Nonfiction Book Reviews

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This is part of my Fun Fridays series. If you’re interested, be sure to check out my other children’s book reviews.

My brother-in-law and his partner live in Norway, so when I saw How to Draw Norway’s Sights and Symbols by Melody S. Mis, I immediately decided to check it out. I wanted to learn more about this beautiful country.

How to Draw Norway’s Sights and Symbols, despite the title of the book, did focus on quite a bit more than just how to draw a particular item. It started out by outlining the history of Norway from 10,000 BC to present day. The first “how to draw” section did not appear until page 15. Far from being disappointed by this, I thought this added a lot to the book. What is the point of learning how to draw something that you don’t know anything about?

As for the drawing portion of the book, I have to say that I am conflicted about it. When I think of a kid’s book on drawing, I think in terms of more simplistic items being drawn. Some of the items to be drawn were simple (like the national flag of Norway) but some of the items to be drawn would have absolutely killed me off, and I’m an adult. Granted, not an especially talented adult when it comes to artistic abilities, but I have considerably more hand-eye coordination than your typical 7 year old. At least I hope so.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure I can fault the author, Melody Mis, for this, considering the fact that she was not in charge of creating the coastline for Norway (click on the thumbnail to your left for a larger version so you can see exactly how difficult the Norway coastline is.)  Some of the other challenging items that you are shown how to draw: The purple heather flower, the Borgund Stavkirke, and more.

I enjoyed the book and certainly learned a lot from it.  The ages it is appropriate for is 9 - 12 years old, and I would suggest sticking with that unless your children are especially talented readers and artists.

This is part of a large series that includes other countries like Italy, Thailand, Japan, Pakistan, and more.  More than countries, however, the series has also branched off to include a book on each state in the United States, so you can find a book on Ohio, New York, Michigan, Idaho, and of course the rest of the states.  Pretty cool, eh?

When looking through those books, it looks as if part of the series is geared at 4 - 8 year olds, and part of the series is geared at 9 - 12 year olds.  That seemed rather strange to me, but I wasn’t able to personally look at those books to verify this.

Overall, I give How to Draw Norway’s Sights and Symbols 4.5 stars.  The illustrations to show the kids how to draw various items are a little small, and again some of the items are overly complicated, but other than that, I thought the book was well-done, full of interesting information, and a nice take on the “normal” series that you see about different countries around the world.

Hava

PS If you’re into children’s books, there is another terrific site here at Today you should check out.  Laura writes children’s book reviews exclusively, and has a fun site going.  Happy readings!

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I first heard about Schuyler’s Monster: A Father’s Journey With His Wordless Daughter by Robert Rummel-Hudson from a patron who was returning the book. He said that his wife read it, and thought it was excellent. Intrigued, I checked it out and brought it home, only to promptly forget about it.

It sat on my shelf for a while, until a couple of days ago, when I finally decided that I needed to either read it or return it. I figured I’d give it the first chapter to prove its worth, or it was going back to the return bin.

Well, I read it and fell in love with it.

Schuyler (pronounced “Sky-ler”) is a beautiful little girl (yes, that is her on the front cover of the book) who was born with an extremely rare disease that robs her of the ability to speak coherently. It also causes her to have only partial small muscle control, which means that it’s difficult for her to use sign language.  She does it, but it’s hard and some of the more difficult signs are out of her reach. And in the other cases of people afflicted with this disease, there is usually mental retardation, although they aren’t positive that’s something Schuyler has been afflicted with.

But up until Schuyler’s 18-month birthday, nobody realized anything was wrong with her. She was a smiley, happy baby who won the hearts of everyone around her; she was able to walk and eat like other babies, and she did make noises. During a routine check-up with the doctor, however, the doctor started to probe deeper and they started to realize that not all was right in the land of Oz. It took several years and many, many tests to finally receive a correct diagnosis.

The eventual result of the testing and diagnosis was that they realized that Schuyler was never going to be able to speak like “a normal person.”  Up to that point, they had been hoping that with enough therapy and work, Schuyler would eventually be able to speak clearly.  So they started looking at options that would provide Schuyler a way to communicate with the rest of the world.

Like I said before, sign language is something she can do, but not well, so they went after a high-tech option that if Schuyler would have been born 20 years earlier, never would have been available to her.  It was an “alternative augmentative communication device” or an AAC device.

An AAC in its most basic form allows the person to push buttons and then the device says the sentence outloud.  The picture I have posted is of the latest and most high tech version yet, the Vantage Lite, but at $7,295 it isn’t cheap.  The funding would normally come from a school district, but the majority of Schuyler’s Monster is spent chronicling their fight to get an AAC for Schuyler, and to get the teacher support needed for this type of device to work.

So that’s the story in a nutshell. Although it’s a sad story, on the surface there isn’t much there to grab you and hold your attention. But it’s the writing that really does it for me. Rummel is a blogger (check out Schuyler’s Monster blog) and in fact this book grew out of that blog, not the other way around. His writing style causes this to be one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year. I cried, I laughed, and everything in between.

