Books I have read with short reviews. Probably useful to no one, but I like to keep track of what I have read and found interesting.
Review:
This was a good walk through the history of the Apollo program. A lot of this was familiar to me, but it included details I had not heard before. One thing that always catches me off guard was that Ed White was one of the three astronauts who died in the fire on the pad.
Review:
Wow, what a great book. This has everything that I'm looking for in a Science Fiction novel. Some real science, character development, aliens, just everything. The book was very well written and extremely engaging. The audio book is completely worth it--Ray Porter is awesome (I love him also in the Bobiverse books). Cannot recommend this highly enough.
Review:
I really thought that this was going to be about January 6th, the cover fooled me, mea culpa. I am very familiar with the history that was reviewed in this book and I found only one memorable quotation: America does not need to learn how to live with civil war, America needs to learn how to live with civil peace (or something like that...I listened to the book and I did not jot down the quotation as I heard it because I have a bit of a life today). Aside from that, this is American history fairly well recounted with a focus on contentious issues (slavery, abortion, etc.) I just really spent too much time on the book as it was mostly a retelling of history with which I was already familiar.
Review:
I did not check when I started, but Stuart Banner is a member of the Federalist Society. I knew something was off as I started reading the book because the first step was to normalize politicization of the Supreme Court. It worried me as it started, but as the book went on it became an apologist for such things as Dred Scott (bad decision, but Tawney was a pretty good guy). As I was listening to the book after about a quarter of the way through things added up and I checked to see if Banner was a member of the Federalist Society. Sure enough, he was. So I started this book thinking that I was getting a historian's perspective and I realized that I was getting a right twist on everything. Really threw me off coming from a UCLA professor in good standing.
Review:
As I have read more Booker Prize winners, I've come to understand that the committee has a long standing favoritism for blood, gore, and torture. This particular book only falls short on the torture angle (though there is a fair amount of emotional distress and general angst). I think I am going to use the Booker Prize as an indicator of a book I do not want to read.
Review:
You cannot get a Booker Prize unless there is some horror in your book. That is just the truth. This book is about the horror of women surviving the sack of their city (in this case in and around Troy). It is pretty horrible. Lots and lots of blood and gore as well as serial rape. Not a fun read. Well written
Review:
This book is neither history nor biography. It looks at the development of strategic thinking of the major leaders during World War II. To some extent it is amazing what we now know of how they thought. It was also interesting to see what drove their thinking. I cannot say that this will change my thinking (I don't operate on a global scale), but it was interesting to see how failure functioned and how success required deference.
