jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

As the first geology book I've read, I found it quite interesting -- even if I wasn't convinced that even with the qualification this sentence could possibly be true: "perhaps the discipline best prepared to lead science into the holistic world of the twenty-first century."

Part of what makes the book so interesting is that it takes you down the cul-de-sacs recounting the promising leads and techniques that did not pan out. The best chapter for this was

Blood Oath is a cross between a political thriller and a vampire novel. A vampire who has served American Presidents since Andrew Johnson is caught up in a conspiracy at the highest levels of government involving the original Dr. Frankenstein, a shadowy off-shoot of the CIA, Middle Eastern terrorists, and most likely the Vice President as well.

Overall, it is pretty formulaic. But it delivers well on the formula with short, effective chapters that read like a screenplay. It ends with a global montage that dangles several loose ends for sequel(s) -- but as much as I enjoyed this one, I don't think I'll be reading the next because it won't have the most interesting parts of this which were the backstory, the creation of a believable vampire world, etc But I'm glad I read this one.

This is a well written, well organized book on the Large Hadron Collider that is now operating at CERN. The five chapter titles pretty much tell you what you'll get out of the book: (1) What We Know: The Standard Model; (2) What We Guess: Theories We Want to Test; (3) How We Do It: The Large Hadron Collider; (4) How We See It: The Enormous Detectors; and (5) Where We're Going: The Big Picture, the Universe, and the Future.

It is written by a practicing physicist who writes well and uses lots of diagrams. About half of the book is "new" in that it focuses on the technical and engineering aspects of the LHC and isn't repeated in lots of other popular science books. The other half of the book is a review of the standard model and other theories the LHC is expected to test. These are somewhat terse and not hugely in depth but well presented and focused and directed very much towards the issues that the LHC will be able to explore.

Notably, while the book goes through supersymmetry, preons (the hypothesized particles that make up quarks), various speculations on dark energy, MACHOs, WIMPs, etc., the phrase "string theory" does not appear once in the book itself (it is in one of the quotes in Leon Lederman's excellent preface). Which tells you something about its relationship to experiment.

Outstanding novel. Set in contemporary India, Balram Halwai (aka the White Tiger) narrates the story of how he climbed out of the poverty of the Darkness, became a driver for a rich man in town, followed him to Delhi, murdered him to steal his money, and ended up as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. (Don't worry, most of this, including the fact of the murder, is stated in the opening pages -- I didn't give anything away.)

The narration is simultaneously hilarious and savage, sympathetic and repellent, reliable and unreliable. The language is consistently inventive but not intrusive. The depiction of the economic life of India -- ranging from feudal to modern and from servants to masters -- is fascinating. This book will make you look twice, and then look twice again, and then look twice again, before crossing the street in India ever again.

This book is about what has been learned from genealogical studies of Jews using genetic data. The author appears to be one of the main researchers in the field and it is published by Yale University Press -- although it is geared towards layman.

The most astounding findings are the ones that have already gotten the most attention -- the fact the "Kohen's" or Jewish priests are disproportionately descended from one man about 3,000 years ago and that the African Lemda really are related to Jews. But they get more attention in this book along with more detail of how exactly the research was performed -- some of which led me to think that a lot of this research is still in a relatively primitive stage with more room for judgment than I would have expected.

The book also covers some other topics, including the link between genetic diseases like Tay Sachs and intelligence, bringing considerable skepticism to evolutionary explanations of Jewish intelligence by Cochran and his co-authors.

Ultimately, however, much of what one would want to know is simply not accessible to the genetic analysis we can do today -- and may not every be accessible. So while I look forward to the sequel with new discoveries and insights ten or twenty years from now, genes will still leave a maddening number of mysteries.

Fantastic book from the first sparkling paragraph to the moving ending. The narrator is a complete original, a spunky tartar grandmother, one part monster and one part saint, that I find hard to describe. So have to just recommend that everyone read the book for themselves.

