What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

[Cygnia]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

"The Serial Killer's Apprentice" by James Renner. It's about relatively recent unsolved cases in the Cleveland area.

[Clonus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Tokyo Vice. It's about a Japanese-speaking American who became a reporter for a Japanese language paper in Tokyo, and ended up bumping heads with a Yakuza boss.

[yamamura]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Tokyo Vice. It's about a Japanese-speaking American who became a reporter for a Japanese language paper in Tokyo' date=' and ended up bumping heads with a Yakuza boss.[/quote']

 

Did you enjoy it but wanted to read something a little more cheerful afterward?

[Cygnia]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Tokyo Vice. It's about a Japanese-speaking American who became a reporter for a Japanese language paper in Tokyo' date=' and ended up bumping heads with a Yakuza boss.[/quote']

 

Think I read an excerpt from that in Maxim earlier this year.

[Clonus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Did you enjoy it but wanted to read something a little more cheerful afterward?

 

It was a bit sad by the end, since those women actually died. It would make a good movie though.

[teh bunneh]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

If you liked that' date=' you'll probably like "Deep Survival" and/or "Everyday Survival" by Laurence Gonzales. I've only read the former. It has less to do with how to prepare logistically and more to do with how to prepare mentally, but still a great read. See also "Touching the Void" by Joe Simpson and "Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer, either of which will make you give up your dreams of becoming a mountain climber.[/quote']

 

Thanks, I'll keep my eyes open for those. I like logistics/preparation/survival type books.

[yamamura]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

It was a bit sad by the end' date=' since those women actually died. It would make a good movie though.[/quote']

 

It could make a great movie. I wonder if there was ever a BBC movie about Lucie Blackman. If so he would have been a character in it. Luckily one of my other Christmas gift was the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Which while enjoyed Tokyo Vice (see my review above), I needed something light-hearted.

[Enforcer84]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Not finished, but "The Book of Basketball" by Bill Simmons. Fascinating, I mean I'm a stats nut and an NBA fan so I'm kind of a mark. And even when I disagree I find his insights to be worth reading. Also, he's pretty funny.

[Cygnia]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Not finished' date=' but "The Book of Basketball" by Bill Simmons. Fascinating, I mean I'm a stats nut and an NBA fan so I'm kind of a mark. And even when I disagree I find his insights to be worth reading. Also, he's pretty funny.[/quote']

 

My husband's reading that book again right now too. He really likes it.

[Cancer]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I just finished The Candy Bombers, by Andrei Cherny. It is about the Berlin Airlift in 1948/49, when the Soviets closed all ground transportation into Berlin in an attempt to force the Western Allies to abandon their half of the city. Most of the book dwells on the first few months of the period.

 

The political context is largely alien; most of the things that I take for granted about the Cold War were done during or after this time. NATO did not yet exist. China had not yet gone officially Communist. Germany was in ruins and no one was seriously trying to change that. Only the United States had nuclear weapons, but Truman was president, and despite his public statements otherwise, it is clear that his decision to use the Bomb on Japan twice deeply disturbed him, and he did not want it to be used again. The Germans themselves were still bitter about the occupation, largely opposed to democracy, and in a poll the majority of them chose the option, "National Socialism was a good idea, but badly executed."

 

1948 was an election year in the US and it was taken for granted that Dewey would defeat Truman. The Czech uprising in Prague was put down brutally in the spring. In June, when the Soviets blocked ground traffic into Berlin, trying to starve out the Allies, the decision to try to airlift supplies in was made almost casually, by General Lucius Clay, commander US Occupation Forces Germany. No one in Truman's cabinet supported the idea, including Secretary of Defense Jim Forrestal, who was going slowly insane in that time. Curtis LeMay, the Air Force commander, opposed the Airlift operation as much as he could. Only Truman kept it going, recognizing it as a necessary step to keep Stalin checked in Europe, and the only one short of force that had any hope of keeping that outpost of freedom in place.

 

And, there was Gail Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot from Utah flying supply runs into Tempelhof, who took it into his head to turn his handkerchiefs into little parachutes for candy bars and packets of chewing gum, and tossed those out of his plane on his approach into the airfield at the children who gathered at one end of the runway watching the planes for lack of anything better to do.

