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I’m starting a book review thread for anyone interested.
I just bought a bunch of ebooks and one paperback so I should be able to post a few here over the next year(I am a VERY slow reader who hops between books quite often).
So anyway–here’s my first review:
The Martian by Andy Weir
http://www.amazon.com/The-Martian-Novel-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDMA#
This is a pretty popular novel right now and a film is being made from it.
It’s what falls under the category of “hard” sci-fi, i believe.
The idea is simple enough: a team of astronauts is forced to flee the red planet when a storm hits but one of them is in an accident, presumed dead and abandoned. Only he isn’t dead. He survived. Now what?
How could someone survive on Mars with just the technology left behind? What would be the obstacles to staying alive before a rescue team could get there?
Andy Weir has put a lot of thought and technical expertise in to solving that problem. If I were stuck there I would hope he was with me. Engineers love the novel. This is not fantasy stuff–it’s how things would probably go, or at least how problems would be solved.
My problem with the novel is why it’s so popular with engineers. Large chunks read like a technical book:
“The total floor space of the Hab is about 92 square meters. I plan to dedicate all of it to this endeavor. I don’t mind walking on the dirt. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’m going to need to cover the entire floor to a depth of 10 centimeters. That means I’ll have to transport 9.2 cubic meters of Martian soil into the Hab. I can get maybe one-tenth of a cubic meter in through the airlock at a time, and it’ll be backbreaking work to collect it.”
It’s interesting but for me it was like dragging an anchor along with my eyes to read the novel. There’s a lot of this kind of thing and it sort of deflates the excitement of the situation. I think it may make a better film. Some people will really enjoy this and some won’t get through it. I got through it but it was a struggle at times.
A novel I happened to like much better on this subject was Ben Bova’s “Mars”. Not as technical(although there is some of that) but it seemed to flow better…to move along. It was more exciting.
Mars by Ben Bova:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick
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Reading Statistics
Total percent of U.S. population that has specific reading disorders 15%
Total percentage of american adults who can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions 46%
Total percent of young people who claim they read more than 10 books a year 56%
Total percentage of U.S. adults who are unable to read an 8th grade level book 50%
Total amount of words read annually by a person who reads 15 minutes a day 1 million
Total percent of U.S. high school graduates who will never read a book after high school 33%
Total percentage of college students who will never read another book after they graduate 42%
Total percentage of U.S. families who did not buy a book this year 80%
Total percentage of adults that have not been in a book store in the past 5 years 70%
Total percentage of books started that aren’t read to completion 57%
Total percent of U.S. students that are dyslexic 15%
Total percentage of NASA employees that are dyslexic 50%
Total number of U.S. inmates that are literate 15%
http://www.statisticbrain.com/reading-statistics/
=================Twilight Of The Books
New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/twilight-of-the-books?currentPage=all
…..see link…
……….There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.
The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading. Bigger cells are easier for scientists to experiment on, and some species of squid have optic-nerve cells a hundred times as thick as mammal neurons, and up to four inches long, making them a favorite with biologists. (Two decades ago, I had a summer job washing glassware in Cape Cod’s Marine Biological Laboratory. Whenever researchers extracted an optic nerve, they threw the rest of the squid into a freezer, and about once a month we took a cooler-full to the beach for grilling.) To symbolize the humanistic approach to reading, Wolf has chosen Proust, who described reading as “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” Perhaps inspired by Proust’s example, Wolf, a dyslexia researcher at Tufts, reminisces about the nuns who taught her to read in a two-room brick schoolhouse in Illinois. But she’s more of a squid person than a Proust person, and seems most at home when dissecting Proust’s fruitful miracle into such brain parts as the occipital “visual association area” and “area 37’s fusiform gyrus.” Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.
Wolf recounts the early history of reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes. For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in connecting to language centers that handled its meaning.
In the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians developed cuneiform, and the Egyptians hieroglyphs. Both scripts began with pictures of things, such as a beetle or a hand, and then some of these symbols developed more abstract meanings, representing ideas in some cases and sounds in others. Readers had to recognize hundreds of symbols, some of which could stand for either a word or a sound, an ambiguity that probably slowed down decoding. Under this heavy cognitive burden, Wolf imagines, the Sumerian reader’s brain would have behaved the way modern brains do when reading Chinese, which also mixes phonetic and ideographic elements and seems to stimulate brain activity in a pattern distinct from that of people reading the Roman alphabet. Frontal regions associated with muscle memory would probably also have gone to work, because the Sumerians learned their characters by writing them over and over, as the Chinese do today….see link….
