So, I’ve previously mentioned a couple other books I read over the holidays:  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson and Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza.  Both were excellent. I also finally finished a book I’d been working on for months, The Counter-Revolution of Science by Friedrich Hayek.  This was one of those incredibly dense […]

Christmas and the time thereafter is always a great time for reading for me.  I always get new books as presents, and I usually have oodles of times during the holidays to read, plus more than ordinary in January and February since workouts are usually less involved and nothing much is going on. As usual, […]

I liked the book.  But it had its problems.  Here’s what I posted on Amazon.  (Not glowing text, but I still rated the book four stars.  Heck, I read the things in just a few days — it must have been good!) This is a really good book. From a science standpoint, it’s a defense […]

I just finished Franz Schulze’s Mies van der Rohe:  A Critical Biography.  It’s a fascinating book that delivers on its title’s promise:  telling the basic story of Mies’s life, and offering what I assume is expert opinions on the quality of his work.  I come away able to talk with your average man about the […]

Last year my brother John gave me a copy of David McCullough’s The Great Bridge:  The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I finished some months back. It was a smashing good book in many ways.  McCullough is a superb popular historian, following finely in the footsteps of his predecessor Cornelius Ryan in […]

I’m going to have to check out Steven Johnson’s books — if they’re anything like as good as his Wall Street Journal article, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” I’m in for some great reading.  I sure didn’t know this, for example: More recently, a graduate student named Brent Constantz, working on a Ph.D. that explored […]

Today that momentous day officially becomes another year distant in history. The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan is a fine book on the subject — and is particularly good in its “books on tape” version. As an aside, two of the decisive machines of that day were the Higgins boat (officially, the Landing Craft, Vehicle, […]

It’s a worthy book for the first book post for sure:  The Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell.  It tells the story of a four-man recon/sniper team of Navy SEALs that went on a mission in Afghanistan — and only one came back alive.  Along the way you learn about how these amazing young men become […]