This Week at the Library (6/5)

Posted on May 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Once more, I have kept my head above the water and am finished with term papers and finals for this semester. I had the good luck to do research on topics I enjoyed (history of science, the Great War, and Robert G. Ingersoll), but unfortunately I was unable to give many of the very interesting books I used in the process of reading their full due here. Still, there are a few titles I’d like to pass along…

  • From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: the Royal Navy in the Fisher Era is a five-volume set covering British navy history during the Great War. I used it while writing on Germany’s use of submarines in that period. The book is incredibly detailed (there’s a reason it consists of five volumes of books, each near four hundred pages), but not dry in the way I initially suspected. I used three volumes of it (1-3) in my research. The set I had access to included generaous sea-maps in the back, tucked inside the back cover. 
  • The U-Boat Wars by Edwin P. Hoyt served me well when researching Germany’s U-boat use in the second war. The book posesses a curious format: while Hoyt generally sticks to a historical narrative, his style when recording specific battles reads like historial fiction. It’s aimed at lay readers, and included many useful tables recording the damage done by U-boats (and the damage done unto them in return). I learned that the U-boat fleet remained active throughout the war, although by ’45 technological improvements and the widespread use of destroyers implementing those improvements turned them into an irritant rather than a menace. 

In writing on the maturation of heliocentrism and its role in demythologizing the western worldview (following the contributions of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo), I drew from a few books including those I’ve read here in the past:

  • Ray Spangenburg and Diane Kit Moser’s The History of Science from the Ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution, which I read two years ago. While re-reading it for background on a general “history of science” paper, I realized heliocentrism and its naturalistic implications were steadily developed through a course of contributors, and made a thesis out of that.
  • Theories for Everything, one of my first reads here.At the time, I said that it was one of those books I wish I had in my private library. It is now. 
  • Spotting It All Started with Copernicus: how Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution by Howard Margolis justified my idea. I used it for tracking the astronomical models taught in universities: it fell right in line with my thesis, but I was too exhausted from note-taking by the time I spotted this book to give it a full scan. 

While I wrote on submarines, heliocentrism, Robert Ingersoll, and did two final exam papers for my History of Europe (1914-1945) and Gilded Age classes, I somehow got some leisure reading done. This past week, I read….

  • The Last Juror, an old favorite by John Grisham that uses the perspective of a newspaper writer and owner to track the history of a small southern town during the 1970s, ten years occupied by  Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement,  the rise of marijuana trafficking in the US, and a heinous murder. Easily the most interesting of Grisham’s works, for me.
  • Next I read another book in the Hornblower series, this time Commodore Hornblower. The good captain is forced to navigate the Baltic Sea, maintaining and building England’s anti-Napoleonic alliance. The book sees Hornblower fight on both land and sea when Napoleon invades Russia. 
  • I finally finished Hard Contact, a Star Wars novel focused on the trials of four Clone Commandos and a young padawan, who invade a planet occupied by a tyrannical overlord in an attempt to destroy a genetic virus that could be used against the Grand Army of the Republic’s clone troopers. The book maintans the humor of the video game that inspired it.
  • Lastly I read David Attenborough’s the Trials of Life, a book documenting the life of animals as they bear young, feed, grow and fight, court mates, build shelters, and work together. The book is completely fascinating and full of wonderous pictures.

Next week:

  • Plato’s Podcasts: the Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living by Mark Vernon. Has a fun title, right?
  • The Iron Heel, Jack London 
  • The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, Tenzin Gyatsao
  • Iron Coffins, Herbert Werner. 
Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Trials of Life

Posted on May 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Trials of Life: a Natural History of Animal Behavior
© 1990 Sir David Attenborough
320 pages

Following up on last week’s The Private Life of Plants, I enjoyed another of Attenborough’s books documenting the extraordinary natural world: this with a focus on the lives of animals, with chapters devoted to various elements of animals’ lives. After two initial chapters on birth and childhood, the book covers navigation, courtship, feeding, hunting, and home-making among others, not to mention separate chapters exploring the way animals interact with one enough. All sorts of beasts have their time in this book, from the smallest ants to mighty elephants. I learned that there is a caterpillar that appears to be a viper, why termite skyscrapers are neatly oriented along with the poles, that they are often home to a host of other animals besides termites, and that antlers are only temporary. Like The Private Life of Plants,  Trials of Life is replete with astonishing pictures. This is an easy recommendation.

This is a caterpillar with a tank-like shell invading the tree nest of ants. The ants can’t get under the shell, and the caterpillar uses that advantage to navigate to the ant nursery, where he lifts the shell up a bit and uses it to capture eggs. Then it feeds on the eggs while pupating.

