A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
This post written by Clint Icarus at the Edge of Time
by Brian Greene
[cover name=icarusattheedgeoftime]
This is an unusual book. It’s a retelling of the Greek Icarus myth, about a young man who uses wings made of wax to fly. Unfortunately, he flies too high, his wings melt, and he falls to his death. Fortunately, this version isn’t so depressing. Icarus at the Edge of Time is set on a spaceship in the future, and this Icarus is a teenage genius who flies too close to a black hole. He survives, but things don’t work out quite the way he expected.
Icarus at the Edge of Time looks like a book for kids – it’s a board book with only 44 pages, and there are only a few sentences per page. Mostly, it’s illustrated with photos from the Hubble Space Telescope. The story isn’t particularly complex, either. However, it’s a neat little story, and it does involve actual physics. It might be a good book to read with your children, if you want to get them talking about science, but I think it’s neat enough that you can enjoy it as an adult, too. I did.
The author, Brian Greene, has written a couple of big books about physics. If you are expecting more of the same, except for kids, you’ll be disappointed. If you are looking for a serious sci-fi version of the Icarus story, you’ll be disappointed. It’s somewhere in between the two. It uses the Icarus story to introduce a little science and have some fun along the way.
I linked to Brian Greene’s official college website at the top of this review, but the book itself has another site at icarusattheedgeoftime.com.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon
[cover name=thecuriousincidentofthedoginthenighttime]
Christopher is 15 years old, and he tells us he has “Behavioral Problems.” He carries a knife with a saw-blade that (he thinks) would be good for cutting off somebody’s fingers. He wouldn’t mind if everyone else in the world just vanished one day. He likes math. However, he’s not a serial killer or anything even remotely like that.
Christopher’s brain works in a different way. He has trouble understanding feelings or interpreting facial expressions. He pays attention to everything, so crowds or some kinds of noises or lots of signs or even looking out the window while he’s on a train overwhelm him. He really hates being touched. That’s part of why he doesn’t like people.
The story is told entirely from Christopher’s point of view. It begins when he discovers that his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, has been murdered. Since Christopher loves Sherlock Holmes, and since he really liked Wellington, he decides to investigate the murder and bring the killer to justice. The murder is solved about half way through the book, but it leaves Christopher in the middle of an even bigger problem, and he spends the rest of the story dealing with it.
People seem to either love or hate this book. I think one reason some people hate it is the writing style, which I can kind of understand. Since Christopher is telling the story, he tells it his way. However, this didn’t bother me. I actually thought it was pretty easy to read. However, I’ve noticed that a lot of people feel cheated because they thought it was a very different kind off book than it really is. Let me try to clear up some of the most common myths I’ve seen about this book.
Myth 1: This is a murder mystery. Well, that’s what Christopher says, but he’s wrong. This is a novel about Christopher, his life, and his family. In fact, Christopher spends every other chapter writing about his daily life, his hopes and dreams, and his hobbies. He is very fond of mathematics and physics, and he talks about math a lot.
Myth 2: This book is for kids. Actually, the author got tired of writing books for kids, so he wrote this one for adults. His agent decided that it would be good for kids, too, so one edition was published for adults and one edition was published for children. Just so you know, there’s a lot of swearing in it, and bodily functions appear more than a few times.*
Myth 3: This is an accurate, scientific portrayal of autism. It isn’t. In fact, the author never says that Christopher is on the autism spectrum. He never claims that Christopher has Asperger syndrome. The author used to work with people who had autism, and he says he basically combined various traits of people he knew to create Christopher. He didn’t go out and do any research. You might want to check out this interesting article about the book written by a man with Asperger syndrome.
If you want to give the book a try, you can read an excerpt of it at the publisher’s website or Google Books.
*: One way to get a book marked as “Literature” is to kill an animal, talk about bodily functions, and make the main characters people you wouldn’t want to hang out with all the time. Having the main character talk about academic topics also helps.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
William Kamkwamba grew up in Malawi, a fairly poor country in southeast Africa. His family’s house didn’t have electricity. He had never seen a working computer. People in his village often went hungry. He wasn’t well educated – his family couldn’t afford $80 per year to keep him in school. Then he found a couple of books about physics and engineering in the local library. He studied them carefully – he had trouble reading English, so he looked at the diagrams and used them to help figure out the words. When he got to the one about windmills, he decided to build one of his own.
