Barry Cunningham

Light lunch-time reading.
Definitely sports nostalgia (or pre-nostalgia, since it describes a sports world of the 1920s or 1930s), pedestrian, and small-time.
I grew up watching the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels, before the Dodgers moved to town, so, having liked some of Zane Grey's Westerns, I was willing to give this try. The minor leagues in this book are a lot more minor though, being set in smaller towns and sandlots, 20 to 30 years before I was watching the Angels. Not great plots or great sports writing, but a pleasant diversion.

I saw this biography in Mac's Backs and knew I had to have it. I knew him only as the basis for character you couldn't take your eyes off of in Kerouac's “On the Road” and wanted to know what his story was.
Neal Cassady was jerk, but a charismatic and influential jerk. In that respect, not unlike most politicians. But he grew up on the other side of the tracks, became a petty criminal, dope fiend, womanizer, and icon of the Beats and the Hippies. Jack Kerouac immortalized him as Dean Moriarty in “On the Road”; Allen Ginsberg fell in love with him, mentioning him by his initials in Howl; besides them he hung out with William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and he drove Merry Pranksters' psychedelic bus Furthur for Ken Kesey on their epic journey across America. An idyllic hero in the Ayn Rand mold.
Fascinating reading, but I'm glad I never met him.

I must confess to some prejudice here: my father wrote this book and I published it. That said, I would not have bothered if I did not think it was worth the effort.
The book is a sequel to Gulliver's Travels, written and set in the mid-1930s. Like Swift's original, it is both a fantasy and a political satire, though not nearly as misanthropic as Swift's.
Though it is a satire of America during Franklin Roosevelt's first term, it is remarkably topical. Some scenes from the book seem inspired by the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 or recent Congressional hearings.
Not a commercial thriller or blockbuster, but still very funny and thought provoking. The “Look Inside” feature is enabled on Amazon, so potential readers can browse the book extensively to determine whether or not this may be of interest.

I found this to be an excellent read.
It helped to put many of Cummings' poems in context. Most of his poems are very personal, so some context about where, when, and why they were written contributes a great deal to my appreciation of them.

A book I had been meaning to read since high school, inspired by the movie. As one might infer from the fact that it took me nearly fifty years to get around to it, that wasn't a really great motivation for what is a bit of a tough read.
The book is much different than the movie. A lot more fleas, malaria, lice, and stupidity of war and tribal and international politics. The book does give us T.E. Lawrence's internal voice, including his self-doubts and perceptions of the roles of various players in the war against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East during WWI. As such, it is a lot more nuanced and not as glorified as the movie.
But, reality is actually a lot more complicated. Lawrence was playing very complicated game. While Lawrence shows us more about his complicated role in the Arab Revolt than the movie can, he doesn't show us all his cards either. Quite a lot of political intrigue was kept secret during Lawrence's lifetime, indeed until the late 1960s. Some followup reading of one of the more modern biographies of Lawrence really is needed to fill in the gaps.

For those not familiar with L. Frank Baum's Santa Claus, let's just say he has a different backstory than St. Nick living with elves at the North Pole that later generations have been raised on. Altogether, I think he is a pleasanter, less-commercial fellow; a little goody-two-shoes perhaps, but our fairy tale characters are not supposed to be nuanced.
In this short-story, the baddies try to kidnap Santa Claus to spoil Christmas for all the children. But, I don't suppose it's a spoiler to say that their plan fails. After all, Santa has friends.

Another Carr puzzler.
Starts out very humorously. After the dead body appears, you'd think the humor would evaporate, but the memorable characters and suspects take up the slack.

Fairly lame, though not untypical for the era.
The sexist stereotypes and setting on a fictionalized Mercury that bears no plausible resemblance to what we know Mercury is like have not aged well.
I did not find the characters particularly engaging.
Maybe if I were 14 in 1949 (and it was still 1949!), I might have found it more engrossing.
As it is, meh.

Moving photography.
Would have liked a bit more text with more history of the institution to set it in its then current social context. That's partly because my maternal grandmother was institutionalized there years before Mary Ellen Mark was there.

Probably the best biography that can be written about Tatum given our agonizing lack of information about him.
Lester's biography appears as comprehensive as it could be, but inevitably leaves us wanting to know more about this enigmatic genius who awed almost all the musicians he met, and continues to awe us today with his recordings.

Useful survey.

Good but not great.
There are technical flaws (diagram misprints / duplications, misprints in move sequences) — not an overwhelming number, but enough to be very annoying. The Kindle formatting of move sequences is irregular, making some of them all but unreadable.
The detailing of the various methods is spotty. In particular, the F2L cases are never enumerated. There is enough there so you can figure out what to look up, but it's not really a self-contained reference.
Useful but not adequate.

