Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
Tinkers, Paul Harding
Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
Redshirts, John Scalzi
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
I Curse the River of Time, Per Petterson
No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe
Steps, Jerzy Kosinski
The Rest of the Robots, Isaac Asimov
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, Victor Pelevin
The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove
2012.05 — From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek‘s Dr. McCoy, Terry Lee Rioux (2005)
I picked this book up on a whim. We were at the library for the first time in years, having for some reason let our cards lapse. I was walking the stacks looking for a different book, and the gently smiling face of Dr. McCoy caught my eye. In my excitement at rejoining the ranks of proud library users, combined with my fondness for the original Star Trek series and for the feisty Southern doctor in particular, I snatched it off the shelf. If I had been able to find the book I’d originally wanted, if I’d spent more time browsing for other things to read, maybe I wouldn’t have checked out From Sawdust to Stardust, which in the final accounting is a decent (but not great) book about a decent (but not great) actor who achieved stardom thanks to a decent (but, I must be objective here, not great) television show.
Sawdust is a linear account of the life of DeForest Kelley (1920-1999), and during the first handful of chapters, during which Rioux recounts his childhood as the son of a poor itinerant preacher in Georgia during the 1920s and 30s, I wondered if perhaps my Star Trek fandom had led me astray. He was poor, his family were conservative rural Southerners, he was well liked but somewhat shy. Things took a promising turn when he moved to Long Beach, California in the late 30s and eventually became interested in acting, but I remained somewhat bored. He was a stage actor, he had friends, he had pets, he liked to drink and dance. We’re still 25 years from “boldly going” anywhere.
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2012.04 — Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Frederik Pohl (1980)
In this sequel to his excellent Gateway, Frederik Pohl again impresses with his ability to combine Big Ideas and compelling plot lines into a delightful and thrilling book. In this case the primary plot involves a family of explorers trying to strike it rich on the frontier, while the Big Idea is nothing less than the evolutionary origins of humankind. The level of conceptual ambition at work here puts this series of books (known as the “Heechee Saga”) on a level with Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, while Pohl’s ability to create believable setting and characters — in short his talent as a writer — in fact exceeds Niven’s.
I don’t want to give anything away, but if you’ve read Gateway you’ll know that the basic premise is that humans have discovered the apparently abandoned relics of an ancient space-faring race called the Heechee. We were able to use some of these relics for scientific gains, such as the expanded exploration of the galaxy, and what we couldn’t figure out how to use we turned into decorative (and salable) commodities.
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2012.03 — A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (2003)
The title of this book by best-selling author and noted American-with-a-British-accent Bill Bryson might be amended to A Short History of Science. While Bryson does indeed investigate everything from the Big Bang down to the machinations of mitochondrial DNA and all stops in between, alongside everything are the stories of the men and women who have brought this knowledge to light. Primarily, in fact, what we have is a short history of modern science, with most of the science coming from no earlier than the mid-17th century.
In any event Bryson’s Short History is a very enjoyable book, wherein he presents his complex subjects in a manner readable to the lay person (i.e., me), without dumbing anything down. Early in the book he states that much of science deals with figures both infinitely large and infinitesimally small, and that his aim is to deliver it to the reader in a digestible way, spelling things out rather than using scientific notation whenever possible, and using analogies rather than bald numbers (Bryson thankfully never uses “football fields” as a unit of measurement, but he does tell you for example that if you wove all the DNA in a single cell out in one continuous thread it would stretch from the Earth to the Moon multiple times).
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2012.02 — The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever (1957)
It is perhaps a Freudian slip that when I typed the title of the book to begin this review, I mistakenly typed it as The Waspshot Chronicle. Maybe I’m being too harsh on what is at the end of the day a rich and interesting book, which as the title says chronicles the lives of a well-to-do family in mid-20th century rural New England. While the characters themselves are something less than likeable (likewise the setting, belying the Norman Rockwell stereotype I hold of the place), Cheever’s writing is masterfully wrought and thoroughly engaging.
The first hundred or so pages are fairly prosaic as the author uses plenty of evocative but not overdone imagery and apt metaphor to place the setting and the characters in the reader’s mind. Cheever’s dialogue is most often indirect, but when he uses direct quotes they are in dialect that feels spot on and unobtrusive. We meet the oddball family and become involved in the gradually thickening plot.
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2012.01 — Triumph: the untold story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics, Jeremy Schaap (2007)
The title says it all, really, as our author the estimable Jeremy Schaap tells the story of Jesse Owens’ astounding victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
I was a little disappointed in the tone of the writing, at least through the first part of the book, which briefly recounts Owens’ childhood and in more detail his college track career. I’m familiar with Schaap as a good sports writer — one of the best in fact, and a fine successor to his widely respected father Dick Schaap — and perhaps my expectations were a little high. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. In any case there is a definite rah-rah Hallmark Card feeling to the early parts of the book, emphasized by the sometimes corny dialogue Schaap puts into the mouths of his protagonists.
Beyond feeling like I was being urged by the author to root for Owens (and honestly, why would I need such urging? Owens is an iconic figure in American and world sports history, and anyone picking up this book surely does so at least partly out of sympathy with him and a distaste for the Nazis), I got exactly what I wanted from the book, which was a detailed account of Jesse Owens qualifying for and competing at Hitler’s Olympics.
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