Building a windmill in rural Malawi wasn’t easy, since he didn’t have a local hardware store. People said he was crazy, but it worked. He figured out how it should work mostly by looking at pictures and he built it out of wood, scrap metal, an old bicycle, and PVC pipe, and it worked. People came from miles around to see it. What did the windmill do, other than turn? It powered a single light bulb. Pretty soon, though, he ran a wire into his house and had an electric light in his room. Eventually, he built a circuit breaker and switches and wired his whole house.
Quite a few people in his village had cell phones, but charging them was not easy. William decided he could do something about this. Again based mostly on pictures and working with spare parts, he built a step-up transformer so that the windmill could charge cell phones.
In my book, that’s amazing stuff from a homemade windmill. What really blows me away, though, was that William was only 14 when he built the windmill.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is William’s inspiring autobiography. I try not to say “inspiring” unless I really mean it, but there aren’t that many other words I can use. This book reminds you that there really are amazing people in the world, and they can do great things.
The book starts with the day William’s got his first windmill working, but then it jumps back to cover some of his earlier life, parts of which were pretty rough. It also describes many of the events that came after that windmill – news spread around Malawi, and at some point it hit the Internet (which William had never seen), and his story made it around the world. William has spoken at two TED conferences and MIT, and he has been on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At the first TED conference, he got funding to build more windmills so he could use the electricity to irrigate the crops in his village. He didn’t stop there, though. William has also co-founded a non-profit organization, Moving Windmills, which promotes economic development and creates educational opportunities for the people of Malawi.
Check out William’s first TED conference presentation. He talks about this in the book. This was his first trip away from his home, so within 24 hours, he flew on his first airplane, saw his first laptop (and made a PowerPoint presentation), got his first e-mail account, and gave his first formal talk. He was fantastically nervous, but he managed to get his point across, and the audience really supported him.
Here is his second TED conference presentation. He’s a lot more relaxed.
Here he is on The Daily Show, where he explains how he built the circuit breaker for his house.
One week later he and Bryan Mealer give a talk at MIT. It’s about an hour long. The first few minutes are all other people talking, but then we get to the good stuff.
Finally, here is the short film Moving Windmills: The William Kamkwamba Story. William’s non-profit group has prepared a feature-length documentary based on this.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits
by Amal Naj
[cover name=peppers]
Amal Naj grew up in India, so you’d think he’d be okay with hot peppers. However, he really didn’t like spicy food until he was in college in Ireland and started to miss food from home. From there, he went on to be a hot pepper junkie. If you really love hot food, this is probably a book for you. Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits is a collection of pepper facts and stories.
This book covers a lot of pepper-related topics. It includes some of the history of peppers around the world and how they have been used as medicine. It also includes some science – Naj hangs out with a number of biologists who study peppers. Two chapters cover the rather bizarre story of McIlhenny Company, the people who make Tabasco sauce. Naj also describes some of his pepper-related travels, such as his visit to Hatch, New Mexico, which is probably the hot pepper capital of the United States, or the Andes mountains in Bolivia, where he joins in the search for the the original wild pepper.
This book came out in 1993, so some of the facts, especially where people talk about the science of peppers and how they are used in medicine, are probably outdated. There is no mention of the Naga Jolokia (the ghost pepper), either. Habaneros are as hot as this book gets. I also noticed that this is not the easiest book to read, although it’s not that bad. The author sometimes uses larger words when shorter ones would work just fine, and sometimes the science sections get bogged down by long lists of names. As long as you know to expect it, you should be fine.
Also, if you want to read more about Tabasco sauce, you might want to check out this series of articles from 2004.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[linkplus name=”Peppers” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b12113516~S0″]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Survival and Obsession Among America’s Great White Sharks
by Susan Casey
[cover name=thedevilsteeth]
If you sail about 27 miles west of San Francisco, you’ll reach the Farallon Islands. They are home to hundreds of thousands of birds and quite a few sea lions, and every year around September, the great white sharks show up. Nobody knows why great white sharks – the same ones every year – spend a few months in the Farallones. Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know about great white sharks. However, Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson are working to change that. They have been working in the Farallon Islands for the last ten years. They know all the sharks by name.
