Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet

Interesting perspective, merely an okay read

Published in 2007

I've been teaching for 20 years so I've ran into a few students with Asperger's Syndrome over the years. I am familiar with the condition and studied it in some depth in a class in my master's program. I was hoping Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant would offer a little more insight and be as interesting as the video documentaries and news programs that have covered Mr. Tammet over the years.

Alas, this read is not nearly as interesting as those presentations. I found myself skimming sections such as the three pages about his self-made game of solitaire and his detailed descriptions about number puzzles. What's left is okay, but in reality, how much can a twenty-something really say about himself that is that interesting? He's just started his life so there's not much to include in a memoir.

Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind is his current book and it sounds like it was more like I was hoping this book would be. I'll be looking into it.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Born on a Blue Day.

Reviewed on January 25, 2010.

METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization (audiobook) collection edited by John Scalzi

Up and down - the ups are solid, the downs are low, so low I nearly quit listening

Published in 2008 by Audible Studios.
Performed by Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Stefan Rudnicki, John Scalzi

Duration: 9 hours, 7 minutes.
Unabridged

METAtropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization is a collection of short stories about a fictional future world in which the United States government is much weaker and local governments have had to shoulder most of the responsibility for governing. We get to see 4 future settings in this anthology - Cascadia in the American Northwest, Detroit, New St. Louis and Scandinavia. While the U.S. government is much weaker, the role of technology has grown much stronger. There are virtual on-line worlds and cellphones are everywhere and even more plugged in than they are now. The five authors sat down and mapped out the ground rules of this future world and than separated to write their stories. John Scalzi edited the collection and was the last one to write a story. He specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four.

So far, so good but what about the individual stories?

What's good is pretty good, what's bad is real, real bad.

The first story is "In the Forests of the Night," by Jay Lake. It is bad. The worst of the bunch. The story concerns a messiah-like figure called Tyger Tyger who arrives at Cascadia, a city of anti-technology greens in the Cascades in the Washington/Oregon area. The messiah-figure concept was done poorly. The anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-religion angle was silly (for example, in one scene creationists storm the geology department of a university and kill all of the geologists).

I doubt that Lake actually understands the meaning of the political term "Libertarian" and he certainly overuses the phrase "reputation economics" - in fact the concept is bantered around in the book so often that you'd think this was a new idea. Nah - just overuse of a cool-sounding phrase. The government of Cascadia is so loose and yet so complicated that it reminded me of the peasant collective government in Monty Python and the Holy Grail described by Dennis the Peasant ("Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!").

Lake's premise that you can hide an entire city under the basalt and loam (two more overused words in this story - buy a thesaurus, man!) and keep all of the heat created by people just living hidden from heat-detecting satellites is so silly that I have to wonder why this wasn't sent back for a re-write. 1 star for this story.

The second story is set in Detroit. It is "Stochasti-City," by Tobias Bickell. I enjoyed this one. It explored the conditions of America in this world the authors created and the story was in and of itself interesting as well. 4 stars

"The Red in the Sky is Our Blood" by Elizabeth Bear is the third story. It is forgettable except that I noted that it was the victim of long soliloquies about the evils of globalization. 1 star.

"Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis" by John Scalzi is the fourth story, and in my opinion, the best of the bunch by far. It had the most important thing that any story has to have - good characters. As a bonus, the slacker is kinda likable and we do get to learn even more about the world these authors created because, as I already noted, he specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four. 5 stars.

"To Hide from Far Celenia" is the last story. Written by Karl Schroeder, it builds on the notion that people can and will retreat into a video game world. This is not news - people do that now with online games. There are already online economies. They'll do it even more with the addition of 3D video glasses that overlay the online world over the real one. The story just didn't really go anywhere and the author's comments on economics are a joke. Too many long monologues - at points it was like listening to a half-baked graduate dissertation on economics and computer technology. I only finished it because I had already invested so much time listening to the other stories. I have to give it 1 star.

So - 5 stories with scores of 1 + 4 + 1 + 5 + 1. That equals 12. 12/5 = 2.4

Total score: 2 out of 5 stars.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: METAtropolis.

Reviewed on January 27, 2010.

What's So Great about Christianity by Dinesh D'Souza

It was not only a joy to read but also well worth the effort

Published in 2007 by Salem Books

I read D'Souza's What's So Great about America last year and I enjoyed it. To use a food analogy, What's So Great About America is like a 4th of July dinner of hamburgers, chips and a soft drink - filling but also fun and easy to consume.