Red Notice by Bill Browder
Bill Browder was a guest on “The Daily Show” which is how I heard about his book “Red Notice”.
The story seemed interesting then, a hedge fund manager hits gold in Russia buying severely underfunded shares in companies that didn’t even seem to know how much they were worth. Russia didn’t seem to know what they had, and the world didn’t either and the world was a little wary about investing in Russia. Bill Browder was interested in Russia from a young age. His grandfather was the head of the Communist party in the United States.
He saw Russia as an opportunity.
He was persistent about it and went to great lengths to secure money for investing. That i itself is a particularly interesting part of the story. I don’t hang around many billionaires or hedge fund managers so the “behind-the-scenes” so to speak, was entertaining–how these guys, pretty cautious, always about themselves first and foremost and not always trustworthy, could pull the rug out at any moment. It’s a high stakes lifestyle, gambling with huge amounts of money.
But this is how the world works–moving money around from one place to the next–always looking for infinite growth.
But there are risks. No matter how much money you have.
Russia, it’s no secret, has a lot of corruption. So does the United States of course, but when the powerful run into a system that basically laughs at the power they “think” they have it can be an entertaining story.
Russia(to be specific–certain wealthy Russians) essentially stole tax money(over 200 million dollars) that the company paid. So Browder and a Russian attorney and others investigated the theft. Browder was kicked out of Russia and his attorney, Sergi Magnitsky stayed behind to continue the investigation–in the process he found some criminal activity of some powerful people. He was in obvious danger but decided to stay and trust the Russian system of justice. This was a mistake. He was eventually beaten to death in a prison hospital.
Browder launched a campaign to bar those involved from entering America and other countries. It is called “The Magnitsky Act” and the story of how that eventually passed is another lesson in sausage making politics right here in America. It wasn’t easy, or pretty. And if a guy like Bill Browder had a hard time getting it through how can an average citizen hope to accomplish anything?
Interpol put out a “Red Notice” on Browder who the Russians were charging with a tax evasion crime. A red notice is sort of an arrest warrant with the extradition that a country will extradite the individual to the country requesting it.
At the time he was in the Netherlands and had no idea if he’d be able to leave because the notice would pop up at the airport. The other thing is watching other people who had been involved with the investigation dying. He knew about Russia and how they weren’t shy about sending assassins across the globe. And he had personally pissed off Putin as well. It was a difficult situation, one to create plenty of paranoia. Part of writing the book was to get the story out hoping it would offer some protection against something happening.
In any case, I thought it was a great book that was easy to read, was exciting and interesting and moving. Browder devotes much of the book to his search of justice for Magnitsky.
If I have any complaints, I would say that he should have devoted a little bit more time to letting the reader know Magnitsky on a more personal level. There’s a bit of an emotional disconnect on a personal level. He describes Magnitsky and his heroics and actions but I’m not sure I ever really felt him as a human being.
But this book is certainly worth reading. It’s a real-life thriller on one level, an interesting peek at big money investing and a drama in a search for justice.
I thought it was one of the better books I’ve read in the past couple of years and probably the best non-fiction book I’ve read in several more years.
I highly recommend it.
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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick
I’ve read Hyperion, Drood and The Terror. I loved all three, especially Drood and The Terror but I agree with PA that they do tend to drag on…
What I like about Collins is how well he transports you to the period in which his novels take place. The Terror and Drood both take place in the 19th century and when you are finished you will truly believe you know what it’s like to live in Victorian England or sail on a mid-19th century icebreaker. He is incredibly thorough with his descriptions but at the same time you won’t feel bogged down with useless details. I was completely engaged the entire time however I have an affection for Victorian England anyway and like PA said, the story continues on perhaps longer than it needs to.
It was set in Hawaii and involved Giant talking pigs,
and a half-shark-half-man demigod, and a Volcano goddess, and
some Japanese billionaires who wanted to buy a resort and turn
it into a golf-utopia. Oh, and a ghost-hunting, naked, Mark Twain is one of the
main characters. Yes.That sounds awful.
I may try ” The Abominable” at some point but I need a break from him right now.