I cannot tell you how thoroughly I enjoyed Schuyler’s Monster.  It is rare to find an author who is willing to be so open about his life and his feelings.  Life wasn’t hunky-dory.  The family went through a lot, and they almost didn’t make it.  I appreciated Rummel being willing to tell it exactly how it was, and to tell it so well, I cared about them through out it all.

For a darling video of Schuyler using her very first AAC (or “box of words” as Rummel calls it) check out the following.  Keep in mind, she’s 5 years old in this video.

I give Schuyler’s Monster 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Schuyler - I know you’re going places, girl.

Havs

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I first heard about Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax” by Philip Plait at the local planetarium when my husband and I went to watch a movie called (you guessed it!) “Bad Astronomy.” It was a movie made to show in a planetarium, so as you might imagine, it was not exactly on par with Hollywood blockbusters. But still, it was enjoyable, and I learned a lot from it. It also made me want to read the book.

The premise of Phil Plait’s book, movie, and website (Bad Astronomy at Discover Magazine,) is the fact that there are a lot of flat-out wrong ideas when it comes science, and more especially astronomy.  Plait is working hard to debunk the conspiracy theories that surround things like the moon landing, and to help people realize that there are common myths (like you can only balance an egg on the spring equinox) that are completely untrue.

In short, he’s a skeptic and a debunker of pseudo-science.

Since I enjoy that kind of thing, I really enjoyed the book and the movie.  There were certain things that he covered that I had honestly never thought about.  Take, for example, ships flying around in space.  Watch any famous movie or TV series (like Star Wars or Stargate) and you’ll see ships flying, then slowing down and stopping next to the mother ship (or whatever).  Notice when you watch those scenes that as far as you can see, there is nothing to slow the ship down!

In space, in order for a shuttle to slow down, it has to fire thrusters at the front of the ship in order to produce force that would send them backwards.  Or in the case of them already going forward, a backwards thrust would cause them to slow down and eventually stop.  But in all of the Hollywood movies, the ships simply stop, as if the pilot stepped on the breaks or something.

After Plait pointed this out to me, I have to admit that it’s been bugging me ever since.  If you like sci-fi movies or TV shows, do know that reading this book may take away some of that joy.  Just a head’s up in case this sort of thing would annoy you instead of provoking humor (ha-ha!  This movie is so stupid - it breaks every natural law in the book! kind of humor.)

Some of the other bad science that Plait tackles: UFO’s, naming stars after yourself, the supposed “fake” moon landing, and a whole lot more.  I will say that there was hard-core science in the book in some spots, and since I have a hard time following that sort of thing (science is interesting to me but science doesn’t always make sense to me) I will admit that I skipped some paragraphs.  Anyone who is more of a science geek than me won’t have any problems with it.  For the most part, it was written so that anyone could understand, even the non-science geeks of the world.

And, speaking of science, there are some great science blogs here in the Today.com network that you might want to check out - both Science Fun and Rocket Scientist are well-written and educational blogs in the science field.  Also, I have read and reviewed other astronomy related books here on Nonfiction Lover, like Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe and Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking that you might want to check out if science and astronomy are a passion of yours.

Overall, I give Bad Astronomy 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Whether you’re a science teacher, debunking fiend, or just enjoy astronomy, you’ll love Bad Astronomy.

Havs

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The combination of working at a library plus reviewing nonfiction books in my spare time meant only one thing - Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron was a must read for me.

It is about Dewey, a stray cat found in the return bin at the library one morning after a terribly cold night in Spencer, Iowa. Someone had dropped the cat down the return bin shoot, and the library director, Vicki Myron, found him in there, clinging to life.

The Spencer Public Library adopted the cat and made him their own. In this autobiography, Myron chronicles not only Dewey’s life but her own, and also the background and history of Iowa, family farms, and libraries.  She discusses going to school to get her masters in library science,  Carnegie libraries, and remodeling libraries, all items that were especially interesting to me as a librarian.

But much more than that, it was a touching memoir of what it means to love a cat wholeheartedly, not only in good times (Dewey brought a lot of fame and attention to this small corner of the world) but in bad - when Dewey started to age and his coat wasn’t as shiny and youthful as it was before.  (Yes, believe it or not, the library board actually discussed what to do with Dewey “now that he was old” and didn’t look as good.  Apparently, we Americans are not only obsessed with human youthfulness but cat youthfulness too.)

If you love cats, libraries, or the small town life, then you’ll adore Dewey. There are pictures of Dewey throughout the book but all of them are printed in black and white, which for an orange tabby means you lose something in the process. But the Spencer Public Library has put together a web page dedicated to only pictures of Dewey with great captions underneath.  After finishing the book, I enjoyed looking through all of the pictures.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat touched my heart - it made me think, it made me grateful, and it made me cry.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Havs

The following is a fantastic guest post by a fellow blogger, Jennifer L Price, here at Today.com. If you are interested in more of Jennifer’s writing, please check out her blog at Journeys and Adventures. She is an excellent writer, so be sure to give her lots of praise in the comment section! Thanks again, Jennifer!!

