Category: Books

As you can tell from the ‘What I’m Reading’ block in the right column of my blog, I don’t read a lot of fiction. Most often my reading tastes tend towards history, biography, politics and current events. And so when recently home in California on vacation, despite having packed a few books, I was glad to accept a recommendation offered by each of my parents to read Orbit by John J. Nance.

The premise is that sometime in the near future, private space travel has continued to advance in the direction already started by SpaceShipOne in 2004. Kip Dawson, a pharmeceutical company executive in a troubled marriage and some issues with his son, thinks he’s scored a dream getaway when he wins a contest for a ride into orbit offered as a promotion gimmick by American Space Adventures. And so it begins. But shortly after arriving in space, a micrometeor pierces the ship, kills the pilot, and knocks out all communications. And Kip finds himself a castaway in Orbit, knowing that he will run out of air in five days.

No spoilers there, you can get that much from the book jacket. The book goes back and forth between Kip’s thoughts and actions as he deals with his looming demise and the scant hope of any happy ending for him. While back on Earth, the world follows his story with the fascination that is always paid to such human tragedies as babies who fall in wells, or miners trapped underground. It was a good read, a fast read, and an entertaining read. A good summer book, thanks for suggesting it Mom & Pop!

My brother sent me this book by T. Coraghessan Boyle, a fine author that he introduced me to years ago (Thanks Kevin!). The Inner Circle is a fictionalized account of the life, research and relationships of famed sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey. The story, told from the point of view of a former student who is hired by Kinsey to help conduct his research, provides a glimpse at what it must have been like to be a member of Kinsey’s staff, and a member of his ‘Inner Circle’.

The book led me to dig deeper. The movie Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson as Professor Kinsey, and the PBS American Experience documentary by the same name, were each good follow-ons to watch.

Despite its universal importance to the survival of our species, and the extra bonus that it’s also great fun, the taboos we wrap around ‘sex’ confront us daily. Some may be reasonable, and many are not. The Inner Circle was a good read, and a fascinating look at a man who tried to tear down some of these taboos, and the consequences that can accompany such efforts.

You’d really have to be asleep at the wheel these days to not be aware of fears about the eventual certainty of a major flu pandemic. Like the coming of ‘The Big One’ earthquake that will rock California, or the rumblings of a volcano we know is gonna blow… predictions of a coming Killer Flu are not offered as a question of ‘IF’, but a matter of ‘WHEN’. Just yesterday the White House issued an Implementation Plan for our National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.

So watcha gonna do about it? I figured reading a book about the last big flu pandemic was as good an idea as any. When author John Barry undertook to write about the 1918 Flu pandemic, the avian virus H5N1 wasn’t yet news. The 1997 outbreak that year in Hong Kong killed six of eighteen infected people. In addition to the accidental timeliness of his topic, Barry also realized that to tell the story of 1918, he’d have to provide some history on the overall state of medicine in the United States in the years leading up to it. And the thing is, it was pretty atrocious. But thanks to the leadership of a handful of medical pioneers such as William Henry Welch and the institutions they founded such at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, medicine in America was quickly catching up with Europe.And there was some other pretty significant underlying history involved in the 1918 flu pandemic as well, and that was World War I. Young healthy men were being trained as soldiers, in crowded camps, and being sent to fight in the trenches of Europe. And their gathering and movement provider carriers to deliver the influenza virus across the country and around the world.

This is a scary story. Somewhere between 50 – 100 million people lost their lives to the 1918 flu outbreak. And uncharacteristically, it was the young and healthy who most frequently suffered a fatal outcome, dying as a result of their own body’s overwhelming response to the virus. People woke up feeling fine, and dropped dead within hours. Death was fast and prevalent, information was unavailable or misleading, fear ruled.

History repeats itself, again and again. It’s often horrible. You can ignore it, or learn from it. Time will tell which we’ve done.

In his book The Courage of Their Convictions, author Peter Irons seeks to remove the “masks of the law” that covers the faces and the stories of individuals who have taken a stand on an issue and fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. The book examines sixteen different cases with two chapters devoted to each; the first chapter covering the history of the case, and another chapter in which the the individuals behind the case tell their own stories. The cases span five decades and cover four major issue areas; religion, race, protest and privacy.

Not all of the individuals in the book won at the Supreme Court. Some saw victory come to later cases that followed their own, and others have not. In Lilliam Gobitis v. Minersville School District, for example, the court’s ruling that the school district could compel a student to salute the flag was overturned just three years later. In other cases, such as those that relate to a woman’s right to choose, or against state sodomy laws, individual rights remain subject to the current makeup of the court, and national levels of tolerance in general.

I knew I would enjoy this book from the preface, in which the author shared a quote from the poet e.e. cummings’ poem, “i sing of Olaf glad and big“, in which Olaf the Conscientious Objector declares, “there is some shit I will not eat”. In the poem, Olaf dies in prison for his protest. His real-life counterparts are many. This book tells the story of just a few, who took a stand for their beliefs, often at great personal risks over the course of many years, because they likewise were served some shit they refused to eat. These often anonymous Americans have played an important part in defining and protecting the rights that characterize us as Americans. This book was an informative and enjoyable read that I’d recommend to anyone.