I’m still reading “Divide” by Matt Taibbi, “Flashpoints” by George Friedman, “The Emperor of all Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee(I’ve been working through that well over a year and I’m about halfway through it) and a paperback novel called “Influx” by Danial Suarez(labeled the Crichton of his time according to the book blurb). Hopefully I won’t start anything new until I finish these. I should set my limit at five at a time–period. I always have a hard time quitting a book when I should. I just keep going most of the time. So they can add up when I get bored.
Not that all of these are boring. “Divide” is fantastic, actually.
Well yeah doesnt surprise me that Taibbi’s book is great.
The best book I’ve read this year (and I’m still reading it) is “Democracy’s Prisoner”.
Its a biography of Eugene V Debbs. Debbs was a tall, charismatic Socialist back in the World War I era.
He ran for President from a Jail cell in Moundsville WV. President Woodrow Wilson tossed him in prison,
for speaking out against Wilson’s War. Back then numerous Socialists were jailed for being anti-war. Some were lynched. Many were beaten in police-riots and riots lead by the American Legion and American soldiers and rightwing vigilantes.Helen Keller was a socialist and was one of his biggest supporters, along with Upton Sinclair, btw.
The book is well-written. Its not a leftist screed by any means. Just lays out the facts, nicely.
Definitely my favorite book of the last few years.
w
v
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Dissent/Democracy%27sPrisoner_Debs.htmla book review
Democracy’s Prisoner
Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent
by Ernest Freeberg
a book review by Peter Richardson
http://www.latimes.com/fe, June 15, 2008It all sounds so familiar: a foreign war, an unpopular president, high-minded vows to spread democracy abroad and a dubious law to restrict liberties at home. Add to that scenario vast inequalities in wealth, high immigration rates, scant regard for working families and festering resentment about the ravages of global capital. The conclusion seems inescapable: the first decades of the 20th century sound weirdly like the present.
But the differences are also notable. Before World War I, a radical journal could reach 700,000 American households, and socialism was what William James might call “a live hypothesis.” The impassioned speeches of labor organizer, Socialist leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs were nothing short of evangelical in tone and effect. (He once called socialism “merely Christianity in action.”) Debs inspired groups large and small, and his remarkable charisma is what most concerned the powers that were. For the historical parallel to hold, we must imagine a third-party presidential candidate today who could receive 1 million votes without leaving his prison cell — and a roaring ovation from his fellow inmates when he finally did.
According to historian Ernest Freeberg, it was precisely Debs’ virtuosity that forced America to grapple with the limits of dissent. In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America’s entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs’ popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government’s power to jail dissidents. The legal justifications came later, after Debs walked out of an Atlanta prison and caught a train to meet his unlikely Republican pardoner, President Warren G. Harding. Ailing, distracted by foreign affairs and stung by criticism from progressives and conservatives alike for his policy failures, Democrat Woodrow Wilson had refused to pardon Debs despite rising public pressure to do so after the war. When it seemed safe, his successor made the call, shrewdly connecting it to his pledge to return the nation to normalcy.
Throughout this time, many civic groups and public officials defended the Espionage Act. One leader of the American Defense Society declared, “Those who are not for us, must be against us.” A congressman advised: “People should go ahead and obey the law, keep their mouths shut, and let the government run the war.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dismissed criticism of the court’s unanimous rulingagainst Debs as “a lot of jaw about free speech.” But Holmes reconsidered his position and later offered his “clear and present danger” test to adjudicate such cases. By that standard, Debs never would have been convicted.
Freeberg’s narrative unfolds at a stately pace. He patiently introduces the main characters and many minor ones. Debs’ main advocate, Lucy Robins, leaves her vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco to take up the fight. She receives strong backstage support from Debs’ labor rival, the AFL’s Samuel Gompers, and equally strong resistance from her more radical husband. Upton Sinclair weighs in, overconfident in his ability to reason with Wilson. We also hear from John Reed, Helen Keller, Clarence Darrow and U.S. Postmaster General Will Hays, who would later lay down the law for the Hollywood studios. (His nemesis, Mae West, appears briefly to lobby Harding for Debs’ release.) Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, launches raids on radical groups and thereby scotches his political future. But Palmer’s loss is J. Edgar Hoover’s gain; the young bureaucrat fills his files with the names of subversives — and eventually carries the imprint of those years into the Nixon era.
