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| 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. |