I am trying to figure out if I want to purchase an e-book reader. Actually I am trying to decide if I want to pressure Wendy to get me an e-book reader for my birthday. The three main choices seem to be: The Amazon Kindle is finally available and functional in Canada. It’s has a [...]
Books | Reviews
What did you read this summer?
I never read much this summer (compared to other summers at least) but I did get some reading done. Here is the list. The Kennedys by Peter Collier & David Horowitz :: Quite good as it followed the family after RFK’s assassination and the tragedy that kept following even the next generation of Kennedys. The [...]
Bill Kinnon on writing
Bill has a wonderful post on writing. The entire thing is worth reading but this one got me thinking In 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. So we are looking at author royalties of a couple [...]
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
I finally finished The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson last weekend. I was 20 pages into it when it got left up at the cabin for a couple of weeks. The book is centered on the life of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century British natural philosopher (or amateur scientist) who most people know as the [...]
Jared Diamond
Wendy, myself and about 1500 people went and saw Jared Diamond at TCU Place tonight. He was what I expected. Witty, gracious, concise, and profound. He talked mostly of his work in Collapse but offered up some thoughts on the global economic collapse and global warming. Sadly for a lot of defeated Liberal candidates, he [...]
Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks
While in Chapters in Regina, I picked up a copy of Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. It is a mesmerizing read if for just the amount of incompetence within the White House, the Pentagon, and the provisional government in Iraq (Paul Bremer comes across as an incompetent idiot). Basically it tells the story of intelligence [...]
The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich
Well I just finished today William Shirer’s The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich. A couple of thoughts. If Churchill and England would have capitulated, England would have been devastated in a Poland like genocide. That goes against what I have read over the years that Hitler never wanted to go to war [...]