Last September I read a book called What’s God Got to Do With It? that introduced me to the life and writings of Robert Ingersoll, a famous politician and orator of the late 1800s who was an advocate of secular government and a leader among those who described themselves as Freethinkers.

I enjoyed that book very much, and started searching for more on the same subject matter. Ingersoll left a voluminous written legacy, and I considered digging more deeply into his works. But my searching led to to a broader view of the subject that appealed to me, Freethinkers; A History of American Secularism.

Everywhere you look in America today, the religious-right is working to inject religion into government. George’s Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and efforts to teach “Intelligent Design” in classrooms, are but a few examples.

Frequently, proponents of such change argue that attempts to separate church and state go much farther than our founding father’s originally intended. Freethinkers is a fascinating history of that reveals what a monumental accomplishment it was for America’s founders too succeed at creating a secular government, and traces the role of freethought through wartime, the woman’s and civil rights movements, and up to the present day, that I heartily recommend to anyone.

My reading comes and goes in spurts. Sometimes I’ll tear through books quickly, and sometimes life’s distractions just won’t allow me the time that I rather be spending reading. My pile of books ‘on deck’ is growing higher.

And because I don’t get as much reading time as I’d like, I really don’t like it when I’ve wasted any of it. If I start a book, I’m gonna finish the book. But not this time.

I wanted to read the book Wicked in anticipation of seeing the musical while it’s in Washington. But the musical is sold out, and the book has bored me to tears. I got a little more than halfway through it before admitting defeat. I wanted to like this book, and the idea of a prequel to give background to The Wizard of OZ had real appeal to me. But it just never grabbed me. So I’m setting this one aside to move onto other volumes.

To the person who bought the book by following the Amazon link on my site, well, I hope you like it better than I did. And thanks for the 51 cents referral fee.

I’ve been paying closer attention to The Constitution lately. It’s an amazing document that sits at the core of our Democracy and the rights that distinguish us as Americans. Yet at the same time it is a political football, under constant threat of revision to score political points (Help, my marriage is being threatened by gays, please alter the Constitution to defend it!), and subject to interpretation by a changing and fallible judiciary. But through it all, the essentials endure. Or so I thought until last year, when I discovered that my home-buying decision had required me to sign away a Constitutionally protected right.

Floyd Abrams‘ career has taken place in the legal trenches where the grand ideas of Constitutional protections come face to face with the more complicated circumstances of real life. In his book, Speaking Freely, Abrams describes in fascinating detail a variety of 1st Amendment related cases he has argued in court; from The Pentagon Papers case early in his career, a number of media-related libel cases, then-Mayor Guiliani’s attempt to shut down a Brooklyn Museum of Art over an exhibit, to the fight against Campaign Finance Reform.

Somewhere inside me there’s a frustrated lawyer wanting to get out. I am fascinated by the law, its use, abuse, and those who practice it. Even I was a little surprised how much I enjoyed reading these tales of sometimes arcane details of various lawsuits related to free speech. Let’s face it, this doesn’t have the sensationalism of an O.J. Simpson trial. But the the consequences to all Americans on how these fights are settled can be profound. I expect most Americans would say that the Freedom of Speech is a good thing, and rightly so. But things can get sticky when some test that right by actually using it.

I’ve decided it’s not enough to maintain a ‘What I’m Reading’ block as I do on my blog, and not make some better effort to offer some thoughts about the books after I have read them. And so, I’m going to try and do that now.

And the first of the newly regular book reviews will be Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I didn’t start reading Harry Potter books until well after the third one. Only after they had become the phenomenon that they are did I decide I needed to get caught up and find out what the fuss was all about. Having finished the latest, I’m all caught up again. My problem is my lack of any memory. Unlike my daughter, the Potter Encyclopedia, I can’t recount the details of the previous books as if I just read them, and so I struggle like a muggle to recollect what for Harry happened just the previous year, but that I read five years ago.

But even with that handicap, Harry remains an easy and fun read. Harry’s growing up, and has become a BWOC (Big Wizard on Campus – duh), and so is struggling with increased work and responsibility at school; tougher classes and being captain of his Quiddich team, the burden of having been labeled ‘The Chosen One’ who prophecy and previous experience says is destined for some epic battles to come, the attention and training that Hogwarts Headmaster Dumbledore gives him, and the fact that he’s matured enough to start noticing girls, not just any girl… Harry fancies his best friend’s sister. (I will resist the obvious temptation to insert any joke related to a wand in Harry’s pants here… better I don’t read such thoughts into children’s books).

All in all, I was a bit let-down by this book. To me it felt like it was all build-up, with little payoff. Obviously, with two books promised still in the series, it’s really just a chapter along the way in a bigger story. But the big news of this one… a major character dying, didn’t provide a satisfying ending. For any reader who’s gotten this far in the Potter books, you really can’t NOT read it, right? Just be prepared for this book to be a set-up with a big fat “To Be Continued…” at the end of it and hope for better in volume six.