Nonfiction Book Reviews

Okay, first off, I just wanted to say I have never read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  I have heard that A Brief History of Time is supposed to be the more technical book out of the two, whereas the The Universe in a Nutshell is geared towards people who are not first and foremost scientists.

It is for that reason that I don’t envision myself ever reading A Brief History of Time, since I hardly understood The Universe in a Nutshell.  Here is an example of a mind-bending point that Hawking makes in Universe:

Yang-Mills theory is an extension of Maxwell theory that describes interactions in two other forces called the weak and strong nuclear forces.  However, ground state fluctuations have a much more serious effect in a quantum theory of gravity.  Again, each wavelength would have a ground state energy.  Since there is no limit to how short the wavelengths of the Maxwell field can be, there are an infinite number of different wavelengths in any region of spacetime and an infinite amount of ground state energy.  Because energy density is, like matter, a source of gravity, this infinite energy density ought to mean there is enough gravitational attraction in the universe to curl spacetime into a single point, which obviously hasn’t happened.
~The Universe in a Nutshell, page 46.

Obviously.

I should confess: My last science class was in the 10th grade, where I took biology.  I’m not exactly a science expert.  But if I understand right, I’m just the type of person Hawking was trying to target with this book - someone interested in science and wanting to learn more about the deeper principles and ideas being explored, but who doesn’t have a PhD in anything, let alone theoretical physics.  (I didn’t realize until I started adding links to that sentence, how many book reviews I’ve written on here about books on science, as compared to books about art [Art books reviewed: 0.]  You can tell what I am really interested in.)

In Hawking’s defense, these ideas are extraordinarily complicated, and that’s not exactly his fault.  I can’t imagine a harder task than trying to explain quantum physics to your average Joe, and that’s what Hawking was attempting to do.

I do give him kudos for sprinkling humor throughout the book.  He talks about bets that he’s made with other scientists on obscure scientific theories, added lots of drawings with little green men in them, and then topped it all off with dry humor comments that added spice to the book.  Here’s an example:

It would be possible to detect the radiation from much smaller and hotter black holes, but there don’t seem to be many of them around.  That is a pity.  If one were discovered, I would get a Nobel Prize.
~The Universe in a Nutshell, page 120.

Oh shucks.  If only there were more black holes in our general vicinity.

I read on Amazon that some people were upset with how much Hawking “dumbed down” the science, and wrote scathing remarks that if you knew anything about science, you could just skip this book because nothing in it would be new.  Apparently, I know less than nothing about science (no surprise there).

In the end, I give The Universe in a Nutshell 4 stars out of 5.  If you’re really into this kind of thing, and have the patience to try to unravel some of the theories that Hawking presents, then by all means, enjoy.  There is a lot of information to digest here, if you have the grits and determination to do it.  I liked learning what I could from it, but I doubt I’ll pick it up again.

Hava

PS If you are a fan of all things science like I am, make sure to check out a blogger in the Today.com network who also happens to be a rocket scientist.  Her blog rocks, and is not only informative, but very funny. Hi Stephanie!

There is an old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope proves it.

Here’s the lowdown:

A busload of college students were driving home from doing banquet work in another city when they were struck by a truck, killing five out of the nine people inside. One of the survivors, Laura Van Ryn, was thrown 50 feet and it was touch and go for a while as to whether she’d live or not.  She lapsed into a deep coma, and the family had no idea if she’d ever wake up.

Five weeks come and go, and Laura slowly made progress.  Finally, she’s in good enough shape to start talking coherently, and do things like eating, exercising, etc.  As a part of the therapy, the physical therapist asked Laura to write her name. She scrawled across the page:

W-H-I-T-N-E-Y

Turns out, in the car wreck, there were two girls who didn’t know each other very well, but who looked strangely similar. The purse for Laura Van Ryn landed next to Whitney Cerak, and the first responders to the scene took one look at the driver’s license and identified Whitney as being Laura.