 

Clay and Halvorsen, in a very real way, turned the Berliners first to accept the Americans and then to embrace the West whole-heartedly, as the Communists tightened the screws and the Allies struggled against the weather. William Tunner organized and ran the airlift operations with an iron fist, and kept the western part of the city heated and fed -- barely -- through the horribly foggy winter of 1948/49. The author calls it "America's Finest Hour", and even as enamoured as I am of Project Apollo and the leap into space, he could well be right.

[Enforcer84]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

My husband's reading that book again right now too. He really likes it.

 

Almost done. Just finished his Hall of Fame redone and I have but one thing to say: "I understand your reasoning but still have Russell number one."

I do admire his ability to build up players he tears down.

[Sociotard]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

"An Edible History of Humanity" by Tom Standage.

 

Pretty good! Its portrayl of the influence food has had on history was very interesting. My one complaint was on page 192, where he quotes an expert who says "In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press." I'm pretty sure the Dust Bowl was a substantial famine. People did die.

 

Anyway, it was still an interesting book. I was amazed at how much breeding changed maize. I did not know that tigers used to be considered a spice (the word meant something different at the time). His explanation of the problems of logistics was very interesting.

[BlackSword]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

See also "Touching the Void" by Joe Simpson and "Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer' date=' either of which will make you give up your dreams of becoming a mountain climber.[/quote']

I read "Into Thin Air" a year or two ago. It didn't drive away any dream to be a mountain climber, but it did remove a lot of the mystery and allure of Everest. Spending that much money to have an increased chance of becoming a permanent fixture on the mountain or maimed from frostbite didn't really appeal to me. It did put into perspective some of the climbs in the US. Even the most difficult climbs I went on in the Cascades were just a day trip up to Base Camp on Everest.

[Clonus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

"An Edible History of Humanity" by Tom Standage.

 

Pretty good! Its portrayl of the influence food has had on history was very interesting. My one complaint was on page 192, where he quotes an expert who says "In the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press." I'm pretty sure the Dust Bowl was a substantial famine. People did die..

 

No. The United States had a substantial food surplus even during the Dust Bowl. It bankrupted a whole bunch of farmers and there was widespread malnutrition because there was so much unemployment, but there was little in the way of actual starvation deaths. However...the claim is largely meaningless because democratic countries with a free press are a relatively new and geographically limited innovation and are as much the product of a wealthy state as the cause of one. Even so in 1966 starvation was only averted in India due to foreign aid.

[DusterBoy]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I just finished "A Dream of Rome" by Boris Johnson, a former MEP, now Mayor of London and known as "the Blonde Bombshell". It's basically an examination of how Rome created a single European economic community around the Mediterranean and made so many disparate peoples think of themselves as Romans. Boris Johnson may look (and sometimes act) the clown, but he is very well educated and clearly thinks Augustus Caesar was one of the most brilliant politicans ever.

[Clonus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Myths and Legends by Phillip Wilkinson.

 

Covers the entire world and is consequently superficial. But it's nice to see the Greeks not being the be-all and end-all

[Balabanto]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Superheroes and Superegoes: Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks, by Doctor Sharon Packer, M.D. Go to the Champions Boards. I loved this book. It will help your superhero game.

[Old Man]

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ...

 

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I think everyone's perception of World War I is horrific trench warfare, but I was not up to speed on the circumstances that led up to that situation. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which details the first thirty days of the war, takes a truly dizzying amount of source material and turns it into a pretty gripping tale of interpersonal relations and high level European politics. It's a lot like watching a train wreck--the arbitrary German decision to invade, French personality conflicts, British hesitation to get involved, Winston Churchill the dangerous loose cannon, the hopelessly rotten Russian government, and a lot of dumb luck combine to create this inevitable and fascinating tragedy. I was surprised to learn just how close the Allies came to losing the war in those first thirty days.