These are honeypot ants: the little black specks are their limbs. This species uses some of its individuals to store food for hard times later on: these individuals gorge themselves on honey and swell up, spending their time hanging from the ceiling. When food is scarce, other ants will force the gorged individuals to burp up little droplets of honey.

This is a caterpillar. 
Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Hard Contact

Posted on May 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Wars Republic Commando: Hard Contact
© 2004 Karen Traviss
293 pages

A few weekends ago I finished Star Wars: Republic Commando, a particularly fun first-person shooter set during the Clone Wars, placing the character as the lead of “Delta Squad”, a band of elite soldiers tasked with the Clone Wars’ toughest assignments. I enjoyed the game immensely for its humor and style, and decided when I found that book series had been written to tie into the game that I’d like to read part of it. That’s what brought me to Hard Contact, a straightforward military science fiction story about the misson of four Clone Commandos. They are not, alas, the four Commandos I became familar with in the game, being a different squad of troops.

The commandos are tasked with eliminating a planetary despot who controls a biogenetic agent targeting the Republic’s clone army, the potential of which earned that despot a place in the Confederacy of Independent Systems’ hierarchy. Succeeding in destroying his labs and freeing the planet from his rule will earn the Republic a new planet: failure might well see the annihilation of the entire Grand Army.  The four soldiers are seperated when infiltrating the planet, and the Jedi master with whom they expected to join forces with was killed: they are left only with his woefully inexperienced and somewhat disgraced Padawan, who is on the verge of being expelled from the Jedi Order for her ineptitude. The squad must rally together against great difficulty to accomplish their goal.

Books that are purely combat rarely resonate with me and given that I didn’t see the characters I had hoped to see, this wasn’t an exception. I generally enjoyed the book, and understand the series’ appeal to other readers. I understand Delta Squad is in other books of the series: I may like those better if I’m able to gain access to them.

Photobucket

A shot from Republic Commando. (Click for full-size.) Delta 07, or “Sev”, finds Wookie architecture peculiar. 
Posted in Reviews | Tagged | 1 Comment

Teaser Tuesday (4/5)

Posted on May 4, 2010 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesdays will be with you. Always. (Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope. May the Fourth be with you, as it is with Should Be Reading)

Philosophy was about what you ate, how you had sex, where you lived. Get those choices right and think less squiffily, too, and it promised the good life. 

xxi, Plato’s Podcasts: the Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living, by Mark Vernon

(I was writing an essay on the English Reformation for my Renaissance and Reformation final during my usual T/T time. ;-))

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Commodore Hornblower

Posted on May 1, 2010 by smellincoffee

Commodore Hornblower
© 1945 C.S. Forester
384 pages

My previous reads in the Hornblower series have been through collections of the shorter works, but Commodore Hornblower is a standard novel set shortly after Captain Hornblower. Hornblower has by now distinguished himself as one of the most capable and celebrated officers in the Royal Navy through a life of service punctuated by imaginative and bold approaches to problems. Fittingly, he is promoted to commodore and given a flotilla to take into the dangerous waters of the Baltic Sea — dangerous not just for  the French ships and pirates prowling about, but for Hornblower’s nebulous mission that will certainty involve diplomacy. Napoleon Bonaparte is nearly emperor of Europe, having composed a Grand Army filled with soldiers from subject nations. Only Britain’s navy and Spain’s guerrillas oppose the Corsican’s ambitions, and he is now moving that army in the direction of Russia to effect its coercion. The loyalty of the Baltic nations may shift suddenly as Napoleon presses on, and Hornblower is tasked with responding to potentially changing diplomatic conditions on behalf of the British empire.

While he isn’t attempting to prevent Britain from becoming wholly diplomatically isolated, Hornblower must still fight the French along the coasts. When Napoleon makes good his threat and invades Russia, Hornblower and his men must lend succor to the besieged city of Riga and do all they can to bolster resistance against the continent’s would-be master. I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as I have previous Hornblower novels, with the exception of the novel’s beginning and its diplomatic intrigue. Being a history student, I enjoyed seeing Forester’s foreshadowing. He also alludes to the world of 1945, using characters’ backstories relating to Napoleon’s rise to hint to readers that history is repeating itself.

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Last Juror

Posted on April 29, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Last Juror
© 2004 John Grisham
355 pages

As [Padgitt] was about to step out of the witness box and return to the defense table, he suddenly turned to the jury and said something that stunned the courtroom. His face wrinkled into pure hatred, and he jabbed his right index finger into the air. “You convict me,” he said, “and I’ll get every damned one of you.”
“Baliff!” Judge Loopus said as he grabbed for his gravel. “That’s enough, Mr. Padgitt.”
“Every damned one of you!” Danny repeated, louder. 