I should probably start this review by admitting that I’m a foodie; foodies are defined by Wikipedia as “amateurs who simply love food for consumption, study, preparation, and news.” Yup, that’s me - I like to make food, look at food, think about food, and, of course, eat food…so a book about a food writer attending the well-known Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris is exactly the kind of book I enjoy.

The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn details her experiences as a former middle manager attempting to follow a life-long dream and navigate life in Paris after being fired from her job - while also trying to learn how to gut a trout without damaging the head, cook with rooster blood, and make the perfect 512-layer puff pastry.

The book is obviously about food; Flinn uses mouth-watering descriptions to illustrate the dishes she creates and enjoys: “My final menu [includes] fillet of veal in pastry, stuffed with apples, celery, and mousse de fois gras with Calvados sauce, endive flowers with marinara sauce, whipped cauliflower with salsify and roasted garlic, chanterelle mushrooms sautéed with parsley.” (Don’t worry if your stomach starts to growl while reading, more than 25 recipes are also included in the book!)

There is more to the book than the food, though - Flinn offers an honest portrayal of life in a challenging culinary school, including demanding chefs and competitive classmates from around the world. The facts used to support her story (like the history of Cordon Bleu and how restaurants started) add a fascinating background to the already enchanting Paris. Trips to the market and glimpses of the Eiffel Tower bring the city to life.

At the forefront, however, The Sharper Your Knife is a memoir. In addition to her culinary experience, Flinn honestly shares the stresses, joys, and trepidations of losing her corporate job, moving to a foreign country, discovering herself, and searching for love: “As in cooking, living requires that you taste, taste, taste as you go along—you can’t wait until the dish of life is done.”

So, foodies like me will definitely enjoy the book—as will anyone who ever thinks of starting over and following their dreams overseas. There’s quite a bit of French in the book and Flinn covers a lot of territory in a short amount of time, sometimes moving too quickly and seemingly glossing over important parts, so The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry gets a 4.5 out of 5 stars from me.

~Jennifer

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Again, you can find Jennifer’s blog at Journeys and Adventures - she writes about countries all over the world that she has visited, and that the tips and ideas that she has to make your trips more enjoyable and stress-free. Even if you’ve gone no further than your own backyard but you love to dream, you’ll love her site. Check it out!

Havs

Although I tend to focus on adult nonfiction books, I do occasionally review children’s nonfiction books too. This is one of those books - if you’re interested, you can find other reviews of children’s books here.

Before I started at the library, I had never heard of the “You Wouldn’t Want to…” series, but now I see the books pass through the library all the time.

You Wouldn’t Want to be an Aztec Sacrifice by Fiona MacDonald is just one of many in the series - other examples are You Wouldn’t Want to be a Viking Explorer or You Wouldn’t Want to Work on the Railroads.  They tend to focus on the more gory aspects of history; the things that a boy in elementary school would think is fascinating, but which the “normal” textbooks tend to pass over.

In You Wouldn’t Want to be an Aztec Sacrifice: Gruesome Things You’d Rather Not Know, the author takes you from the beginning: Who the Aztecs are and who “you” are (yes, everything happens in the present tense, and it all happens to you - the author tells you “Now you are doing this.  Now you are feeling that.”  Etc.  Except not in a boring way, promise.)  Eventually, you get captured in battle and eventually end up as a human sacrifice to the gods (and in case you were wondering, no, no last minute save happens - you really do die as a sacrifice.  I had kinda thought that a “But wait!” moment would happen, and you’d be saved.  Nope - you die.)

The illustrations are bright, colorful, and eye-catching.  I found a two-page spread online that I could download, so here’s two pages in the middle of the book:

I found that the book was both gruesome and humorous. That’s not normally a combination I find in reading materials, but I think the book will strike just the right chord for its intended audience - 4th to 6th grade boys. It is historically accurate (okay, not so much the pictures per say, but the facts and history in the book) and for kids who normally find history “bor-ring!” and “Can’t we do something else?” this might be just the ticket to spike their interest.

MacDonald’s right - I don’t want to be an Aztec sacrifice, but I did enjoy this book, and I would want to read more in the same series.  With an eye towards my eventual job as a teacher, I have to say that I’m excited about this series - I think this is a great way to connect with kids who might not otherwise care.  I give it 4.5 stars out of 5.

Hava

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales is, as far as I know, the only book I’ve read and reviewed for this site because I’ve had to.  Well, I had to read it for my honors class at college - I guess I didn’t have to review it also, but what would be the fun in that?

Anyway, Deep Survival is probably not a book I’d normally just pick up and read, mostly because I haven’t ever focused on survival books before.  But after reading this one, I’ve decided that I’ve been missing out - it seems like there are some extremely interesting stories in the survival genre, and I’ll probably start picking up some books on the subject, starting with Adrift (a book that Gonzales talks about some in Deep Survival.)  So it was good for me to read something outside of my “normal” comfort zone!