 

The book is a bit dry; since it's a historical work, there are no conversations, just the occasional quote. And the experiences of the people actually doing the fighting are not really detailed here. It's beyond the scope of the book, true, but it would have helped to get a sense of what WWI non-trench warfare was like. As a work of history, though, it's incredible; the list of sources and references in the back is about as long as anything written by Steve Long. I give it four out of five stars.

[Escafarc]

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ...

 

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I think everyone's perception of World War I is horrific trench warfare, but I was not up to speed on the circumstances that led up to that situation. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which details the first thirty days of the war, takes a truly dizzying amount of source material and turns it into a pretty gripping tale of interpersonal relations and high level European politics. It's a lot like watching a train wreck--the arbitrary German decision to invade, French personality conflicts, British hesitation to get involved, Winston Churchill the dangerous loose cannon, the hopelessly rotten Russian government, and a lot of dumb luck combine to create this inevitable and fascinating tragedy. I was surprised to learn just how close the Allies came to losing the war in those first thirty days.

 

The book is a bit dry; since it's a historical work, there are no conversations, just the occasional quote. And the experiences of the people actually doing the fighting are not really detailed here. It's beyond the scope of the book, true, but it would have helped to get a sense of what WWI non-trench warfare was like. As a work of history, though, it's incredible; the list of sources and references in the back is about as long as anything written by Steve Long. I give it four out of five stars.

 

I enjoyed that one and I would also reccomend Dreadnought by Robert Massie:

http://www.amazon.com/Dreadnought-Britain-Germany-Coming-Great/dp/0099524023/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272071741&sr=1-1

[Bazza]

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ...

 

the list of sources and references in the back is about as long as anything written by Steve Long. I give it four out of five stars.

How do you know SL didn't ghost write it?

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ...

 

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History' date=' 1300-1850[/i'], by Brian Fagan.

 

Very interesting book; lots of stray data on how medium-duration (several years) climate shifts shaped human events.

 

 

If you accept three premises:

• Population expands until it is limited by the production of food, and stays at that limit
  
• Substinence-level farming always operates at the "bleeding edge" of its capabilities
  
• Humans will continue to count on recurrence of the most favorable event in their experience, no matter how freakish that was
  

Then you can imagine that shifts in weather patterns could powerfully affect history.

 

As gamers, we perhaps over-acknowledge three of the Four Horsemen (War, Death, and Plague). But we seldom think about the other one, Famine. This book lets you see just how important that one has been.

 

PS: If, like me, you are/were ignorant of the Irish Potato Famine, be prepared to be appalled.

 

Some Wikipedia links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_ice_age

Executive summary: "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries... [Viewed] hemispherically, the "Little Ice Age" can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels."

My own problem with the "Little Ice Age" has always been the way that historians use it. For example, in a recent major study of the Russian Time of Troubles (it might be this book, although it didn't seem that short to me), the LIA is invoked at random intervals every time the politics of the interregnum reached a crisis. "Wait. So this global climactic change that people are linking to sunspots and whatnot shows up in 1603, vanishes, comes back in 1611, and then again in 1630? You do know that when historians use it in the same way for Germany, it shows up in 1618, right?" The point being that the LIA has been used as an explanation of every major turning point of the Seventeenth Century, summoned and dismissed from the stage by the narrating historian like the school janitor called to clean up the latest spilt milk.

 

Such use does not speak well of the (nonexistent) data used to justify it. Really, guys, scientists move from the data they have to hypotheses they are willing to support, not the other way round.

 

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/brenner.htm

 

This is an odd link (J. M. Blaut is quite the controversialist, and not everyone here will be comfortable reading Marxists arguing amongst themselves. Talk about epistemic closure!), but I couldn't find anything more substantive, at least quickly, on the "Brenner Debate" that broke out after Brenner's 1976 Past and Present article. In brief, the two key assumptions of Malthusian, and later Marxist economics (population increase up to the limit of sustainability; static and implicitly low levels of sustainability for agriculture) are brought under scrutiny by Brenner to varying degrees.

 

Since the Debate, the tide has been running against both assumptions. You will still see economic historians arguing for them (notably in Clark's Farewell to Alms). But those economic historians are a little ....special! That's the word I was looking for, special!