So Whitney’s family had a funeral (closed casket - the parents never looked at their daughter’s body upon their own request), gave away her clothing, and in general did their best to move on, all while their daughter was really in a hospital room in a deep coma.

And then there were Laura’s parents, loving and caring for someone who they thought was their daughter, and when they noticed small anomalies like her teeth being different, they attributed it all to the accident. “The force of the accident must have pushed her teeth that way,” they told themselves.

When Laura mumbled, “False parents” and pointed to her dad, her dad got huffy and thought, “False! I put you through college and have loved you and fed you and done everything I could for you. Why are you calling me a false dad?”

It wasn’t until Whitney became mentally quicker and more agile did the truth come out. It was confirmed with dental records. That day, the family of the Van Ryn’s went home to grieve the death of their daughter, and the Ceraks were called to find out that their daughter was raised from the dead.

Overall, it was one of the most interesting stories I think I have ever heard. It’s an amazing testament to the human mind, where an entire family could spend five weeks with a complete stranger they had never met, and yet believe the entire time that it was their daughter.

So yes, it was an interesting story, but for anyone who is not a born-again Christian, the book will make you uncomfortable. Both families are born-again Christians - both fathers work as pastors. The daughters were both going to a Christian college. Every page has some reference to scriptures, singing gospel songs, praying, etc. The entire book revolves around giving praise to Jesus, having a relationship with Jesus, praying to Jesus…You get the picture.

So if you’re born-again Christian, you’ll absolutely love this book. It will be an affirmation of your testimony, and you’ll come away from it with a stronger faith than ever.

If you’re another religion, or atheist, I suggest you skip this book. The constant references to Jesus will be too big of a distraction for you to enjoy it.

I give Mistaken Identity 4 out of 5 stars. The writing style was a bit simplistic and it didn’t end up being one of my favorites, but it certainly had an interesting plotline.

Hava

PS In case you’re in the mood for some real fiction, make sure to check out a fellow Today.com blog called Fiction Book Blog.  It’s written by a coworker of mine from my local library - when he found out that you could write about books and get paid for it, he got excited and asked for the website address to apply.  Now, he’s covering the other end of the spectrum: Fiction.  If you want variety in your reviews, you couldn’t ask for a better complement to my blog than his.

Sleeping with a Stranger: How I Survived Marriage to a Child Molester by Patricia Wiklund was filed in the 921’s section at the library, which for the non-librarians out there, means that it was labeled as an autobiography.  I saw it while doing check-in (of course - that’s happy hour for a bookaholic like me) and thought that it would be along the lines of A Child Called It, where the author would talk about her life in general, and in particular, what happened in her marriage to the child molester.

That was not at all what the book was.  I’m thinking seriously of asking the library to relabel and categorize it, because it shouldn’t be counted as a 921 at all, but instead a self-help book focused on wives whose husbands are child molesters.

Patricia Wiklund talks about what happened in her own marriage in fairly generic details from page 3 - 14 (the first chapter of the book).  The entire rest of the book is spent quoting other women who went through the same thing she did, talking about the different theories of whether a child molester really can be “cured” or not, and how to work through the whole thing if you’re a spouse of a child molester.

Very occasionally, she’d mention something that’d happened in her own life (this would last for a whole paragraph - maybe!) and then she was back to focusing on others.

I don’t think I would have minded this, if I had known that was what this book was going to be about.  Of course in that case, I wouldn’t have picked it up at all, because I’ve never dealt with child molestation on a personal level - I have no reason to learn how to deal with being married to a child molester, obviously.

While reading it, I didn’t know that was what the book was going to be like, and I kept waiting (in vain) for the author to focus on her own story again.  I read to the end (skimming in parts, I’ll admit) and it never happened.  It was a self-help book, focused on the spouses of child molesters.  Period.

If this is something that you are personally dealing with, then I’d highly recommend this book to you.  I think you’ll find it invaluable, because I don’t personally know of other books focused on this same subject - this is a pretty specialized subject.