If you forced me to choose a favorite John Grisham work, I could manage to choose The Last Juror with some conviction. Not whole conviction, mind you, for I’m prone to picking up  my well-thumbed copy of The Rainmaker and reading a chapter at random. The two works, probably not coincidently both written in the first person, constantly jockey in my mind for first place. Like many of Grisham’s works, The Last Juror‘s background plot takes place within the realm of law, as a small Mississippi town is shaken by the rape and murder of a young woman in full view of her children. The prime suspect is Danny Padgitt, a young member of the Padgitt crime family, a secretive and close-knit clan of bootleggers, car thieves, and drug dealers who operate from a small island formed by a near-circular bend in the Mississippi river. Unlike Grisham’s other works, the main character is only a spectator to the trial. His name is Willie Traynor, and he’s a 23-year old lapsed university student who has acquired the bankrupt local paper through a rich aunt. Traynor is interested in turning the weekly newspaper into a goldmine, and the shocking trial provides an instant boon in his first few months as owner and publisher.

The Last Juror is  notable for its setting and scope: while other Grisham works take place within the span of a few months, The Last Juror spans an entire decade — and that decade happens to be the 1970s, the era of Vietnam, Nixon, and Civil Rights.  While the dramatic murder trial’s lasting effect on the town provides the overall plot, the substance in between its appearances makes the book special for me, for Grisham  explores the development of a small town in this tumultous period from the perspective of an outsider (Traynor is from Memphis, which makes him a ‘northerner’ in his readers’ eyes). Grisham uses the timeframe to comment on the culture and history of the rural south from the viewpoint of a local newspaper: religion, politics, funerals, football culture, the response to segregation,the  rise of big box stores, and the like all receive Traynor’s curious attention and amused, concerned, or affectionate commentary. The book is in a way a loving tribute (and a mild roasting) to Grisham’s childhood background. This is the book that made me curious about the effects of chain stores on local economies, for instance. A ten-year span also provides plenty of time for character development, as Traynor ages and becomes part of the town’s fabric of interesting characters. The town is, by the way, Clanton — a favorite setting of Grisham’s, set in his often-visited and fictional Ford County. Characters from other books (Harry Rex Vonner and Lucien Wilbanks from A Time to Kill, most notably) appear, sometimes extensively and sometimes only as part of the background.

The Last Juror for me is the most interesting of Grisham’s works for its novelty: none of his other works are like this. As much as I like The Rainmaker, it is at its essence only a legal thriller like much of his other works. The Last Juror is commentary on ten years of the history and culture of a small southern town, breaking from Grisham’s typical formula and an easy reccommendation to those who are familar with Grisham’s legal thrillers but who have tired of them, or who have never really experienced his works.

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Private Life of Plants

Posted on April 28, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Private Life of Plants
© 1995 David Attenborough
320 pages

I spend a little time every week contemplating my home library’s eviscerated science section, hoping against hope to find some interesting volume amid the remains. Last week, picking through the rubble led me to Sir David Attenborough’s excellent The Private Life of Plants, a book in the same style as his numerous nature documentaries (The Lives of Mammals, Planet Earth, and others).  Separate chapters discuss transportation, feeding and growth, flowering, the social struggle, the relationships plants have with one another and various animals, and surviving. In each section, Attenborough  documents the extraordinary details of plant’s every-day lives. The narrative is replete with pictures — no page is without one, and some pages are dominated by full-page   or even centerfold spreads.  The content is ever fascinating and sometimes bizarre. I learned, for instance, that there is a species of jellyfish that house algae inside their transparent bodies: they spend the day near the surface of the ocean allowing the algae to grow, and then partially digest the growth without destroying the algae. In effect, they have garden inside their bodies. If you find this book, by all means take a look at it. It’s bound to be one of the more interesting books on the natural world you’ve yet seen.

This is part of a series of books by Attenborough, which you can expect I’ll be visiting further.They appear to have been converted from film documentaries.

One of the book’s many fascinating pictures. That husk houses a seed.

Posted in Reviews, science | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

This Week at the Library (28/4)

Posted on April 28, 2010 by smellincoffee

This week at the library…

I began with Young Hornblower, a collection of three Hornblower novels set during Horatio Hornblower’s early career. C.S. Forester’s novels are fast-paced naval adventures with plenty of variety, often including political intrigue and shore-side missions. I’ll be continuing in the series.