This isn't to say that famine isn't a key issue in human history: but ask yourself, if everyone was always dying of plague, famine, war and the odd asteroid strike, how is it that we're still here. Is it just barely possible that sometimes, people exaggerate the impact of current events for the sake of the story?

Whoops, gotta go. Rahim Jaffer is destroying Canadian politics!

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: what non-fiction books have you read? please rate it ...

 

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I think everyone's perception of World War I is horrific trench warfare, but I was not up to speed on the circumstances that led up to that situation. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which details the first thirty days of the war, takes a truly dizzying amount of source material and turns it into a pretty gripping tale of interpersonal relations and high level European politics. It's a lot like watching a train wreck--the arbitrary German decision to invade, French personality conflicts, British hesitation to get involved, Winston Churchill the dangerous loose cannon, the hopelessly rotten Russian government, and a lot of dumb luck combine to create this inevitable and fascinating tragedy. I was surprised to learn just how close the Allies came to losing the war in those first thirty days.

 

The book is a bit dry; since it's a historical work, there are no conversations, just the occasional quote. And the experiences of the people actually doing the fighting are not really detailed here. It's beyond the scope of the book, true, but it would have helped to get a sense of what WWI non-trench warfare was like. As a work of history, though, it's incredible; the list of sources and references in the back is about as long as anything written by Steve Long. I give it four out of five stars.

 

Barbara Tuchman was a great writer who could really shape a story.

But, she was a journalist, not a historian. A great historian, at the height of his powers, has now given us this. While the promised sequel is looking as unlikely as Dances with Dragons, with this one we at least know the outcome.

 

And, vitally, Strachan doesn't forget what Tuchman seems to be in danger of forgetting: that the French won in 1914. A great deal of crap has been written about the inherent superiority of the German army and all the very questionable things sometimes associated with it (claims, that is, about the superiority of given cultures, races and religions). Given the terrible things these prejudices have led to, I take very great comfort in

 

 

(Yes, I've posted this here before. It's still a great video. Look! She's so tiny! And she rolls her rs!)

[Cancer]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

The Varieties of Scientific Experience, subtitled "A personal view of the search for God", by Carl Sagan. This is actually the edited transcripts of Sagan's invited Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology given in 1985 at the University of Glasgow, edited by his widow, Ann Druyan; it was published in 2006, ten years after Carl's death. This book was used as one of the required readings for an honors seminar on Science and Religion at my work institution (I'm at a Jesuit university); I didn't teach the course.

 

There are nine chapters (one from each lecture). It starts with a largely historical narrative of our development of awareness of the Universe in a scientific sense, both astronomical and, to some extent, biological. Since I'm a scientist by avocation and training, the first five chapters are old had to me, but others' experiences are likely to vary. One main personal comment I have is that it gives one pause to read the editorial footnotes and see the list of the major discoveries that came in the twenty years between the lectures and the publication of the book: in that interval the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, repaired, and the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe was found; COBE and WMAP were launched and mapped the microwave background, and have all but proven beyond doubt the hot Big Bang cosmology and its Inflationary Hypothesis extension, established the age of the Universe to better than 10% accuracy; the Cassini-Huygens mission was launched to Saturn, the Huygens probe landed on Titan and found unmistakable signs of liquid runoff features and the Cassini mapper found lakes (presumably of hydrocarbons) on Titan's surface, and Mars Pathfinder found water ice in the subsurface soil on Mars.

 

From a theological point of view, Sagan's main points are in the last four chapters. In his own quiet, perhaps pedantic way, he opens with a discussion of UFO reports and the inevitably flawed nature of peoples' reports when there is a predisposition to believe, even when the reasons for believing are preposterous or even blatantly fraudulent in retrospect. He then confronts the theological issue directly with a chapter titled "The God Hypothesis", pointing out that there's a broad diversity in religions' conceptions of deities, and that there has been a distinct asymmetry in the application of physical principles to theology:

But it has always struck me as curious that those who wish to apply the Second Law [of Thermodynamics, which has been cited spuriously by creationists as an inconsistency in the scientific picture of the origin and evolution of the Earth and life on it] to theological issues do not ask whether the God is subject to the Second Law. Because if God were subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then God could have only a finite lifetime....