What's So Great About Christianity is a much more complicated work. If it were a meal it would be like a 3 course porterhouse steak meal - more challenging to consume, more work to prepare and, in the end, more filling. But there's a lot more chewing. This is a work that requires a lot more thought and more time to read and properly understand.



D'Souza systematically delves into all aspects of Christianity - from the areas of the world to where it is growing today to science to miracles to the "problem" of evil to the charges that more have been killed in the name of Christianity (and other religions) than any other cause. He takes on none of these topics lightly. This is not intended to be an evangelistic tract but rather an educational work for Christians. Too many Christians have no idea about the depth of scholarship and the richness of the intellectual traditions of Christianity.

Dinesh D'Souza

I read this book as an individual but I would recommend this book for an advanced Bible study. D'Souza has written a study guide (What's So Great about Christianity Study Guide: Your Guide to Answering the New Atheists) that I have flipped through after reading the book. It would be a great companion to this book and would surely generate and focus discussion. It would probably be helpful to anyone reading on an individual basis as well.

I can't say that I agree with every thought D'Souza has on Christianity but I can say that this is a thoughtful, well-argued book and it was not only a joy to read but also well worth the effort.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: What's So Great about Christianity.

Reviewed on January 30, 2010.

Note: I wrote this review nearly 13 years ago. Back then, I respected D'Souza and his opinions. A lot has happened since then. The rise of the Age of Trump has changed things. Maybe the shock of Trump made the scales fall from my eyes. Maybe Trump's success compelled otherwise restrained people to advocate a number of things that I disagree with. Maybe they always were that way and the Age of Trump freed them. Either way, I cannot say that I support this man any longer.

I REALLY liked this book when I read it 14 years ago. I have not re-read it, and I have no interest in re-reading this man's take on Christianity since he has violated the Christian ethics multiple times by violating the law and misleading people with flat out lies in movies that he produced, speeches, and countless Tweets. His nonsense has created so much unnecessary chaos and show, at best, an extraordinarily bad sense of judgment.

The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller (audiobook) by various authors

Published in 2007.
Read by Alfred Molina.
Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes.

Unabridged.

The Chopin Manuscript is not really a great story but an interesting premise and veteran actor Alfred Molina does a fantastic job performing this audiobook. This book was given an "Audie Award" (2008 Audiobook of the Year) and that is entirely due to the masterful ability of Molina to mimic accents and create voices for literally dozens of characters. His performance was much better than the material he was given to perform.

The idea behind the story is pretty simple - Jeffery Deaver (The Lesson of Her Death), a well-known writer of action thrillers started out an international thriller by writing the first chapter. Then the story was handed off to another author and a chapter was added (15 authors in total) until it got back Deaver who wrote the concluding chapter.

The story is a thrill-a-minute ride that has a herky-jerky nature. Every author seemed to be out to move the story along as much as possible so character development was sacrificed for action. I do not know if an over-arching plot line was discussed among the authors but it seems clear that the minor characters were definitely out to be slaughtered (or ignored) throughout. Super villains are created in one chapter and then dispatched in the next without much fuss as the next author cleans up the other author's "mess" and creates his own. A whole chapter is spent developing a character that appears on maybe two pages worth of material in the rest of the book.

Lisa Scottoline (Everywhere That Mary Went) is probably one of the least "big time" authors of this book but her chapter was excellent - she eschewed action for character development and revealed the most awful betrayal of the book in a chapter that literally was set in just one room. I've always liked her work and was pleased to see that she went for smart storytelling over a splashy shoot 'em up chapter.

So, to sum up - mixed bag but an interesting experiment. I recommend the audio version since Molina's performance will make the rough patches in this book more palatable.

3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller.

The Copper Bracelet (audiobook) by Jeffrey Deaver and 15 other authors

Much like the last one in the series, the experiment in making the story is better than the story.

Published in 2009 by Audible Originals.

Read by Alfred Molina.

Duration: 8 hours, 31 minutes.
Unabridged.

The Copper Bracelet is the second installment in the Harry Middleton story. Harry is former military officer, former music teacher, current hunter of war criminals. Along with his compatriots, the Volunteers, Harry Middleton is after war criminals from Kashmir.