Otherwise, I’d skip the book.  There’s not much to interest someone who isn’t dealing with this issue themselves.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Havs

I have mixed feelings about Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar. It was a very hard book for me to get into, and in fact, I put it down for a month and didn’t touch it at all. I just couldn’t force myself to read it.

It’s the story of Sandeep Jauhar, whose older brother was a doctor, and whose parents wanted him to be a doctor too. Sandeep didn’t want to be a doctor because he was ill-suited for the profession (he was a thinker, not a doer - his words - and he also didn’t like blood). He also didn’t want to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to be a doctor.  Mature, I know.  It only gets worse.

So he got a PhD in Physics instead, which at the end of his schooling, he promptly decided that he didn’t want to be a physicist. So then he did nothing.

A few months later, he decided that he wanted to be a doctor (he’s not even sure why - he just decided to do it) and when he told his parents, they were understandably upset with him because this meant years of more schooling, and he was rather late getting to the game, not to mention all the money he had spent on his last doctorate degree.

Instead of letting that deter him, he said that his parents not wanting him to do it solidified his decision because apparently the only thing he wanted to do was what his parents didn’t want him to do.

Do you see why this book absolutely drove me crazy? He was indecisive, immature, and making huge mistakes for the heck of it, as far as I could tell.

So against his parents wishes, he enrolled in school yet again, this time to become a doctor. He gets through three years of school, and then becomes an intern at the New York City Hospital, where he promptly hates his life. He hates being a doctor, he isn’t good at it, he doesn’t really like the medicine world, and he doesn’t ever want to learn anything more than what he absolutely has to. A doctor was trying to explain the difference between two different kinds of medicine, and Sandeep basically said he didn’t give a darn.

All of this made me pretty frustrated with the book.  I went to Amazon at one point to look at the ratings for it, and was shocked to see it getting 4 and 5 star ratings.  Was someone reading a different book than I was? So far, there had been little to recommend it.

I decided to give it another 50 pages, which would have brought me to just over halfway through the book. If it didn’t turn around by then, I was giving it up for good. Perhaps it was going to be another Hope’s Boy, where I just never saw why other people liked it.

I hit the end of the 50 pages, and just kept going. It finally, finally started getting good. He started doing better at his job - caring about the patients more, having a better attitude about getting things done, and wanting to learn more about medicine instead of skating by with whatever he could get away with.

His second year, when he became a junior resident, went much better for him, and the book took a definite turn for the better. It was thoroughly interesting to me to see how difficult the field of medicine really is. The quality of life debate was a huge theme in this book - the doctors were able to keep someone alive, but at what cost? Should someone really be kept on life support when there was no chance of them getting better?

And what about patients who purposefully chose the choice that in the end would kill them? He had a patient who loved to eat, but when he swallowed, the food would sometimes end up in his lungs. Eating was literally killing him. But the patient loved to eat so much that not being allowed to eat was killing him too. Should the doctors allow him to eat, even when that choice meant eventual death?

Anyone who has spent a lot of time in a hospital being treated for a serious disease like cancer or leukemia would relate to Sandeep’s discussions of whether the cure really was better than just letting the disease run its course. Sometimes, the doctors would stop administering to a patient because they had given up all hope of curing him, and as soon as that happened, the patient would miraculously start to get better.  Sometimes the best medicine was to simply get out of the way of the body’s natural ability to heal itself, which Sandeep discusses quite often.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is chronically ill, or who has a loved one who is chronically ill. I think they would relate to much of what Sandeep talks about.  I would also recommend it to anyone looking at going into medicine as a career. But if you don’t have a whole lot of interest in hospitals, medicine, or doctors, skip this one. There would be better memoirs out there to read.

Overall, I’d have to give 4 out of 5 stars. I liked the writing style and I enjoyed the patient stories, but the book just took too long to get good.

Hava

A Brother’s Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse by Richard B Pelzer was a very difficult memoir for me to read.  The abuse described in this book made me sick to my stomach.  I’d read his brother’s memoir, A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer, back in high school and remember crying - sobbing really - because of what happened to him.  Richard’s memoir affected me as deeply as Dave’s had.

