Now reading...

[kinuta]

 

[BillF]

6 hours ago, kinuta said:

 

[alankin]

12 hours ago, T.D. said:

Sorry for the delay.

It's pretty good. I've read a lot of science bios and "popular science" books (incl. Von Neumann and Turing bios, various works touching on the Institute for Advanced Study [IAS], Los Alamos, Teller, the ENIAC, etc) , so much of the material was not new to me. But the weaving in of the IAS and hardware/software development was new and interesting. There's also lots of good info on significant figures who have been neglected in many historical accounts, for instance Nicholas Metropolis, who decades ago co-authored the "Metropolis-Hastings algorithm" now practically ubiquitous in Bayesian statistics as "Markov Chain Monte Carlo". Worthwhile reading IMO.

[Added: Also, I've long been an admirer of Freeman Dyson, so found it pretty cool to read a book authored by his son.]

Sound interesting.  I will have to put this on my to-read list.  Thanks.

[John Tapscott]

Fascinating story. Well worth the read.  

[BillF]

1 hour ago, John Tapscott said:

Fascinating story. Well worth the read.  

[kinuta]

 

I read these classic Asimov's in random order donkey's years ago .

Rereading them in the correct chronological order is highly enjoyable and oddly compulsive.

Amazingly they are all out of print here so I'm reading Kindle versions.

[BillF]

The book shows how the extraordinarily long career of Jimmy Heath mirrors the development of jazz from a disreputable ethnic subculture involving drug abuse and prison sentences to academically esteemed subject studied by the flower of white youth and lauded by the highest in the land (White House visits, etc.) Personally very interesting as I've been listening to the music for sixty years myself.

Edited August 27, 2017 by BillF

[kinuta]

[BillF]

9 hours ago, kinuta said:

[jlhoots]

Josephine Tey: The Daughter Of Time

[ejp626]

I'm finding I have no particular interest in any of the characters in Lucky Jim and don't care what happens to them.  (Furthermore, David Lodge writes much more pointed satire of academia.)  I'll finish it, as it is fairly short, but I am already looking ahead to The Good Soldier, which I liked very much in my 20s, so I hope I still feel the same now.

[paul secor]

A definite 

[kinuta]

[Brad]

[crisp]

On 09/09/2017 at 0:07 PM, Brad said:

I read this a few weeks ago. An interesting book. Reminded me of The Killer Inside Me in its psychopathic narrator. I haven't seen the Nicholas Ray film.

[kinuta]

Deliciously well written and enjoyable.

It really does feel like a long lost , previously unpublished part of the cold war series.

He brilliantly recaptures the prose, mood and atmosphere of his great work.

So good I'm keeping in check my natural impulse to binge read the whole thing.

[BillF]

6 hours ago, kinuta said:

Deliciously well written and enjoyable.

It really does feel like a long lost , previously unpublished part of the cold war series.

He brilliantly recaptures the prose, mood and atmosphere of his great work.

So good I'm keeping in check my natural impulse to binge read the whole thing.

Copy reserved at public library. Am about number 50 on the list!

[ejp626]

On 9/4/2017 at 10:33 PM, ejp626 said:

 I'll finish it, as it is fairly short, but I am already looking ahead to The Good Soldier, which I liked very much in my 20s, so I hope I still feel the same now.

I definitely felt The Good Soldier was a bit too drawn out this time around and a bit too needlessly convoluted.  We get the gist of what happened by p 50 or even sooner, and then the rest is sort of a baroque filling in of a lot of details and much more back story.  Which would be fine if some of it didn't seem just so repetitive.  The last few pages do redeem it a fair bit where we finally get a sense that the narrator isn't quite the angel he often portrays himself as.

It's still a solid book, but I wasn't blown away by it as I was in my 20s.

Carr's A Month in the Country next, and I am also trying to wrap up Fontane's Irretrievable (NYRB).  I compared Irretrievable and No Way Back (Penguin) and finally plumped for the (older) translation published by NYRB.

[Brad]

On 9/11/2017 at 11:40 AM, crisp said:

I read this a few weeks ago. An interesting book. Reminded me of The Killer Inside Me in its psychopathic narrator. I haven't seen the Nicholas Ray film.

A great study of the criminal mind that builds in intensity. 

On 9/14/2017 at 8:44 PM, kinuta said:

Deliciously well written and enjoyable.

It really does feel like a long lost , previously unpublished part of the cold war series.

He brilliantly recaptures the prose, mood and atmosphere of his great work.

So good I'm keeping in check my natural impulse to binge read the whole thing.

I'm a big fan of the Karla Trilogy having read it several times and countlessly watched the Alec Guinness portrayals of Smiley.  Can't wait to get it. 

[Brad]

A powerful book. 

[jlhoots]

Craig Johnson: The Western Star

[jazzbo]

Very interesting.

[BillF]

Returned to this one after 10 years and very rewarding, too. Must re-read the rest of the trilogy soon.

[Dan Gould]

Only benefit of the hurricane was ample time for reading. Finished these two in the past week:

Fascinating piece of reporting, in his own way the 'good' Bulger was as dirty as the 'bad' one.

And this was a mind-blower:

Imagine growing up with a love/hate relationship with your father, becoming a homicide detective, re-connecting with your father before his death, then discovering photos of the Black Dahlia murder victim in his personal album, undertaking your own homicide investigation, and figuring out that your father killed the Black Dahlia and probably many, many others - while you were a boy living in his house.

 

[Brad]

On 9/16/2017 at 11:10 AM, Brad said:

A powerful book. 

This is simply an amazing book. The author, a psychiatrist, survived four concentration camps, and a good part of the book (the book is 160 pages in length) details those experiences and how he survived. The remainder revolves around his theories that we can find meaning from suffering.  He quotes Nietzsche that he who has a "why" to live for can bear with almost any "how."

This a good article about the book, http://benjaminmcevoy.com/7-lessons-learned-mans-search-meaning-viktor-e-frankl-book-review/