Deep Survival is not what you’d think - it isn’t a book about how to survive out in the wilderness, and it isn’t simply a retelling of the stories of people who have lived through extreme conditions (although there is a lot of that in there).  Instead, it approaches survival from a psychological perspective - why is it that a well-trained Ranger would drown in a river while a five-year-old girl who is lost out in the wilderness would live for days?  Or why would a scuba diver pull off his mask while deep in the ocean, when the air tank was more than half full?

It all comes down to the mind, and things like “emotional bookmarks” and “cortisol in the hippocampus.” It was quite fascinating to find out that there was a rational reason for people behaving irrationally.

The style of writing is very poetic - he is almost lyrical at points.  It isn’t a writing style I normally encounter, so I found myself slowing down in order to understand what he was trying to say, instead of tearing through the book at break-neck speed like I normally do.

Here’s a good example of the writing style:

There goes another one now - ka-chunk-whoosh! - in a sleet storm of metal particles and this amazing hissing scream like someone’s tearing a hole in hell.  Then two angry afterburner eyes seem to hang motionless in the darkness, as the bat shape shinnies up a pigtail of smoke and is gone.
Deep Survival, page 23

I’ll admit it - I like being able to read stuff at break-neck speed.  It means I sure get through books a lot faster. So the writing style took some getting used to, but by the end, I was enjoying it.  It was probably a good thing I slowed down - there is so much in Deep Survival to digest that I suggest that you read it in small chunks if you end up picking it up.  This is definitely not what I would term a “fast read” nor a “read it and forget it” type of book.

Deep Survival made me rethink things I had done in the past, and realize why I did what I did. Case in point: A couple of summers ago, I was tubing down a river with my siblings when I got caught on a submerged log and was flipped out of my innertube.

All rational thought fled my brain, and I screamed my lungs out. I couldn’t get a grip on the river floor because the current was too fast, and I was sure I was going to get sucked into a whirlpool and die. For whatever reason, my brain took this as a good reason to scream. Maniacally. If I had spent half as much energy trying to get back into the innertube as I did screaming, I probably would have been fine. But no, I was completely and utterly panicked, and I could think of nothing but bellowing, as loud and as long as I could.

My brother eventually got over to me and helped me back into my innertube, but it wasn’t until hours later that I calmed down.  I was in a literal state of shock all that time.  Well, when I read the book, I realized something sobering: If I am ever caught in a really bad situation, I am not likely to live. The people who live are able to keep calm, cool, and collected, and are able to think rationally under extreme pressure. I am none of the above, and cannot think at all under extreme pressure, let alone rationally. Go me.

If you enjoy survival stories, if you like a poetic style of writing, and/or if you like discovering what makes the human mind tick, then you’ll thoroughly enjoy this book. I give Deep Survival 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Hava

Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps by Andrea Warren is a well-written biography of Jack Mandelbaum, a boy living just inside Poland’s borders at the beginning of World War II.  It is a young adult book - I would say the child reading it would need to be at least 9 or 10 - and even though it was written for that age group, it was so well-written, I still enjoyed it.

It starts out with Jack as a child in Poland, and the happy upbringing that he had.  Although his grandparents were Jewish, his parents were not devout, and so Jack considered himself Polish first, and Jewish as a far, far second.  When the war started, Jack was excited, like any 12-year-old boy would be, at the sight of soldiers matching and the naval ships readying to fight against Hitler.  He was sure that Poland would be able to beat Hitler in a week.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it happened, and things got progressively worse for Jack, his family, and the Jews in Poland in general.  He eventually ends up in the concentration camps, and he talked about the friends who helped him, the horrible jobs he was given, and the starvation that surrounded him.  Although there are obviously a lot of bad things happening to him and everyone around him, Jack was a naturally optimistic person, and the book never got really depressing (except a little at the end).

Overall, I enjoyed it - it tended to read a little simplistically, but then again, I wasn’t the intended age group for the book, so I can’t really complain.  If you are studying the Holocaust with your children, and you want a companion book for The Diary of Anne Frank, this would be the perfect complement: It is from the point of view of a boy, and it covers the concentration camps, so your children can get a more well-rounded view of what happened in that terrible atrocity.

I give Surviving Hitler 4.5 stars out of 5.

Havs

Note: I got most of the way through this post and realized that I had forgotten to give a definition for intelligent design, for those readers out there who are not into the latest fads of science.

Basically, Intelligent Design (ID) is the belief that there are complex systems in this world (they use the eye as an example) that could never have evolved on its own.  Ergo, there has to be an intelligent designer who has done all of the major changes in the life forms here on Earth - they believe that every time a new species either appeared or disappeared, it was done by the direct hand of a god (and they specifically say that it isn’t necessarily the Christian God - just a god.)  Intelligent design is in direct competition with evolution as a way of explaining the history of life on Earth.