If you haven’t read A Child Called It, I would say that’s almost a must before reading Brother.  Richard pretty much just jumps into the story with very little explanation - it’s almost as if it’s a sequel to Child.  Reading them one right after another might be a bit much to stomach, however, because they are both so darn depressing.

For the few people who haven’t heard of A Child Called It or A Brother’s Journey, basically what happened is Dave and Richard grew up in California in the ’70s, and were subjected to intense abuse by their mother. When Dave was a part of the family, he was called It or or sometimes That Boy when someone was feeling nice that day. Eventually, the state came and took Dave away. Once Dave left, Richard became the de facto whipping boy, literally.

The mother was unstable, completely unbalanced mentally, and a horrid drunk to boot. She was regularly wasted by 10 in the morning, and sometimes woke up still drunker than a skunk because of how much alcohol she’d consumed the day before. The father was terrified of his wife, and stayed married to her until the day he died, even though he moved out of the house when Richard was still just a young boy.  The mother is a monster, and that’s the nicest thing I can think of to say about her.

One thing that bothered me about A Brother’s Journey is that the story ends when Richard is only 15 years old. I felt like the author had intentionally cut the story in half (after all, he’s still living with his mother and brothers at this point - there is no Great Escape like there was at the end of Child) in order to write another book and make twice the money on the same story. Sure enough, after finishing this book, I did a Google search and saw that there is a sequel, A Teenager’s Journey. I don’t know if I want to read that one or not.

Overall, this was a hard book to read - I felt physically sick to my stomach during parts of it. I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars

Hava

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Anthony Flew was definitely written by a philosopher.  I guess I was expecting too much, I don’t know, but this book was a struggle for me to read the first time around (I’d originally read it several months ago, and then decided to reread it yesterday so I could write a review on here.)  Not surprisingly, it made more sense the second time around.  I’ve never been a big fan of “deep mysteries” where you ask philosophical questions that don’t actually have an answer.  That’s too nebulous for me.  I think philosophy and I don’t get along for the same reason that I’m not a big fan of poetry - I like concrete facts and things that I can categorize in my mind, or at least understand, lol.

Here’s a quotation from the book that left me scratching my head:

“Perhaps the most important and wide-ranging of these insights was that we must become constantly and crisply conscious of how all philosophy (insofar as philosophy is a conceptual inquiry) must be concerned with correct verbal usage.  We can have no access to concepts except through study of linguistic usage, and hence, the use of those words through which these concepts are expressed.” Page 38, There is a God

If you enjoyed that (or even understood that!) you should definitely check out the Journeyman Philosopher here at Today - I think you’d enjoy that site.

For me, that didn’t make much sense. I struggled through the middle of the book (the beginning was written in plain English, and the end wasn’t too bad either - it was the middle where he started explaining his philosophical beliefs that just completely lost me.)  I was almost to the point of giving up when it started to get good again: He started to explain the things that made him change his point of view on atheism, and he did it using language I could understand.

One of the most interesting parts was on page 75 - 78, where he talks about the work done by Gerry Schroeder to disprove the “monkey typing” explanation.  We’ve all heard it: Lock a group of monkeys in a cage and give them computers, and if they banged on the keyboards long enough, they’d eventually be able to produce a sonnet by Shakespeare.  The analogy is often used to explain how it is that this world, galaxy, and universe in all its complexities, could be produced by random chance.  I won’t go into the refutation by Gerry Schroeder because this post is getting too long, but definitely check the book out if you’ve ever thought that this sounded like a reasonable explanation, because Schroeder does an excellent job of tearing that idea apart using simple mathematics.  (Of course disproving an analogy does not disprove the random chance theory, but I did find it interesting that Mr Schroeder was able to disprove it so convincingly.)

In case anyone was wondering, Mr Flew did not become a theist because he attended a revival and “found Jesus.”  Far from it.  He doesn’t believe that there’s life after death, nor does he believe the Christian religion is true (although he does say that if you were to believe that revelation really does happen, Christianity has got the best explanation for it out of all of the religions).  He believes basically that there was some sort of intelligent being who created the universe, galaxy, and world, and then just left it to its own devices, never to bother with any of it again.  This is roughly the same theory that Albert Einstein had.