A very complete debunking of the attempts to rationalize this myth from the Gospel of Matthew as any sort of astronomical phenomenon.
On the surface, this is fairly simple because the “star” described in Matthew does not remotely behave the way any astronomical body would behave. Adair goes through in detail all of the “explanations” that have been proposed over the years (e.g., nova, supernova, meteors, meteorites, planetary conjunctions, eclipses, occultations, etc.) and systematically notes how each of these phenomena differ markedly from what is purported. He also shows what we know historically about the world astronomy of the era is good enough so that the fact that such a singular astromical display is not mentioned in any records from the time is very suspicious.
Finally, he does something which I have not seen done by other authors on the subject: he looks at whether it is possible that what is being described is an astrological event rather than a physical event. Delving into the astrological systems of the time in the region, he shows that such an interpretation is even more problematic.
The five stars is for the completeness of the exposition. While Adair tries to keep things simple and give a popular expostion on the subject, the nature of the argument is such that not every reader is going to find this to be much of a page-turner. But, if you've ever sat through one of those 50 minute planetarium shows around Christmastime and wanted to know from someone who isn't trying to sell you a ticket what the real story is, this might be a worthwhile read for you.

Still interesting

This book, though a little dated in its examples and details, is still a classic and worth a read.
This is actually at least the third time that I've read it. The first time was sometime in the late 1950s when I was still in elementary school. Much of it was above my head then, so I think I didn't finish it then, getting bogged down someplace in the orgones.
I read it again around 1970 during my senior year at MIT. It was a good reminder to me at that time of what science was about and that however cool and trendy the psychic hoogie-moogie, astrology, and occultism of my friends early in the Aquarian Age seemed, ultimately it had to be self delusion or fraud.
The bits that are now the most dated are simply the refutations of the fallacies being debunked; 70 more years of scientific progress makes it much easier find disproofs, especially in the fields of genetics, biology, planetary science, and physics.

Important, but tedious

His main surviving works, “Theogony” and “Works and Days”, are unrelieved by any semblance of plot. Nevertheless, the “Theogony” is particularly important historically for its genealogy of the Greek gods around the time of Homer.

Just saw the movie.
Let's just say the comic book was not a spoiler for the movie.
While similarly themed and containing some of the same characters, the movie is not just retconned, it's wholly reimagined. It had to be to keep it to a reasonable budget.

Delightful

I fell into Mo and Meggie's world (or should I say worlds). Sort of a Harry Potter series for bibliovores.

Fairly simpleminded

Despite the title.
This book does a few things well. It provides an introduction to the literature so that one can get into the subject further. It also provides some hands-on examples on the IBM Q-experience website, along with some supporting videos.
Unfortunately, it also does some things very poorly. The intended audience has not been well thought out. Several explanations, especially those involving complex dimensions and complex projective space, have been so dumbed down that even though I had the mathematical background and familiarity with the concepts I found it hard to identify what was being talked about. I can't imagine someone without a strong math background being able to make any sense out of them. The second major problem is that the hands-on material will be outdated fairly quickly. The user interface on the Q-experience website has changed enough since the book was written just over a year ago that the illustrations and videos are noticeably different from what one sees today. I expect the pace of change on the IBM website to be fairly rapid.

Delightfully snarky

Not exactly as lyrical as Madeleine Miller, or even Pat Barker, it is a hoot.
Margaret Atwood's reimagining of Penelope's life from the point of view if her and the dozen of her maids that hung after mopping up the suitors' gore. It is recounted from Hades a few thousand years later, as a delightfully snarky feminist critique of a story from a decidedly non-feminist age.

Good Basic Intro

Provides enough basic information and how-to steps to get you to break the ice and start a YouTube channel. So it is good for that.
All the tip boxes and sidebars framed in red did get to be annoying.
As well, some of the ideas for what would be cool content I found to be borderline cringeworthy. You mileage may vary.

Imaginative

And, well written, I suppose. I found most of the stories to be too dark and unsettling for my taste.

Mostly pretentious mystification. A series of vignettes exploring different visions of time. Almost none of them seem related to any scientific conception of time of any sort. Only a few seem related to any psychological perception of time. If not for those few glimmers I rate it as 1 star.
The crude framing story of a fictionalized Einstein seems there simply to exploit his name and fame and provide a turn of the century Swiss backdrop for the vignettes.
I think the author wanted to dazzle me with taurine ordure. I was not dazzled.

Possibly the worst science fiction book ever written.
When the good guys are losing a space battle to the aliens, they pop into bubble of spacetime and spend thousands of years developing powerful new weapons, then pop back into the battle a few seconds later with a vast armada to kick butt. I think that's cheating. Like a book on improving your chess suggesting you use a chain saw to dismember your opponent.
I'm sure you can find books you think are worse. Don't tell me. I'm not going to read them to compare. I don't want know. Have it your way.

Fairly lame overview of the subject. Marred by several things, including its insistence that the Gospel of Luke is history corroborated by other historians (a demonstrably false assertion), paucity of real content, and bad links at the end that attempt to open a Facebook page (presumably for the publisher's self promotion).

Some interesting ideas and a good introduction to the literature, but deeply flawed by specious reasoning throughout.
I originally tried listening to this as an audio book, but that was hopeless. It was an effective soporific, but following, analyzing, and picking apart specious philosophical writing is much more easily done by reading and annotating rather than listening, fuming, and falling asleep.
I've posted my annotations on Goodreads, so have a look at them for more specific criticisms. I'd just rant here.

Of some historical importance I suppose, since it is in Volume II of the Harvard Classics.
Still, I found Epictetus to be an insufferable twit.
Oligarchs will love him because of his message that victims and slaves should meekly accept their lot. Some of us differ, but don't beg.