He fires broadsides at the standard arguments for the existence of God, pointing out that these rely upon neatly-timed interruptions in reasoning, because certain obvious next-step corollaries inevitably fail or are absent or are merely stonewalled, and these unanswered corollaries point to a God (if a God in fact exists) who must not be omnipotent or omniscient or benevolent or compassionate, and how easy it ought to have been to leave unambiguous proof that a God as usually understood to be does, in fact, exist.

 

He goes on with powerful arguments that the desire to believe is inherent to the structure of the human mind, and that this intrinsic desire to believe is exploitable by socially dominant classes as a tool to maintain order, sometimes in a viciously predatory and oppressive system. He takes a detour through a chapter titled "Crimes Against Creation", aimed principally at nuclear weapons (remember, this was 1985), where humans have clearly attained the ability to extinguish themselves negligently, and that this ought to be a theological issue of world-wide importance. The last chapter is titled "The Search", which is brief and about the search for knowledge and self-knowledge, and just how essential and unending that search must be. For the true search must not have an end, and the decision that one has reached that goal is a concession of ultimate defeat; he concludes with

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. ... It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe [lower case in original] as it really is, not to foist our emotional predisposition on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Francis Pryor, Seahenge. I'm reading a great deal of archaeological theory at the moment. It's nice to turn to a book that doesn't make your eyes want to crawl back into your head for a change. Pryor is a professional excavator with some impressive work on the margins of the English fens behind him. His Britain BC was based on a BBC TV show, and he is definitely in the tradition of British TV archaeological presenters, a great communicator with something to say.

 

And since he got to the place where he is by doing good work, he has some very useful things to say about how modern British archaeology approaches the human past, especially the preliterate past. He explains why British archaeology has turned away from sites and towards landscapes, and makes a case for reading built landscapes to understand ancient minds.

 

This is still very much a rich man's archaeology, a populous and wealthy society digging a populous and wealthy past, but as far as I can tell it lives up to its promise. It also has important implications for postliterate societies, including our own. To what extent is "the political landscape" more than a metaphor? Do we reify concepts such as "culture" and "the state" by building them into our human geography? Is that a rhetorical question?

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I haven't read a book for pleasure in a long time (the eyes just aren't what they used to be). During my current hotel-like exile, though, I'm getting back to some reading at last. Finishing up a couple books that have been taunting me for a while. The first...

 

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)

Richard P. Feynman & Ralph Leighton

 

Dick Feynman was one of America's greatest physicists. He worked in Los Alamos developing the Bomb, won the Nobel Prize, taught at Caltech and Cornell, and lectured around the world for decades. Those are the things you might have heard about him.

 

He also has a great sense of humor that led to a life of practical jokes and adventures. He had an insatiable curiosity that led him to become an expert in a number of his hobbies, whether it was drawing or Mayan hieroglyphics. In fact, reading about how he dabbled in so many different things and just happened to excel in them I can only draw one conclusion: he's the real life Doctor Who.

 

While the exploits and stories read like a Mary-Sue kind of super character, but he's so matter-of-fact in tone most of the time that he can't be accused of arrogance. In fact the only chapter that deals with winning the Nobel Prize is more concerned with what an inconvenience it was than an honor. He tells just as many embarrassing stories as proud moments.

 

It's not a biography in the conventional sense. While it follows a general timeline, it's not a strict one. This reads more like sitting down with grandpa and listening to them tell stories from their youth. "Did I ever tell you about the time I met Nick the Greek?"

"You know what I used to love to do? Safecracking." "Let me tell you about the time I played in a samba school in Brazil..." Very little of the book has to do with physics unless it's him relating tales about the lectures he delivered. Sometimes he does get technical about mathematics or machinery and I would lose him for a short time, but those moments aren't bad.

 

Overall, very good book. He is a fascinating individual, and he shatters the stodgy scientist stereotype completely. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

Next one will be My Booky Wook, Russel Brand's autobiography. Got halfway through and stopped, but I'll go more into that when I'm finished.