There’s something in here for everyone: I think the book will by turns offend and then please people, depending on their own ideas of how the universe came into being.   It is a great book to read if you’ve been thinking and wondering about the origins of man and universe - just skip over the boring parts if you get bogged down.  I promise I won’t tattle on you.

4 stars out of 5.  Too many dry spots to rate it higher than that.

Havs

America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money by Steven and Annette Economides is a good book to pick up if you’re looking for inspiration on how to live cheaply but well.  The Economides (yes, that really is their last name!) are cheapskates, and proud of it.  Yet they come across as being fairly normal, if a bit over-organized.  They go grocery shopping once a month, period.  No, they don’t even go by to “pick up the milk” or “grab a loaf of bread.”  They buy gallons of milk, pour a little off the top, and freeze it.  They buy bread by the bagful, and freeze those too.  I don’t think I’ll ever be as organized as they are. Ever.

They produce a bimonthly newsletter, The HomeEconomiser, which is where the bulk of the information for the book came from.  I haven’t subscribed to that newsletter, so I can’t say myself that it’s a good idea to sign up for it, but if it’s anything like the book, I would think it would be worth the while, especially if you need ongoing support to keep your focus on your goal of living below your means (or at least paying off your debt).

But still, it was an interesting book, and had quite a few good suggestions on how to tighten your belt.  A lot of it was the same that you’d hear in other tightwad books (shop with coupons, don’t buy on impulse, shop around for the best deal, etc - standard fare for financial books like this) but there were some real nuggets of helpful information buried in there.  The most interesting part to me was seeing how the family as a whole operated.  There is a picture on the front of the whole family, and their input is scattered throughout from the kids.  The parents, of course, are the authors.  Many of the financial books out there come from the mother’s point of view (I’m not sure why that is - perhaps because the moms are trying to stay home and raise the kids, so they’re the ones who have the time to streeeeetch their money as far as it can go…?) so it was fun to read this one that was basically from the everyone’s point of view.

If you’re new to saving money and trying to live below your means, this might be a good book to pick up, for a broad overview of how to do be a better tightwad. If you’ve already read every book out there on saving money and making every penny count, there probably won’t be enough new stuff in here to make it worth the read.

And if you’re on the hunt for budgeting or finance tips, we’ve got several great websites here at Today.com that cover that subject: Counting Pennies and Frugal Living.  Be sure to check them out!

I give America’s Cheapest Family 4 out of 5 stars.

Havs

Escape from Saddam by Lewis Alsamari is a pretty good autobiography, especially if you’re interested in learning more about Middle Eastern politics from an insider. It centers around Lewis Alsamari, a boy who lived in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign and who wanted to escape the country. It’s entitled Escape from Saddam even though he never met Saddam and was never influenced personally by him. From the title, I was expecting something more along the lines of him being a part of Saddam’s inner circle, but somehow getting out of the country and living to tell the tale. Instead, he met Saddam’s son once, for a brief five minutes on the street, and that was it.

I never really got heavily into the book, and I think it’s because I didn’t relate to Lewis on any level. It was a pretty gripping read, even so, and I did finish it in a couple of days. He went through some hellacious stuff, and it made me realize what a gigantic gap there is between our cultures. Over there, if your father is a part of the “right” political party, you got an extra 5 points on your graduation test, and if he served in the army, then you got another five points. He said it was common to have people graduate with 110% scores. Here in America, I can’t even fathom something like that happening. Never in a million years.

He does stay out of the political end of the Iraq war, until the Epilogue, which I appreciated - I didn’t want to read the book and have the whole thing be slanted one way or the other. His feelings are very strong on that subject - I won’t ruin the surprise and tell you what they are, but he definitely has an opinion!

If you’re interested in Iraq, the political landscape there, and what it was like before the Iraqi War, I think this is one of the better books out there to read.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Havs