book list

recent additions

Timothy Harper
The Good Beer Book

read by Steven Krise
3/11/2010 225 pages
A broad discussion of the broad topic of ''good beer'' loosely meant to refer to !(Bud | Miller | Coors) circa 1997, but includes beers by Miller and Coors when they aren't the color of horse piss. Large portions of the book are wasted on descriptions of breweries, brewpubs, bars, ''brewspapers'' (awfuller a term I've never heard), and websites (yes, lists of websites in a book) that the author(s) find noteworthy. The discussion of notable European breweries (complete with flavor profiles of each's most important beers) was worthwhile, edifying, and exclamerapulous.
Alex Dryden
Red to Black

read by Tony Pisarenkov
3/7/2010 373 pages
Henry Gee
Jacob's Ladder

read by Steven Krise
3/2/2010 272 pages
A discussion of the history of our understanding of the genome, culminating in the author's discussion of his ''network view'' of genomes.
Harold James
The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle

read by Tony Pisarenkov
2/25/2010 325 pages
An examination of the 2007-2009 economic crisis in terms of the failure of the global financial system. Or something. The writing is so horrendous that most of the time it was impossible to follow.
Colin Tudge
The Link

read by Steven Krise
2/24/2010 262 pages
It's supposed to be the story of the fossil, Ida, a 47 million year old primate that may be the oldest known anthropoid. However, all but the last two chapters dealt with primate/anthropoid/hominid evolution and the details on Ida were scant owing to the fact that the official description hadn't been published yet when the book was written.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex

read by Tony Pisarenkov
2/24/2010 529 pages
Powerful stuff.
S J Gould
Full House: The spread of excellence from Plato to Darwin

read by Steven Krise
2/13/2010 244 pages
''Most of this chapter has focused on constraints imposed by life's origin at a left wall of minimal complexity, followed by a passive trend to the right as life diversified. As in all other examples for this book, I emphasized how explicit consideration of all the variation (the 'full house') can engender proper understanding, while the old Platonic strategy of abstracting the full house as a single figure (an aver construed as an archetype or an extreme example to excite our wonder or horror), and then tracing the pathway of this single figure through time, usually leads to error and confusion. My two major examples in this book--the extinction of 0.400 hitting in baseball and the absence of a driven trend to complexity in the history of life--consider different sides of the same analytical strategy (studying the full house rather than the abstracted essence).'' - oh, yeah, and he handily dismantled that medieval bugaboo teleology in the meantime.
Lee R Berger
In the Footsteps of Eve: The Mystery of Human Origins

read by Steven Krise
2/12/2010 325 pages
An overly gossipy account of the author's career at the University of Witswatersrand. I think his point was to highlight the importance of South African fossils.
Robin D. G. Kelly
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

read by Tony Pisarenkov
2/11/2010 588 pages
Way longer than it needs to be, and suffers from some serious pacing problems. Just because it took the author 14 years to write it, doesn't mean it should take us that long to read it. Still, compared to many jazz bios out there, the writing is refreshingly accomplished.
Edmunds Wilson
To the Finland Station

read by Tony Pisarenkov
2/7/2010 590 pages
Eloquently and enganginly written, to be sure, but how Wilson can live with himself after deconstructing to the slightest detail every fault of Marx's arguments and then immediately expressing admiration for him is beyond me. More on LP soon.
Brian Yaeger
Red, White, and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey

read by Steven Krise
2/5/2010 257 pages
A disjointed travel log of the author's journey across America interviewing interesting or iconic (and mostly family owned) breweries. There were about 4 or 5 good chapters (Yuengling, Fritz Maytag and Anchor, Spoetzel in Shiner, TX, and another one) - owing mainly to the quality of the story about the brewing not to Yaeger's insight, wit, acumen, or ability to write. It won't kill ya to read this, if you can find it for free.
Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia

read by Steven Krise
1/30/2010 381 pages
A loose collection of anecdotes cum case studies unified by the theme of the ''brain and music''. If you've read any of Sacks's other books (such as 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat' or 'Awakenings') then some of the content will be old. Fortunately for me, it was all new to me.
Stefan Zwieg
Beware of Pity

read by Tony Pisarenkov
1/25/2010 353 pages
Interesting how a mostly hum-drum novel can turn almost overwhelmingly powerful in the last thirty pages.
Chris Beard
The Hunt For the Dawn Monkey

read by Steven Krise
1/24/2010 348 pages
A tale about the surprisingly contentious realm of anthropoid (monkeys, apes, and humans) evolution. Chris Beard lays out his case for the ''ghost lineage'' hypothesis. Be prepared to read a lot of details about fossil teeth.
delete me
Please

read by Micaela Larkin
1/16/2010 100 pages
PLEASE DELETE
Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex

read by Steve Gadd
1/12/2010 520 pages
Douglas Palmer
Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution

read by Steven Krise
1/9/2010 283 pages
A fairly standard review of human evolution, including a final chapter discussion human uniqueness. It was interesting in that it highlighted the amount of discussion involved in assigning fossils to genuses. I hadn't realized how dialectic that process was.
Andrew Vachss
Haiku: A Novel (2009)

read by Brad Snyder
1/3/2010 224 pages
A band of homeless guys, led by a Japanese ninja-dude that is in a self-imposed state of homelessness, witness a crime. Or maybe they don't. Meanwhile, one of the guys keeps a bunch of books in an abandoned building. But the building is going to be demolished. Plot? Save the library! Will they raise the money AND come to terms with their demons? I know the suspense is killing you, but don't waste your time.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment

read by Steve Gadd
12/31/2009 532 pages
''People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so in fact.''
Marsha Hoffman Rising
The Family Tree Problem Solver

read by Steven Krise
12/31/2009 232 pages
While the author makes an effort to swear off the beginner in the introduction, I found this advanced book to be useful, particularly the last three chapters (disambiguating individuals with the same name, researching in years prior to 1850, and 10 common mistakes to avoid).
Colin Renfrew
Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind

read by Steven Krise
12/27/2009 219 pages
A somewhat incoherent, though interesting text, variously covering the topics of human evolution, the discipline of archaeology, the multi-disciplinary field of ''prehistory'', and the underlying mechanisms of cultural evolution and the trajectories various cultures followed when transitioning from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to ''civilization''.
Lewis Porter
John Coltrane: His Life and Music

read by Tony Pisarenkov
12/16/2009 409 pages
Poorly written and unfocused; cannot decide whether it wants to be a biography or an exhaustive analysis of Coltrane's style of playing and composition. Succeeds at the latter much better than at the former, but I'm still questioning the usefulness of technical analysis at such a low level.
Kinglsey Amis
Everyday Drinking

read by Tony Pisarenkov
12/13/2009 302 pages
An entertaining, irreverent and -- the best part -- unabashedly opinionated commentary on all things alcoholic. Recommended if that's your sort of thing.
David Ellis Dickerson
House of Cards: Love, Faith, and Other Social Expressions (2009)

read by Brad Snyder
12/12/2009 384 pages
I heard this mentioned on This American Life and thought I'd check it out. Memoir of a fella that worked at Hallmark writing cards, which had the potential to be amusing. And it was in places. Unfortunately, he also turns out to be an unattractive protagonist in this story. About half of the book regards his engagement and his breaking it off because lack of sexual fulfillment (he can't get no satisfaction), which he blames on his Christian Fundamentalist upbringing (?), which he no longer adheres to because he's now an atheist. Another quarter or so of the book is him wandering around Kansas City, MO, moping because he's still a virgin at age 29. Hubris.
Lemony Snicket
The Ersatz Elevator (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 6) (2001)

read by Brad Snyder
12/12/2009 272 pages
So far my favorite book from the series. Hilarious.


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