The middle section of the book, which describes the various pressures and counter-pressures brought to bear on the amnesty question, slows to a crawl. Debs moves through two prisons and three wardens, whom he invariably impresses with his integrity and affability. His freedom looms on the horizon like a mirage as two administrations ponder the politics of his release. One delegation after another makes its pitch in Washington, and the decision-makers dispense blandishments until the battle for popular opinion is all but settled. Freeberg’s reader languishes along with Debs, waiting for some definitive outcome.
When it finally arrives, the relief is palpable. Some readers may be moved, as I was, by the photograph of a black-suited Debs standing on the road outside the penitentiary. With his back to the camera and black hat raised high in his right hand, Debs acknowledges the ovation of his fellow inmates. For American radical history, this is Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium. Debs wasn’t the victim of a bad break; he was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.
Debs served less than three years, but he returned to a different world. He had always mediated the tension between his party’s two major factions, the democratic Socialists and the communists, but the party splintered while he was serving his sentence. After his release in 1921, he sided with the democrats, whose numbers were dwindling, partly because many of the party’s causes — including women’s suffrage, food and drug laws, a minimum wage and a ban on child labor — had become mainstream issues.Moreover, Wilson’s war had squandered much of the nation’s idealism. As Freeberg notes, “The administration had lied about the causes and likely consequences of the war, big business had fattened itself while families sacrificed, and much of the patriotic fervor that gripped the country in the war years had only been froth churned by the government’s propaganda machine.” Fortunately, this would never happen again.
Soon after his release, Debs had seen enough of Lenin’s methods to deplore them. When he shared his concern with radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, he received a Rumsfeld-esque reply that “some things happen that we don’t expect.” Debs broke with the Bolsheviks, but despite strenuous efforts by Lucy Robins, he never healed the breach with Gompers before dying in 1926. Many of Debs’ comrades drifted off into other pursuits, including mainstream journalism, real estate sales and the development of solar greenhouses in Vermont. Ironically, Clyde Miller, an Ohio journalist and the man most responsible for Debs’ conviction, lobbied Harding to pardon him, helped found an institute for propaganda analysis and was later grilled by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
If history is what the present wants to know about the past, “Democracy’s Prisoner” is teeming with lessons. But above all, it’s the story of one extraordinary man’s showdown with the establishment — and how that confrontation turned into a complex political struggle whose outcome was up for grabs. Carefully researched and expertly told, Debs’ story also brings a fascinating era into sharp, vivid focus.
Peter Richardson is the author of “American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.” His book on the history and influence of Ramparts magazine will be published next year.
I talked to a guy in jail the other day. He was
denied a lawyer. Court wont appoint him a public-defender.
Why?
Because the crime he committed carries no jail sentence.
He wrote some worthless checks. Worthless check charges
only carry a FINE but no jail time.
The law in WV sez, you are only entitled to a court-appointed lawyer
if the crime you are charged with — carries a possible JAIL sentence.So…he’s in jail because he cant MAKE BAIL — but the charge itself
carries no JAIL sentence — so…he cant get a Lawyer, to help him
…get…out of jail.I could go on
It’s insane.
I caught bit of “…And Justice For All” last night—the old Al Pacino film. That also touches on the insanity of the system Good film.
I can’t imagine your level of frustration having to deal with it all the time. Maybe you just get numb after awhile–I don’t know. All you can do is do whatever little good you can do in this bizarre system. I have to believe when you get victories it feels pretty good, knowing what you’re up against.
Nah, it doesn’t get to me, Pa. Its not just
the ‘criminal justice system’ — its the same
story in all the corporotacracy’s “sub-systems.”
Health care, Education, Media,
Legal System…etc, etc, etc — same story: crush the poor.Meanwhile, the poor continue to vote for
duplicats and replicants.Ah well.
w
v“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.”Percy Bysshe Shelley
— from his poem “The Mask of Anarchy”:“Our picture of the world is provided by those that profit from our ignorance.”
Gavin GeeSpeaking of the justice system, I read Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a Small Town by Jon Krakauer. I think that I’ve read most of Krakauer’s books. They always come across as being so well researched. However, his targets aren’t always given a chance to defend themselves. Anyway, as always Krakauer had me engrossed throughout. As the title implies it is not a plesent book, but it opened my eyes in many ways.
I should read more of his books. I loved “Into Thin Air.” He really brought you to that mountain and those horrible events. It’s the closest I’ll get to experiencing anything like that. Even if I had the money and time to try it, I wouldn’t.
The book was fantastic and memorable.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick
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