Okay, now we can proceed with my book review…

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This year in the honors program, we are studying evolution which has been fascinating for me.  Perhaps I slept through evolution in my science classes in high school, or maybe it’s part of the knowledge that I’ve since forgotten that I even learned, but either way, I know pretty much nothing about evolution.

So when I saw Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul by Kenneth R Miller while doing check-in, I thought that it’d be a great book to check out and read, so I could get a better grounding on the subject.

The main thrust of the book is this: Evolution is a scientific theory that has been proven over and over again in the labs and in different disciplines of science.  Intelligent design, on the other hand, has absolutely no scientific proof backing it up, despite the fact that its proponents claim that it is a scientific theory.  Miller goes through and explains the intelligent design point of view in-depth, and then he very neatly rips it to shreds.

In the debate today on evolution vs intelligent design, the lines have been set: If you believe there is a God, then you must be against evolution and for intelligent design.  And if you’re for evolution and against intelligent design, well then, you must be a soulless atheist.

Which is what makes this book stand out from the crowd: Kenneth Miller is a devout Christian.  He believes in God.  He also believes that a belief in God and a knowledge that evolution is a true scientific principle are not at odds with each other at all.

The really great part of the book is that this is not made a central point of the book.  Instead, he discusses both evolution and intelligent design from a scientist’s viewpoint, and leaves religion pretty much out of the equation.  About two-thirds of the way through the book, he does discuss his belief in God, and it runs about five pages.  For any atheists or agnostics reading the book, they would not be offended by this section, and could easily skip it without feeling like they’re missing large chunks of the book.

I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style of the book - Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University, and has obviously spent a lot of time breaking down difficult concepts, because I was never lost once while reading this book, which says a lot for his ability to teach.  I hate it when I read a book that is supposedly intended for a general audience, but it written so far above me, the only way to comprehend it is to read it with a dictionary in the other hand.  You don’t have to worry about that with this book.

I have to give two giant thumbs up for this book.  If you’ve heard about the debate, and you’re wanting to see what all the fuss is about, this is the book to read.  If a non-scientific mind like mine can read it and understand it and enjoy it, I think pretty much anyone out there could too.  And this is such an important debate in today’s world, you don’t want to go into it blind.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Hava

I picked up Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches for Teach for America by Donna Foote on a whim.  I had heard about Teach for America in passing a long time ago, but I would have been hard pressed to say anything more than it was some sort of organization that took people who weren’t teachers but did have a bachelors degree and put them into classrooms.

Other than that, I didn’t know a thing.

One of my tests of whether a book is well-written or not is whether someone who has no knowledge on the background of a subject can still sit down and enjoy the book.  Relentless Pursuit passed with flying colors.

Donna Foote takes the reader through the first year of teaching as a Teach for America student, giving the perspective and insights from a handful of teachers.  She also showed the point of view of several of the administrators of the schools, along with the founder of the Teach for America company, Wendy Kopp.  Because it was able to cover the situation from such a wide variety of angles, by the end, I felt like I had a great grasp on how the company works, as opposed to if I had simply read an autobiography of one of the teachers in the program.

Unfortunately, it’s greatest strength (variety of viewpoints) was also its greatest weakness: I tended to get confused about who each person was.  If I was going to read this book again, I’d do it with a scratch piece of paper and take notes about each person and their personalities.  That way, I could keep up with the book better.  But I tend to be one of those people who gets names mixed up very easily, so this may be a Hava-only problem.

Since I live in boring Idaho, where everything is relatively safe and steady, I think the most eye-opening part of the book was the description of the school and area that the teachers were teaching in: Locke High School, in Los Angeles, California.  The idea behind Teach for America is to take educated adults (with bachelor degrees), give them a summer of training on how to be a teacher, and then put them into the worst schools in America, in an attempt to improve that school.

The teachers sign a contract saying they’ll teach for two years, and then they are actually encouraged to leave and get into business, etc, as normal.  Teach for America has figured out that if educated businessmen and women were out in the corporate field with an in-depth and personal insight on our failing schools, then they would be a better position to help those failing schools get better.

So Teach for America has a two-pronged approach: Send the teachers in to help the schools in the short-term, and then send those teachers out into the business world to help educate everyone else as to what needs to be done.

Rather ingenious, I have to say.

So when the teachers get sent to the “worst schools in America,” we’re talking some really scary places.  Locke High School is in the middle of the Crips and Blood gang territory, along with quite a few other gangs, meaning that just trying to walk to school can be extremely dangerous.  As Foote pointed out in one section, the kids are not stuffing their backpacks full of books to take to school, but rather clothing, so they can change clothes as they walk through different gang areas.  That keeps them from getting killed for wearing the wrong color of t-shirt.

If only that was an exaggeration…

As you can imagine, if you’re worried every day about whether you’re going to live or die, and trying to survive gang wars, actually learning anything in class would be at the bottom of your to-do list.  Staying alive is a lot more pressing.  So here you have a group of teachers who are idealistic, and wanting to teach the students so they can get out of Los Angeles and actually make something of themselves, but how do the teachers reach the students who have better things (like living) on their minds?

It definitely made for an incredibly interesting book.

It didn’t end with a happily-ever-after conclusion - some of the teachers quit part way through the year, incredibly disillusioned and simply ready to go home.  Some of them quit at the end of the year and went to other similar organizations like Green Dot, to see if they could make a difference there instead.  Locke High School got embroiled in a political battle, and the whole school basically ground to a halt for the next year as people were fighting over who was going to control the school.

No, it did not end happily ever after, but I think that’s the reality of dealing with real life, instead of Hollywood.  Life is messy, and Teach for America is not immune from that.

If you’re interested in the program, you must read this book.  If you want to have an inside look at one of the most troubled schools in America, Locke High School, then you don’t want to miss this book.  If you’re interested in school reform, or the state of education today, this book would be an excellent way to gain some basics on the ground.  And if you’re interested, even a little, in being a teacher, this book (despite its depressing nature) will make you say, “I can do this, and I need to do this!”  It manages to be inspiring even as it is depressing you.

Overall, I have to give Relentless Pursuit 4.5 out of 5 stars.  It made me want to be a teacher myself, although I think I would pass on Locke High School.

Hava

Physics of the Impossible:A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel was written by Michio Kaku, a quantum physicist who co-wrote the string field theory (which I had never heard of before reading the back flap.  Luckily you don’t have to know anything about string field theory before reading, although Kaku does explain it some detail in the conclusion of the book.)

I picked this up on a whim (as I do most of my books) but quickly found myself engrossed in the text.  Kaku categorizes various futuristic ideas such as phasers and force fields into Class I, Class II, and Class III Impossibilities.  Here’s a quick rundown of the categories:

Class I Impossibilities are technologies that are impossible today, but that do not violate the known laws of physics.  They are ideas that might be possible to achieve either in this century or the next.

Class II Impossibilities are technologies are so advanced, either they’re completely impossible, or if they are achievable, it won’t happen for a millennia, or even a million years.

Class III Impossibilities are technologies that violate the known laws of physics, and are therefore impossible.  There are (surprisingly) only two ideas in this category, and Kaku says, “If they do turn out to be possible, they would represent a fundamental shift in our understanding of physics.” This is the sort of understatement that scientists like to engage in.

He starts out with the Class I items, and those actually take up a majority of the book.  It was also the most interesting (and understandable) section of the book.  In Class II items, he starts explaining some pretty wild quantum theories that went right over my head.

Luckily, he doesn’t do this the whole way through, or I would have put the book down long before the end.  I have studied science very little, and quantum physics not at all, so the fact that he only lost me a couple of times speaks volumes of his writing style.

The book flows pretty easily from one Class I impossibility to the next, and you feel that by the end, you’ve learned more about where science is at right now than you could have by sitting through 5 years of college lectures.  It’s a book that I found myself discussing with anyone who would sit still long enough (”Did you know that they are working on an invisibility cloak and have already been able to make minuscule items invisible in the red light spectrum?”  Some days I feel sorry for my coworkers…)

Any huge Star Trek or Star Wars fan would thoroughly enjoy this book, since he mentions different episodes/parts of the movies throughout the book.  Although it’s fun to imagine that things like teleporters exist, it’s even more fun - for me - to find out that scientists are actually working on making them into a reality, and X, Y, and Z are the things they are focusing on.

Also, any science geeks would love this book, since it’s easy enough for a regular person to understand, but definitely not dumbed down so much a science nerd couldn’t enjoy it.  Not to mention that his Notes section at the end of the book was quite extensive.

Having said all that, I loved this book, and I am neither a Star Trek, Star Wars, or science geek.  I enjoyed reading it because I love hearing about the latest and greatest that humanity has come up with, and I simply love to learn.  I felt like I really had learned something when I finished this book, instead of just wasting the last 5 hours of my life.

I give Physics of the Impossible 4.5 out of 5 stars.  There was a bit too much over-my-head information to rate it higher than that, but it was still one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time.

Now I’m going to have to hunt out some of the other books he’s written.  Beyond Einstein and Hyperspace both sound interesting…

Havs

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

Today is the opening ceremonies for the Olympics in China, so of course, I had to review a book about China. China: People, Place, Culture, History was the book I chose, and I’ll admit: I chose it because it had a beautiful cover. I know there’s that old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but in this case, that would have meant me missing out on a gorgeous book.

China: People, Place, Culture, History was definitely meant to be a coffee table book. Large, with a woven red cover and gold lettering, it’s an eye-catching book. But coffee table destiny or no, this book was crammed full of beautiful photos, great history, and interesting information. It’s thick (355 pages) and so chock-full of information, it could take a dedicated reader several weeks to get through the whole book.

It starts out focusing on geography by publishing a single photo spread out over two pages.  The first whole chapter is set up this way.  Some of the vistas were breathtaking, and some of them reminded me of Idaho, which is strange, because I never associated that kind of geography with China.

I guess with a country as large as China (it is roughly the same size as America) you’re going to have a lot of variation in geography. I had just honestly never thought about it, and imagined the whole country to be one large bamboo forest interspersed with lots of rice paddies and huge cities. Boy, was I wrong!

To accompany the photos, there was a small paragraph that explained the photo, and a Chinese poem that somehow related to the picture. It was a fun way to start off the book, and I felt like I had had a great visual tour of China.

China: People, Place, Culture, History then switches to history, and gives a timeline for important Chinese dates, a section lasting 45 pages. Although dry historical dates and facts tend to be boring, they did a great job of spicing it up with photos and sidebars with more in-depth information.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how well done the book was - I looked and realized that the book was written by DK Publishing, the same company that does the Eyewitness Series for kids (I reviewed the Titanic: Discover the Luxury of this Famous Ship by them.) I had thought DK Publishing only did kids’ books, so that was fun to see.  After realizing that, I started to pay attention while at work, and realized that quite a few “coffee table books” have been done by DK.  I somehow missed that along the way…

China also covers people, culture, and architecture in their own sections, with enough information on each that you’ll feel like a grad student in Chinese culture by time you’re done. For any homeschooling families who reading this and are interested in studying China, I highly recommend that you check this book out of the library (or buy it) and make it a large part of your studies. I think all of the photos will help keep even the younger kids interested.

Overall, I give China: People, Place, Culture, History 4.5 out of 5 stars. Great job, DK Publishing!

Hava

PS My coworker said that the Chinese chose to start the Olympics today because 08-08-08 is considered to be a “lucky day” for the Chinese.  I have no idea if that’s true or not, but it is a pretty cool date, regardless.

Have you ever read a book because you felt you “had to” as a part of your general education? That’s why I picked up Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan - it seemed like one of those books that I “had to” read, as a citizen of America and all that good stuff.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, I ended up loving the book. I was shocked by how readable it was, and spent the next week telling everyone that they needed to read it too.

This is a 921 (meaning it’s an autobiography) but Alan Greenspan being who he is, the majority of the book focuses on the financial system of the world. The book actually starts out on September 11th, 2001, then jumps back and focuses on his early life, and goes forward in time from there.  In the excerpt below, he’s talking about his first job out of college, where he was charged with finding data and making it accessible to businessmen and union leaders.

I think this passage really spotlights the fundamental gap between me and him, since I’d rather have my teeth extracted with no painkillers than mess with numbers on a regular basis, but that’s why he was Chairman of the Fed and I’m…well, I’m definitely not.

There was no room to work in the library’s crowded stacks, so I would lug armloads of materials to my desk. Usually I’d have to blow the dust off the books. The chief economist would assign the research projects, and in just a few months people began to tab me as a guy who knew all the data. In a sense, that was true.

It became my passion to master all of the knowledge on those shelves. I read about the robber barons; I spent hours over the census of population of 1890; I studied railroad freight-car loadings of that era, trends in short staple cotton prices for the decades after the Civil War, and myriad other details of the vast American economy.

It wasn’t drudgery - far from it. Instead of reading Gone with the Wind, I was happy to immerse myself in “Copper Ore Deposits in Chile.” ~Page 33 of Age of Turbulence

Great for him and America that he was that way, and even better for me that I don’t have to be.

Although I enjoyed reading about his background, the really interesting part for me came when he started talking about dealing with the different presidents. He’s libertarian (meaning, a capitalist first and foremost - most of his book is spent passionately defending capitalism as the best way of life) but his position was nonpolitical in nature, and he tried to stay out of the political spotlight.

His behind-the-scenes look at each of the presidents was an eye-opener for me. The president who seemed to be the most aligned with Greenspan when it came to economic policy was actually Bill Clinton, and Greenspan had heaps of praise for his policies on economic decisions.

He talks briefly about the Monica Lewinsky affair, and says how disappointed he was in that happening, but he didn’t seem to let it affect his judgment on whether or not Clinton made a good president.

Overall, the book was quite a-political, which I really liked, because I hate having one point of view or another forced down my throat when the book is supposed to be about something else entirely. Now if the book is labeled as a political book (like a book from Rush Limbaugh or something) then fine, at least I know it going into the book. When people try to slide their views in subtly, it really drives me nuts.  Greenspan doesn’t do that.

After going through the presidents up to President Bush, and then his eventual retirement from the Federal Board, Greenspan then dives into what he thinks about each region of the world: China, India, Russia, South America, and more. He talks quickly about why the country is where it is, what changes he thinks they need to make to become more prosperous in the future, and what he thinks will actually happen.

To me, this was the most fascinating part of the book. To have someone as knowledgeable as him give a broad overview of a country and its economic policies was engrossing. I was almost late to work several times, because I didn’t want to put the book down.