I re-read John Grisham’s The Brethren accidentally, having picked it up with no intention of reading it through wholly. Brethren is one of Grisham’s extra-legal works, involving plenty of politics when an extortion racket run by three imprisoned judges nets the CIA’s hand-picked presidential candidate.

I next read a Star Wars novel, Tatooine Ghost, set early in the extended universe — early enough that Thrawn is a simple ship commander assigned to procure an object from a Tatooine auction. This object, a rare surviving artifact from Alderaan that contains a chip with the New Republic’s communications protocol, cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of the Empire. Leia Organa and Han Solo labor to prevent the painting from being captured while at the same time Organa struggles with her father’s legacy.

Although academic concerns have kept me too busy to offer full comments on it yet, I also read Sir David Attenborough’s The Private Lives of Plants, an excellent documentary-in-a-book that I expect to share in full tomorrow.

Pick of the Week: The Private Lives of Plants.

Quotation of the Week: “I must remind you of one salutary regulation of the navy, to the effect that no junior officer can challenge his superior to a duel. The reasons for it are obvious — otherwise promotion would be too easy.” p. 31, Young Hornblower.

Upcoming Reads:

  • I’m trying to read Republic Commando: Hard Contact by Karen Traviss because of my affection for the game that inspired it. We’ll see what becomes of that.
  • Commodore Hornblower by C.S. Forester. I’d like to continue reading about young Hornblower, but I wanted to see what becomes of the good captain’s relationship with a certain noblewoman.
  • The Iron Heel, by Jack London. I’ve read The Call of the Wild, and London’s one of those authors on my “Read More From” list. From appearances, it’s an alternative history novel that for London would have been set in the future and which depicts drastic political changes in the US.
  • The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World by Tenzin Gyatso, since I enjoyed the original book so much. 
  • Annnnnd Iron Coffins, which I started last summer but never finished. I’m writing a paper on German submarine strategy and thought I might use it as a primary source, it being the memoirs of a WW2 U-boat captain.  Whether I do or do not, it was shaping up to be interesting.

 

Posted in Reviews | Tagged | Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesday (27-4)

Posted on April 27, 2010 by smellincoffee

Oh, shame! I’ve been too occupied with being bedridden and working on papers to actually read this past week*, but here’s a teaser from one of my favorite books.

“Did they really try to burn down the paper?”

“Yes, they did,” I said, wondering if I’d heard this black lady in rural Mississippi just say that her first language was Italian.

(p. 66, The Last Juror by John Grisham)
*I have book comments forthcoming, but academics have been rather demanding. Still, the worst will be over by Thursday night.
Posted in Reviews | Tagged | 3 Comments

Tatooine Ghost

Posted on April 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

Tatooine Ghost 
© 2003 Troy Denning
416 pages

Tatooine Ghost is set early in the expanded universe, focusing on Leia and Han in their first year of marriage. Mon Montha of the New Republic has sent the newlyweds to Tatooine, where a unique painting – the lone survivor of an Alderaanean art form known as ‘moss painting’ – has surfaced in an auction. While Leia – who saw the painting every day in her childhood home – places great sentimental value in the artifact, buried within it is the key to the New Republic’s communications protocol concerning military and intelligence operations. Leia must prevent the painting from falling into the hands of the Empire while simultaneously confronting her father’s presence on Tatooine.

    Tying into events of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith*,  Tatooine Ghost sees Leia and Han infiltrate the auction under heavy disguise. The book would be short indeed if Leia was able to obtain the painting merely by bidding for it, and in no time at all grenades are thrown and our happy couple – along with Chewbacca, Threepio, Artoo, and a few minor characters from the original trilogy who knew Leia’s father as a little boy on Tatooine – are forced to chase the painting across the sands of Tatooine in a manner reminiscent of the Empire’s attempt to recover its Death Star plans in A New Hope. As Leia begins to experience her father’s past – to talk with his friends, to visit his home and familiar haunts – she is forced to come to terms with the legacy of her father, particularly in light of the fact that she is beginning to experience the Force which he served and which corrupted him. 

I lost interest in the main plot early on, being more interested in Leia’s reckoning. Portends of the extended universe’s history abound: the imperial officer heading the Imperial search for the painting just ‘happens’ to have red eyes set against blue skin. Although I thought the search for the painting was a bit derivative of A New Hope, I enjoyed the book overall given the emphasis on Leia’s character growth.

*The book was published in 2003, yet references events (Shmi’s abduction and torture at the hands of Sand People, Anakin’s retaliation and graveside confession)  that only took place in a movie not released until 2005. I’m not sure how that happened.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment