What an amazing book! Or perhaps I should say “What an amazing house!” Bob Walker and his wife Frances have turned their house into a jungle gym for their nine cats, as you can see in this image. But… Read More ›
Books
Isaac’s Storm and The Devil in the White City
Having read and enjoyed Erik Larson’s non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, I decided to read his tale about the flood that… Read More ›
Three philosophical novels: Goldstein, Sloan, and Barbery
Three of the novels that I read this summer are explicitly or implicitly built on philosophical themes: Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A work of fiction. With a title like that, you can see why a subtitle… Read More ›
Paul Lockhart
Three and a half years ago I wrote a post about Paul Lockhart’s book, Mathematician’s Lament. Now he has a new book, oddly titled Measurement. Why, you ask, is that title odd? It’s because the book is only peripherally about measurement. Mostly it’s… Read More ›
My Short, Happy Life in “Jeopardy!”
I reviewed Ken Jennings’s book Brainiac seven years ago. (Was it really seven years ago‽ Yes, it was!) So I figured I should also read the latest book by another Jeopardy champion, Brendan DuBois, whose short fiction I had read several times… Read More ›
Plagiarism: Pro and con
Pro and con? Perhaps you think this is a deliberately provocative title. Every teacher, after all, is vehemently against plagiarism, right? We are justifiably outraged when a student turns in a paper in which whole paragraphs are cribbed unattributed from… Read More ›
Not Harry Potter
Just finished reading the first of J.K. Rowling’s two post-Harry-Potter novels. This was The Casual Vacancy, the one she published under her real name. On the whole, my reaction was far more positive than negative. It has very little in common… Read More ›
The Joy of x
Steven Strogatz has made a useful contribution to the surprisingly large set of math books written for the general public: The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. I have to admit that I started out… Read More ›
The Fractalist
I had expected to be able to leaf through The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, by Benoit Mandelbrot. I had expected that I would spot a couple of interesting nuggets along the way, but that the story couldn’t possibly sustain my… Read More ›
Kinsey and Me
At this point I’ve read 22 of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone novels, starting with A is for Alibi and continuing on all the way through V is for Vengeance. This may sound extreme, but at Sue Grafton’s pace it isn’t: 22 books in 29… Read More ›
A Double Thread: Growing up English and Jewish in London
In his fascinating memoir, A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London, John Gross does exactly what the title promises: he shows how the English and Jewish cultures can intertwine and yet remain distinct. It’s important to note that… Read More ›
Bellwether
If you know Connie Willis at all, you probably think of her as a science fiction author. I just finished reading her 1997 novel Bellwether, and indeed it was marketed as science fiction; it even was nominated for a Nebula Award!… Read More ›
Monk
For some reason I have never watched any of the Monk television shows. But I’ve read a couple of the short stories about Adrian Monk, all written by Lee Goldberg — who was the writer of the three of the… Read More ›
Reamde
Where do I start? How do I write a post about a thousand-page epic? Clearly I can’t do it justice, so I won’t even try to write more a single paragraph. Reamde (not a typo) is a sprawling Neal Stephenson novel about massively multiplayer… Read More ›
The Universe in Zero Words
Well…not really zero words…closer to 100,000, in fact. But the main point of Dana Mackenzie’s beautiful book about beautiful mathematics is his combination of illustrations, numbers, and the equations relating those numbers to each other. Essentially, The Universe in Zero… Read More ›
Make Just One Change
I dunno. In this book, Make Just One Change, authors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana try passionately to make a compelling case for their view that education can be transformed by making “just one change”: teaching students “to ask their own… Read More ›
The Given Day and Live by Night
Dennis Lehane is best known as a local mystery writer, but his last two books aren’t mysteries: they’re historical fiction. They loosely form the first two parts of a trilogy (actually, I’m just guessing…maybe there won’t be a third book… Read More ›
Maphead
I mentioned a few days ago that I hadn’t yet reviewed Ken Jennings’s book, Maphead…so here we go. Unlike either Brainiac and Because I Said So, this is not really a book for a general audience. It’s not that you have to be a map geek or… Read More ›
The Ten Cent Plague
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America is a terrific history of the comic book industry and the role it has played in American culture. Most of my readers are too young to remember the ’50s,… Read More ›
Because I Said So
Ah…Ken Jennings! The Jeopardy geek’s favorite. He’s our favorite, not just because he’s the big all-time long-lasting winner, but more because he combines encyclopedic knowledge, intellectual curiosity, sense of humor, and surprising humility. I earlier reviewed his book Brainiac, and I just… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 