| VB COM by Who Cares?, 344 pages Steven Krise 09 December 2003 I can't believe I haven't discovered Property Set() before this. Btw, howda you like a book that has all acronyms in its title? | Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, 198 pages Jonathan Misirian 25 July 2006 Velvet Elvis is a Blue Like Jazz for the Church. A fresh look at what following Jesus means for the Church today. Bell is a gifted story teller, able to link complex themes with everyday life. |
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell, 208 pages Brad Snyder 08 September 2006 Another post-modern take on Christianity written in that hipster style I'm becoming so accustomed to. I'm starting to wonder what this movement is going to look like in ten or twenty years when the children of the po-mos grow up to reject the churches their parents took them to, calling them unhip and monolithic just as the current po-mos have done with the corporately-modeled churches they attended as children. Bell makes some nice observations (I especially like the attention he pays to the Jewishness of Christianity), but overall I found his theological musings too vague for a book format: they would be better discussed over a beer. |
Vesper Holly Series I: The Illyrian Adventure (1986) by Lloyd Alexander, 132 pages A Bennett 16 March 2004 "The poor child was suffering a touch of nerves--the result, naturally, of being more or less confined to a cave, subsisting on cheese and firey hot sausages, and being surrounded by desperate characters; including the most dangerous man in Illyria. It was no kind of life for a Philadelphian. (p.80)" "Killing us was, in itself, criminal in the extreme; to do so with deliberate disregard for a noble monument to antiquity was nothing less than heartless vandalism. (p.105)" (Dear Mike Gadd--I see you--hot on my heels. Beware the wrath of the lacrosse stick!) |
Vico & Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas by Isaiah Berlin, 216 pages James Donahue 25 April 2003 I'm sure we are all tired of my name on the post board, especially myself. Thus I skip usual comments and simply report that this the last book for my semester. In the words of the immortial Homer: WHOO-HOO! |
Victor Hugo by Graham Robb, 541 pages James Donahue 19 May 2005 Robb's biography of Hugo made me realize just what a central political and cultural figure Hugo truly was. Beyond writing the Romantic stories that have recently been canabalized by Disney and Andrew Lloyd Weber, Hugo was a dominant figure in the 1830, 1848, and 1870 revolutions, a major religious figure who founded his own Vietnamese cult, the greatest French Romantic poet and the first French modernist poet, and the impregnator of much of the Parisian jet-set. Robb always writes great literary biographies, with a sharp eye for detail and a refusal to get bogged down in recapsulating plots and literary mumbo-jumbo. |
Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard, 340 pages James Donahue 23 May 2008 Moral of the book: Queen Victoria had too many children for anyone to keep clear. |
Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh, 321 pages James Donahue 22 July 2007 "Adam and Nina were suffering from being sophisticated about sex before they were at all widely experienced." |
Violence Unveiled (1999) by Gil Bailie, 276 pages James Donahue 11 December 2007 Rene Girard's work on sacrificial culture, Christian theology, and modern theory remains for me the most compelling work of the past decades. Apparently the same can be said of Gil Bailie, a Christian theologian who heads his own California institute. This book is an extended reflection (and restatement) of Girard's importance for modern evangelicals. Worth reading, but perhaps the casual reader would do better to go straight to Girard himself. (Read on the train ride back home.) |
Vipers' Tangle by Francois Mauriac, 281 pages Micaela Larkin 16 April 2006 Novel dissecting the interior life of middle-class french lawyer.... Catholic Classic Best line:"Our thoughts, our desires, our actions struck no root in the faith to which we paid lip service. All our strength was employed in keeping our eyes fixed on material things." |
Virtual History by Niall Ferguson, 440 pages James Donahue 19 December 2005 Ferguson gets eminent Oxbridge historians to chip in their counterfactual speculations on key moments in British history - What if Hitler had invaded England? What if James II had succeeded against the Scots in the 17th-century? What if America had remained British? But, since these are after all serious academics, these contributions are not so much Turtle-esque alternative worlds, instead more of an examination of how contingent these key world-events actually were. Interesting material, excellent writing. (You can just tell these historians enjoyed letting their imaginations run outside the academic vein.) |
Virtual Light by William Gibson, 352 pages Steve Gadd 06 January 1999 A favorite from the inventor of the cyber-thriller. |
Visual Basic .NET Database Programming by Rod Stephens, 405 pages Steven Krise 30 October 2006 ¿Programming database applications with Visual Basic .NET? |
Visual Basic 6 Business Objects by Rockford Lhotka, 735 pages Steven Krise 12 May 2004 I'm sick of reading code as text. Anyway, Rocky should be beat about the head and shoulders for his smug cover photo. |
Visual Explanations by Edward R. Tufte, 151 pages Steve Gadd 17 August 2008 Another classic treatise in design, showing what can go right (arresting a cholera epidemic) and wrong (loss of a Space Shuttle) based on the way information is presented. |
Vixen (2003) by Ken Bruen, 200 pages Jonathan Misirian 14 August 2007 Renegade London cops track down a ruthless killer, in this the second in Bruen’s Detective Brant series. Think The Shield, set in modern London |
Voltaire in Exile: The Last Years, 1753-78 (2004) by Ian Davidson, 308 pages James Donahue 02 January 2006 In 1753, Voltaire learned during his return from hobnobbing with Frederick the Great that he was exiled from Paris. So he used his fortune (gained not from selling books, but from winning the lottery) to buy an estate just outside Geneva, settling down to a life as factory-owner, agriculturalist replete with peasants, critic of the Church, earthquakes, and Genevan-native Rousseau and, above all else, tourist attraction. In Geneva I lived a few blocks from Voltaire's house (now a museum containing his archives), no longer an estate and swallowed up by apartment buildings. |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 28 February 2003 After reading only 50 pages of Nietzsche over a snowy four-day weekend, I decided to go looking for some lighter fare. This book is a single conversation between two witty conversationalists who discover each other on an adult chat line. Baker lends his voice, with its fine-tuned attention to detail and wry imagination, to both partners. In the end it doesn't amount to much other than soft-core, but it is a nice complement to the wonderful magazine essays on boring subjects like nail clips and library card catalogs (in the collection The Size of Thoughts). |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 16 March 2006 Somehow this book came home with me when I picked up The Mezzanine at the library, and I read through it in two sittings. |
Vox by Nicholson Baker, 165 pages Steve Gadd 07 March 2009 The rare book that lives up to the blurbs inside the cover. A receipt tucked inside indicates that it was purchased at the Virgin Megastore San Francisco on March 25, 1999. |