I started reading Native Son because it is Banned Books Week (last week of September). The Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association asked people to read their favorite banned book. I’d rather take a chance on finding a banned book I already have and want to read than go back and read…
Ender Wiggin’s sister, Valentine plays the role of fictional Demosthenes online in several of the books by Orson Scott Card. She would play the role of an extremist to whip up the gullible Americans, while her power hungry psychopath brother Peter played the role of Locke would be the moderate. In reading Ender in Exile, a speculative train…
There seem to be two ways to recommend something to others… Because the person making the recommendation likes it. Because the person making the recommendation knows the one receiving it and thinks that person will like it. The last time I looked, I am not anyone else. I like things others do not. Others like…
I recently completed my first resolution for the year 2009: Read 12,000 pages. pp Check the Reading page for the master list. Titles in bold are the ones I recommend. (They also are probably the ones I quote the most.) Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – Carl Sagan – 368…
These are the books I read this year after completing the resolution list. The Art of Racing in the Rain – Garth Stein – DONE – 322 pp (10,461 total) The Last Voyage of Columbus: Being the Epic Tale of the Great Captain’s Fourth Expedition, Including Accounts of Mutiny, Shipwreck, and Discovery – Martin Dugard…
The French and Indian: War Deciding the Fate of North America In high school and college the French and Indian War was this long amorphous event in between settling the colonies and the American Revolution. It took a movie, The Patriot (not even in my top 500 movies), to give some color to the story…
George and I talked about this some last night. Nature vs Nurture… I tend to think of both as bottlenecks for human development. The debate about which does more to me makes as much sense as debating which is better for a web application: Apache or MySQL? Both are involved and affect the end results.…
The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child by Thom Hartmann My review rating: 5 of 5 stars Reading the DSM-IV about ADHD sounded to me more like the behavior over a typical boy than a mental illness. Thom theorizes a gene came about which allowed our ancestors to survive an intense…