The story behind the book is pretty simple - Jeffery Deaver (Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936), a well-known writer of action thrillers started out an international thriller by writing the first chapter. Then the story was handed off to another author and a chapter was added (16 authors in total) until it got back Deaver who wrote the concluding chapter.

This is a slightly different group of writers than in the first novel, The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller. The Copper Bracelet is a bit smoother than the first book, but it still has its herky-jerky moments in which characters are introduced and then promptly killed. To me, the bad guys seemed rather James Bond Super-Villain-ish, which for me is too cartoonish to be interesting.

The most interesting feature of the audiobook is the last "Bonus" disc that includes an interview with the narrator, veteran actor Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2) and an interview with Jeffrey Deaver and a couple of authors about the process they used to write the book. Most interestingly, no overall plot was ever discussed beforehand - the authors receive the completed chapters and have a limited amount of time to add another chapter before it gets handed off to the next author in line.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It ca be found on Amazon.com here: The Copper Bracelet.

Reviewed on March 10, 2010.

Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech and the Twilight of the West by Mark Steyn

Fascinating, entertaining and important

Published in 2009 by Stockade Books.

For those of you who are not aware, Mark Steyn was brought before three courts of Canada's Human Rights Commission for violating the human rights of some Muslim students and the Canadian Islamic Congress. You see, in Canada, your right not to be offended is more important than your right to speak your mind (except in the hypocritical cases Steyn has fun with throughout the book).

What was Steyn's crime? Maclean's magazine printed excerpts from his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. This was a bestseller in America and Canada but if he was found guilty the books would be pulled from all Canadian bookstores and Maclean's would have to be minded by politically correct nanny censors. Steyn is continually amazed that "large numbers of Canadians apparently think there's nothing wrong in subjecting the contents of political magazines to the approval of agents of the state." (p. 4)

Mark Steyn

Steyn details the fight against these three cases. Along the way he generates lots of memorable quotes such as, "I don't want to get off the hook. I want to take the hook and stick it up the collective butt of these thought police." (p. 5)

So, Steyn includes offending comments from the excerpts that brought him to court. He also includes columns that were included as supporting evidence. As a bonus he includes commentary from the complaints and then writes rebuttals. Steyn gleefully quotes author Martin Amis who noted that Steyn's "thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a maniac." (p. 106). How very true - Steyn whipsaws back and forth - sometimes darkly sarcastic, sometimes sad, sometimes like a little boy who is glad to point and call names. But, throughout all of it Steyn is right - dead on 100% right. We cannot let the freedom of speech to be compromised, especially not in the name of offending the religious sensibilities of a determined few (my own religious beliefs are assaulted almost daily on sites I visit on the internet, TV and even in my classroom but I hardly am interested in shutting up those who offend me). To quote Steyn again, "What's so bad about disagreement that it needs to be turned into a crime?" (p. 182)

One of the most important books of our troubled times - as a bonus it's a joy to read!

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West

Reviewed on January 30, 2010.

The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

A Classic

Published in 1998.

Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation is a classic. This is not sophisticated writing and the format is basic but Brokaw's interviews with dozens and dozens of veterans of World War II, their wives, their children and their comments on how the war affected them and the way they lived the rest of their lives is a loving tribute to his father's generation.

Brokaw has sections on regular foot soldiers and sailors, soldiers who went on to become famous such as Caspar Weinberger, Bob Dole, Andy Rooney and Julia Child. He also addresses the racism and sexism of the time (and incorrectly asserts that only the Japanese were forcibly removed - several East Coast Italians were removed to western states and their fishing boats were confiscated, although clearly the Japanese were treated much worse as a group). He also talks to soldiers who were wounded during the war and how that affected them.

Tom Brokaw

Interesting comment from former pacifist Andy Rooney about his witnessing the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp: "For the first time I knew that any peace is not better than any war." (p. 296)

Commentary about the differences of values between generations abounds. I liked this observation about divorce from Peggy Assenzio: "It's too easy to get a divorce. We've had our arguments, but we don't give up. When my friends ask whether I ever considered divorce I remind them of the old saying, 'We've thought about killing each other, but divorce? Never.'" (p. 239)

I also like the observation of a black soldier who philosophically overlooked the racism he experienced: "When you get over there and the nation's in trouble you ain't got no black and white. You only got America." (p. 199)

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw.

Reviewed on January 30, 2010.