I loved three books this month, all very different from each other:
A Happy Marriage, a description of a fraught and very loving long-term marriage, supposedly a work of fiction but I have my doubts about that
Border Songs, the very sweet story of an unlikely border patrol agent
The Woman behind the New Deal, the life story [...]
A young widow and assistant prosecutor with an ambitious boss takes on a suspiciously-acting man who appears to have killed his soon-to-be ex-wife — and wins the trial, although she has her doubts on his culpability. Meanwhile, a serial murderer is planning her demise. There’s a gratuitous transplant story to boot, but it does not [...]
Continuing my foray into scientific book I picked up Life Ascending, which promised to discuss “The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution”. Cool, huh? Well, I supposed it would be if only I could understand what the author is talking about.
It all started very auspiciously because I learned something on the first page of the book, [...]
This is a very unique and strange book! One Hundred Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know claims to talk about how math explains our world — and of course math explains most things in the world, from the perspective of many mathematicians, including defrocked ones, hence I just had to read it. Instead, [...]
A Short History of Women tells the stories of five generations of women who share just a couple of first names, to the great confusion of the hapless reader (me). Note to self: do not name your daughter after your mother or worse, after yourself!
In any case some of the stories are quite captivating, and [...]
I thought Cold, which promises “Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places”, would be a great book to read in early Fall, while it’s still comfortably warm here. And it was, indeed, refreshing in a way, but also loaded with corpses of adventurers, school children, soldiers, divers (bring me to Maui instead!) and animals of various [...]
Great book! With echoes of The Little Giant from Aberdeen County, Border Songs tells the story of a tall, dislexic, Asperger’s suffering border agent who lives with his parents, pines for the girl over the border in Canada, works as a border patrol agent, and lives to birdwatch, which brings him to out of the [...]
Crow Planet is a strange book. It’s a book about crow behavior, but it’s also (mostly?) a book about the author’s tortured life as a depressed would-be country girl living in a large city.
The bits about the crows are interesting. Crows (which I don’t like now any more than I did before reading the book) [...]
Talent Is Overrated claims that high performers achieve because of (smart) hard work and not at all because of any inborn talents. While it’s refreshing to think that great performance is possible for all of us I remain very doubtful that truly outstanding achievement doesn’t require at least a modicum of talent (plus lots of [...]
Strangers tells the story of a lonely retired bank manager who needs to witness the death of a similarly isolated cousin and experience a bizarre relationship with a woman who seems to have absolutely no guilt in sponging off him to finally go forth, take some risks, and live a little. The author takes great [...]
