what to do if a car comes around the corner towards him while he's doing 60kph. A very involving, finely-written book! | ||
 | The Stingray Shuffle | |
 | "not quite carl hiaasen..." | 2003-02-08 |
| Having just finished Shuffle (after reading Triggerfish Twist), and now rereading Florida Roadkill, I can say that Dorsey is better than Hiaasen's weaker novels, but still is a ways from Hiaasen's best work (Tourist Season, Skin Tight). With Hiaasen's best work, the characters and events from each novel stick in mind for years. With Hiaasen's second-tier work, the characters and events tend to blur together, so at this point I remember very little about what went on in, say, Sick Puppy. Tim Dorsey's work comes closer to this latter situation: I can remember some good bits and pieces, but there's a lot of blurring, even with Stingray Shuffle, which I just finished last night. That doesn't bode well. Like Hiaasen's work, Tim Dorsey's novels are entertaining. filled Still and all, it's an entertaining novel, worth reading. | ||
 | Winter World : The Ingenuity of Animal Survival | |
| "superb nature writing" | 2003-02-04 |
| If you have enjoyed the nature writing of Farley Mowat or David Attenborough (The Life of Birds, The Private Life of Plants), you'll enjoy this wonderful book. There are books on nature which are dry and distanced: this is just the opposite. There are also books on nature which are primarily observational, such as Thoreau's Walden Pond and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Neither Thoreau nor Annie Dillard measured the rectal temperature of insects in the winter to help determine the mechanics of heat regulation. Most of the mammals, birds, insects, and trees looked at by the author are his neighbors in the winter woods: the love and enjoyment and the curiosity about his environment is very evident. He wants to know what these creatures do to cope and survive the severe winters where he lives in Maine and Vermont. Heinrich writes with great warmth and humor throughout the book. You'll follow his thoughts and discoveries about how the tiny golden-crowned kinglet survives the winter, when logic seems to say that it shouldn't even survive a single below-zero night. On sunny days, even when the temperature is well below freezing, several dozen honeybees may emerge from the hive and just a few seconds later will all be lying dead on the snow: this is a sacrificial testing mechanism by the hive to ensure that when the first flowers open up that a head start can be obtained for foraging. There are all kinds of fascinating things that you could never imagine going on. Most of the nature in the book centers on Heinrich's own environment, but he also readily and often talks at length about other species from around the world. The book is lavishly illustrated with drawings that help make you feel even more personally acquainted with the subjects. Heinrich is a scientist with a wonderful breadth of knowledge, | ||
 | Labyrinth: A Thriller | |
| "a caver's thoughts....." | 2002-12-07 |
| I've been caving in Tennessee for almost 30 years, and I teach at the University of Tennessee, where the first murder takes place. Think of a short, 1-page document about how to set up, say, a DVD player that was written by a Sumerian with minimal knowledge of English, but who owns a Sumerian-English dictionary. So the words are all English, but the words often make no sense in the context. Labyrinth has some of that flavor--you say "Huh? Did I miss something?" A rock with mysterious powers is brought back from the moon in Tom Burke, the world's greatest caver--"Huh? There are Gregor and his gang, rather than go into an entrance close to the Problems occur when a huge earthquake collapses various passages I still don't see how carefully-planning prison-breakers would There is little in the way of good (4 or 5 stars) cave fiction-- | ||
 | Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts | |
| "a most enjoyable read!" | 2002-07-20 |
| A wonderfully entertaining book--part archaelogy, part detective novel-like, part art. Lavishly illustrated (black-and-white with blue to highlight): maps (showing locations where fragments and tablets, etc, were found, historical influences, such as Kush on Upper Egypt); hieroglyphs, symbols, etc; photographs; drawings, etc. You can spend a lot of time just on these illustrations alone. The book starts off with chapters on three deciphered (more or After showing how the three aforementioned languages were So we have, in essence, a detective novel that isn't fiction. | ||
 | Are We Living in the End Times? | |
 | "unintentionally funny in places..." | 2002-06-11 |
| This book brought to mind a Superman comic I read about 40 years ago. In the comic, the bad guy, for reasons obscure now, ran off and hid with a penguin. Superman wants to catch the bad guy. So there follows a mind-boggling 3 panels in the comic: 1) In order to make the penguin's egg hatch quickly, Superman heats the egg with his x-ray vision, causing the egg to hatch in seconds rather than weeks. 2) The baby penguin is born fully-fledged and ready to fly, which is good because: 3) As Superman explains, babies (birds, or all creatures?) have an instinctual knowledge of where their mother is at all times, and so the baby penguin flies through the air (I kid you not) on a bee-line for its mother, followed closely behind by Superman. End Times provides a similar plethora. You will learn such | ||
 | The Kid Who Batted 1.000 | |
| "Not up to his golf novels" | 2002-05-16 |
| This doesn't measure up to the author's excellent golf novels "The Green", which I'd give 5 stars, and "The Foursome", which I'd give 4 stars. A number of well-known historical incidents (the Merkle Boner, the striking of of Bench who thought he was getting an intentional walk, etc) occur to characters in the book--perhaps interesting to readers unfamiliar with the game, but somewhat offensive to those who know the true contexts. I would much preferred not to see a pennant drive as the climax-- too many sports novels/movies seem to think that a Super Bowl or a world Series being on the line makes things more interesting--the movie Bull Durham didn't need this device, and Semi-Tough had the Super Bowl as a rather minor incident. Perhaps significantly, there are only 17 players listed on the team, including what appears to be a 3-man starting rotation and two relievers, and only a few of these players are endowed with character. The two best baseball novels are Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, and Roth's The Great American Novel. In the former, J. Henry Waugh creates a fantasy league controlled by dice--and rules and is ruled by the game--the players are all given very distinct characters by Waugh. In the latter, in 1943 the Ruppert Mundys of the Patriot League are displaced from their stadium (the war effort, you know) and play 154 road games. This is a hilarious book, and you get to know all the misfits (such as Hothead Ptah, the wooden-legged catcher). People who enjoy baseball will appreciate both these novels, and the characters have a real depth to them--you do not need pennant chases to make things interesting. McAllister's golf novels can be reread with pleasure every couple of years, and Coover's and Roth's books can also be reread once a year-- but I do not expect to be rereading the review book. | ||
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