Susan Casey, the author, spent eight weeks with Peter and Scot. The Devil’s Teeth is about her experience there. We get to know Peter and Scott, as well as Cal Ripfin, T-Nose, Spotty, Mama, Betty, or the Cadilac (a few of the local sharks). We also get to see what life is like on these desolate islands just off the coast of San Francisco.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder
[cover name=thesoulofanewmachine]
The Soul of a New Machine is not about a machine. There are plenty of machines in it, but it is really about people who happen to be designing a new computer called the Eagle. The small group of people who designed the Eagle put their hearts into their work. They put their souls into it. They worked long hours for a project that hadn’t even been approved by their company, so even if they did an amazing job, the company might just throw everything away. They weren’t working for money, or even for the chance to make the world’s next popular computer. They were doing it for the pure joy of creating something.
In the 1970’s, not everybody had computers at home or on their office desks. A minicomputer could be bigger than a couch. Microsoft and Apple weren’t the biggest names in the industry back then. They were just getting started.
The Soul of a New Machine tells the story of people who work at Data General Corporation, based in Massachusetts. Data General makes minicomputers. They have a series called the Eclipse, and they have just opened a new R&D lab in North Carolina. The people who work in North Carolina are asked to design the new series that Data General will start selling, while the people still in Massachusetts are left to keep tinkering with the old Eclipses. This doesn’t make the Massachusetts people happy. They want to create something, too, so their manager, Tom West, gets them going on a new project. He didn’t really get anyone’s approval to start this new project. He’s kind of unofficially asked if the president of the company would be okay with it, and he’s kind of unofficially gotten an answer: yes, but it needs to run the same programs as the old Eclipse machines did, and it can’t have a mode bit.
What does this mean? Well, you can’t just copy a program from your iPhone to your PC and expect it to run. Back in the 1970’s, pretty much every time you got a new computer, you had to throw out all your old software and get new stuff. This new computer that Tom West’s people might be allowed to build has to run all the old programs that the old computers could run.
The “mode bit” is basically an easy way to make this happen. It’s a sort of switch. Flip it on, and the new computer works just like the old one. Flip it off and the new computer gets to run like its new, awesome, shiny, super-fast self. If Tom’s group had any chance of getting their project approved, they had to find a way to make their computers run old software without this little switch.
So off the engineers went, working hard on a project that might not even be approved. They called their new machine the Eagle, and they were darned proud of it.
The Soul of a New Machine talks about their struggles. Corporate politics was part of it, but they also had to deal with tight deadlines, try things nobody had tried before, and push themselves hard to make the best computer they could possibly make. The book is also about the people themselves: their personalities, their quirks, and their hopes and dreams. You get to meet some really amazing people this way.
The time they spent on the Eagle project isn’t all hard work. You can’t work as hard as these people doand not take breaks, so we also get to see a bit of computer geek culture. One of the games the engineers play is called Adventure, and it’s pretty famous. You can play it online if you want to see what all the fuss was about.
If you are worried about having to read computer mumbo jumbo, you can relax. Yeah, there is some. The author generally does a good job of explaining it in terms that normal people can understand, but you can skip it if you want. The book isn’t about technical details. It’s about the people.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
If you are interested in the history of computers, you might want to check out the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint Fullmetal Alchemist
by Hiromu Arakawa
[cover name=fullmetalalchemist]
Fullmetal Alchemist is set in a fantasy version of Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Edward and Alphonse are studying alchemy, a sort of magical chemistry, and decide to use it to resurrect their dead mother. This ends badly: Edward ends up with a prosthetic leg and arm, while Alphonse needs to have his entire body replaced with a body of metal. Edward goes to work for the military, hoping to get access to enough resources to regrow his limbs and his brother’s body. However, the brothers eventually stumble upon a conspiracy and, with the help of some of Edward’s military buddies, have to save their country.
You can look it up on Wikipedia.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[librarydate]
This post written by Clint They Never Gave Up: Adventures in Early Aviation
by Michael Wilkey
[cover name=theynevergaveup]
This book describes people’s attempts to fly, from ancient myths up to the early days of modern airplanes.
[starratingmulti id=”1″]
Where to Find It
[librarylist]
[linkplus name=”They Never Gave Up” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b24463016~S0″ cchasone=true]
[librarydate]
|
More Recommendations
Reading About Comics
Science & Math Reading
|
Tags: 
Category: 
Write a comment