After all this, the book finally ends up doing what I was worried about all along: It got boring. He gets into the fine details of how the financial world hums along, and even though I know that understanding all of this would make me a much more informed person, it was just too much for my non-math brain. Here’s a quick excerpt - tell me if you understand this:

A detailed calculation by Federal Reserve Board staff employing data from more than 5,000 nonfinancial US corporations for the years 1983 - 2004 found that growth in the sum of deficits of those corporations where capital expenditures exceeded cash flow persistently outpaced the growth in corporate value-added. The sum of surpluses and deficits, disregarding sign, as a ratio to a proxy for corporate value-added exhibits an average annual increase of 3.5% per year.*

To clarify, it says in the footnotes:

*The surpluses (and deficits) are measured as income before extraordinary items, plus depreciation, minus capital expenditures. The proxy for corporate value-added is gross margin, or sales less cost of goods sold. ~ Page 356 of Age of Turbulence

So glad we cleared that up…

Unfortunately, Greenspan goes on in this fashion for several chapters. At first, I tried to understand it, and then I gave up. I am soooo not a math person. I just started skimming until things got interesting again, and they did. The book ended on a great note, and I finished in awe of the knowledge that Greenspan possesses, and also quite sad that the book was finally finished. At 531 pages, I really should have been celebrating its completion, but it was such an interesting book, I wanted to keep learning.

If you have any interest whatsoever in finances, politics, the economy, or just the world in general, you really can’t miss when it comes to this book. Everyone I’ve talked to who has read it thoroughly enjoyed it, so I know I’m not the oddball out here.

Overall, it rates 4.5 out of 5. I wish I could give it higher, but there’s just one too many dry spots.

Havs

Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys by none other than Dave Barry was a terrific read.  It was an expose on how guys’ minds really work (hint: they don’t) delivered in the classic Dave Barry style.

The book had me smiling by the end of page one, then a little chuckling snuck in.  I soon progressed to giggling, which quickly turned into full blown laughter.  But it didn’t stop there.  Soon (about 10 pages in or so) I was laughing so hard, I was doubled over, struggling to breathe, and wiping tears off my face.

If you don’t laugh when you’re reading this book, you need your pulse taken.  There’s a good chance you’re dead.

Having said all that, there were definitely parts of the book that warrant some warnings.  Dave Barry thinks nothing of including “adult humor” so this isn’t a book I’d hand to a child.  There were some clean and hilarious stories in the book, but there were also some not-so-clean-but-still-hilarious stories in the book. Just be forewarned.

In case some of you have been living under a rock for the past couple of decades and haven’t read any of Dave Barry’s writings, I figured I should put up an excerpt (a clean one, of course) demonstrating Dave’s writing style.  Again, no laughter = dead.  Just wanted to make sure we were clear on that…

Dave talked about medical conditions that only afflict guys: Mainly, Guy Vision (the complete inability to see dirt) and Guy Memory Lapses.  This excerpt is from the Guy Memory Lapses section:

The basic problem here is that guys, as I have noted, devote so much of their brains to remembering vital facts such as who was named MVP of the 1978 Super Bowl, that they cannot always remember minor details, such as they have left an infant on the roof of a car.

You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.  According to a 1992 Boston Globe article, a guy in Massachusetts did this on Mother’s Day.  He had his two children with him, and he was loading them into his car, and he did - give him credit - remember to strap in his twenty-month-old daughter into the car.

But the amount of concentration required for a guy to remember this type of childcare detail can put a lot of strain on his mental equipment, so he went into acute Guy Memory Lapse and forgot that he had placed a car seat containing his three-month-old son on the roof of the car.  As he accelerated onto Interstate 290, he sensed that something was wrong when “he heard a scraping sound on the roof of the car.”

(This is classic guy behavior: He doesn’t notice that he only has 50% of his total children inside the car with him, but he does notice that his car is making a funny sound.)

Anyway, the car was going about 50 mph when the car seat containing the three-month-old boy sailed off the roof and landed on Interstate 290, where - this is strong evidence that God is a guy - the seat skidded safely to a stop, with the boy unhurt.  So, the story has a happy ending, except of course that this particular guy had to tell his wife what happened (Happy Mother’s Day!).  I bet she rolled her eyeballs into the next state.

Perhaps you’re saying, “Dave, aren’t you being unfair?  Aren’t you using purely anecdotal evidence to reinforce an unfortunate gender stereotype about men?  Isn’t it entirely possible that a woman could leave her child on the car roof and drive off?”

No.
~Page 111 - 112

You did laugh, right?  I was a little worried there for a moment…

I hadn’t heard about what was happening with Dave for quite a while, so I decided to do a Google search and see what he’s been up to. Turns out, Dave’s retired from the weekly column business (which is probably why I haven’t heard from him).  Oh, and the Complete Guide to Guys was turned into a movie, which I also didn’t know.

Apparently, I’m not very up-to-date on the latest Dave Barry doings.  Which is sad for me, considering how darn funny I think he is.

I’m giving Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys 4.5 out of 5.  It’s marked down for adult, sometimes crass humor, but overall, it’s just too darn funny to rate lower than that.  Need a pick me up?  Read this book and he’ll have you rolling on the floor with laughter in no time (which, sadly for me, is not an exaggeration).

Hava