| The Botany of Desire - by Michael Pollan - 2001 |
"Pollan focuses on the relationship between humans and four specific plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes."
says one of the many positive reviews at amazon.com. It sounds like a boring and dull book but it isn't. You'll
never eat another McDonald's french fry again without thinking of how they grow the potatoes! The history of
marijuna and how it is grown around the world, especially in Holland, is eye opening.
|
|
| Carnivorous Nights - On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger Margart Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson - Villard Books 2005 |
This is the tale of three adventurers from New York city visiting Tasmania searching for the Thalacine or Tasmainian Tiger
that many belive is extinct since 1930. Alexis Rodman is an artist and the book is illustrated with many of his animal paintings
made from paints mixed with animal scat and other strange ingredients.
The animals in Tasmania are found no place else on earth - it is almost like visiting an alien world. There is a DNA cloning
project under way to recreate the Thalacine from a tiger pup pickled in alcohol. The culture down there is "tiger" obsessed
and many have looked long and hard but no undeniable evidence has been found that the Thalacine still exists. The
adventures and descriptions of the local characters, the wild life and the weird natural environment in Tasmania serves
to take you away from everyday life in the suburbs. What a trip!
1933 Thalacine Black and White movie of the last one.
|
|
| What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff ©2005 |
An eclectic rambling history by anecdote of the characters that populated the early days of software
and hardware development for the new toy of the age - the computer. I enjoyed it because I grew up
in this age, attended a compiler course at Stanford where much of this story takes place, and I
have attended talks given by some of the characters and still read Dr. Dobb's Journal of Compter Calethenics
and Orthodontia. Drugs, anti-war demonstrations, the first GUI, the invention of the Mouse, and a cast of hundreds
of well known and unknown characters make this an interesting story. There is a lot of very funny stuff
as well some very serious reflection on the turmoil of the 1960's. Some early technology like the video
projector described below shows how amazingly far we have come in just a few decades.
"English was the one who had tracked down the remarkable Eidaphor video projector for the demonstration. On loan from NASA, and with the blessing of Bob Taylor at ARPA, the Eidaphor was the only technology that could create the kind of effect that Engelbart had in mind. It was a six-foot-high cabinet that used a blindingly intense arc light, bouncing it off a concave mirror to make a bright, 875-line video projection. The fact that the device drew each frame by forming an image with an electron beam in a sheet of oil that was repeatedly wiped away by a windshield wiper made the feat only more remarkable."
|
|
| The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart ©2004 |
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Maybe it is just me, I relish Scientific American and
as an engineer and I have always been interested in technology and its history.
This book made me feel like I was working with Walton and Cockcroft under Rutherford
at the famous Cavendish labs in England as they toiled to build a proton accelerator
to smash the nucleus before other labs could beat them with cyclotrons and Van de Graf
generators. It was an exciting race. It explains how to build a rectifier for 700kv out
of huge hand made vacuum tubes. All the big names in early quantum mechanics make an
appearance. The politics, the challenges, etc. I highly recommend it. |
|
| Silent Victory by Clay Blair |
The complete history of US Submarines in WW 2 against the Japanese. It is
a mission by mission account. It complements Clay's two volume set on
Hitler's U-Boat War. |
 |
| Blood Stained Sea by Michael G. Welling 2004 |
Describes the work of the U.S. Coast Guard during WW II. This was mostly
escorting convoys in the icy waters of the North Atlantic during 1941-1944. You
may get a bit bored by one numbered convoy after another being decimated by U boat
wolf packs in wretched cold miserable weather. I enjoyed
it but then I have read all the U Boat submarine stories too. I especially
enjoyed the reference to the "sturdy tugboat Foundation Franklin" which came out to
salvage a torpedoed frighter. This tugboat is chronicled in Farley Mowat's book "The Grey Seas Under",
one of my favorite books of all time.
|
|
| The Grey Seas Under by Farley Mowat |
Describes the adventures of the coal burning sea going rescue tug Foundation Franklin
during the 1940's.
It is one of my favorite books of all time. Farley is a wonderful writer and the
stories of salvaging distressed vessels in terrible storms in the North Sea
are riveting.
|
|