I also find myself having a difficult time doing justice to the story. It begins in 1978 in a Russian city with the (soon-to-be) grandmother discovering that her teenage daughter is pregnant. Despite her best efforts to induce a home-remedy abortion, a daughter is born to her. The story centers around these three generations of women with a variety of men serving primarily as a backdrop, mostly husbands and lovers, as they navigate Soviet culture and eventually emigrate to Germany.

History and the passage of time are lightly depicted in a book that covers 1978 to 2008, with the most interest being on the development of the granddaughter and her relationship with the two women that care for her and often trade or steal her back and forth.

A great collection of original documents about the Mutiny on the Bounty. Together they tell as good a sea yarn as any novel, complete with a Rashomon-like quality as two parties to the mutiny see everything in precisely opposite ways -- while agreeing on fragments of key details. There is some repetition, especially in some of the transcripts from the trial and testimonial letters on the character of Captain Bligh. This repetition, however, contributes to an almost biblical quality to the text as it lists names after names, retells the same story from different perspectives, and compiles narratives with more straightforward information.

Specifically, the items included in this volume are:

--Captain's Bligh's account of the mutiny and his 4,000 mile journey to safety in a long boat following it. Told in precise nautical terms -- dwelling less on the mutiny and more on how he survived following it and what he discovered in the process.

--A partial transcript of the court martial of the mutineers compiled with an appendix by Edward Christian, brother of the chief mutineer Fletcher Christian. This is intended to be largely exculpatory for his brother, arguing the Bligh was a borderline-psychotic taskmaster.

--A reply to the Appendix by Bligh and a short reply-to-the-reply by Christian.

--Captain's Bligh's orders and discoveries.

--An account of a mutineer captured on Tahiti and his transport back to England.

--Two news accounts of the discovery of the last surviving mutineer on Pitcairn Island in the Pacific.

--An account by "Jenny," who lived on Pitcairn Island.

Sadly, with Don Juan, I believe that I have now read all of Richard Wilbur's translations of French drama. Then again, I had thought that years ago and they recently started republishing ones I hadn't read. So maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by some more translations.

Sadly also, this is the only Wilbur translation that has any false notes, specifically the dialogue of the rustic peasants in Act II sounds anachronistic and tinny, with phrases like "Hell's bells." Clearly an artistic choice on Wilbur's part but not one that worked for me.

But, of course, Don Juan is spectacular. It is in prose, like other versions of Don Juan a strange combination of comedy, romance, tragedy, moral fable, and other genres. The prose has the same grace as Wilbur's versions of Moliere's rhyming verse. And Don Juan's depiction is complex and multi-faceted.

This novel unfolds in the form of a classical drama -- a single day spent by a family in the house of their dying father, a mathematician. And like a good classical drama, it also has some mischievous gods wandering around interfering in the lives of the mortals, including Zeus, Hermes and Pan. The story extremely loosely follows Amphitryon.

The writing is beautiful, it is filled with moments that are both poignant and funny, and the entire novel is disorienting -- it is largely realistic but in addition to the gods there are the occasional throwaway lines that make it clear the setting is somewhat different than we imagine -- e.g., Wallace's theory of evolution recently disproven, Einstein's theory of relativity recently disproven, and the modern train is a steam engine straight out of the mid-19th century. These odd throwaways are never explained.

The 3-/12 stars, however, are because reading the book went from a delight to a slog. Although in theory it had a classical unity, it seemed somewhat random with one characters thoughts or perspectives following right after the other, with no clear forward momentum, greater depth of explanation, or resolution. Which was disappointing because the premise was so promising and appealing.

A really fascinating collection of short stories. Most of them are very short -- a few pages or in some cases even a paragraph (one of these is pasted below). They are all impeccably written, mostly odd, invariably disorienting with their psychological shifts. Most of them are about relationships, many of them failed. All of them are economical with only a minimum of necessary detail.

But better than a description is to read one of them entitled "What She Knew":

"People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?"