Books and Movies, January 2011
Movies
The Freshman
Fresh
Free Money
Foreign Correspondent
The Formula
Of these, Fresh and Foreign Correspondent are the best. In his commentary on Fresh, the director made the point that we often look forward to the violent scenes in movies the way we look forward to musical numbers. They're often the best edited and put-together bits and they're exciting. In Fresh, he said, he tried to make the violence very fast (in a "what just happened?" way and not a "cool! look how fast they're cutting between shots of the gun and people's faces!" way) and move on.
Foreign Correspondent is international intrigue and also love! Two characters decide they want to marry each other after minimal hijinks. Awww! Most of the story, though, is solid. It's Hitchcock. It takes place (and was released) right before US entry into World War II. It ends with a patriotic send-off to America during a blackout in London (Keep your lights on, America! They're the only lights on Earth.).
Books
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Best American Science Writing 2009 ed. Natalie Angier and Jesse Cohen
What Einstein Told His Cook by Robert Wolke
The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten
These are all excellent, A+, highly recommended. Spoon I saw on my library's page of books on-order, and I thought, "that's a neat-looking cover," so I put a hold on it. The same with Fiddler. Spoon is a science-light, anecdote-heavy trip through the periodic table of the elements, and it's fascinating. The King of France had a set of aluminum flatware for extra-special guests. Slightly less highly-favored guests used gold. There is sufficient science to understand the properties of elements (silicon is too bulky to do for aliens what carbon does for us), but the rest is stories. And Kean spends a fair amount of time talking about women in science (the three people who had done the most work on relativity before 1920 were women: Meisner, Joliot-Curie, and that one whose name I can't remember), which endears him to me. Fiddler is a collection of Gene Weingarten's features. It ranges from his piece on children's entertainer The Great Zucchini to the title piece, for which The Washington Post had Joshua Bell (who is apparently a famous violinist; if you don't keep track of famous violinists and the name still sound familiar, it might be because he did the actual violin-playing in The Red Violin) play in L'Enfant Plaza metro station for an hour, just to see what would happen. In other pieces, Weingarten searches for the armpit of America, only to try to convince his editor not to publish because it's October 2001 and snide is out ("you go back to that armpit," his editor says, "and find its heart"). He talks about his father's increasing blindness, he talks about going out to middle-of-nowhere Alaska. He talks about infant hyperthermia, usually caused by parents forgetting their children in hot cars. He goes to the home of a little girl, where statues cry oil.
Einstein is also WaPo-related: Robert Wolke has been writing the Food 101 column for the Food section for a while (since 2001?). I doubt Einstein would have known a lot of these things, since he wasn't a biologist or a chemist. Anyway. The book is designed as a reference volume. You look up "sugar" in the index, you read the pieces about sugar. But I read it straight through, which also works. It has a question-and-answer format ("I thought corn was a low-fat food, so how do they make corn oil?" "They use a lot of corn.") that works very well. Most answers have a short answer (see: corn oil) and a longer explanation with facts, figures, and/or accounts of experiments Wolke has conducted himself to test ideas.
Science Writing is a multi-colored duck. It has pieces about itching, torture, reducing crime in urban areas, possible worlds theory, astronomers trying to raise money for better or bigger telescopes. Every piece is good. It's worth noting, these are not scientific papers. These are articles from The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Onion. They are all, again, excellent. Good job, January.
The Freshman
Fresh
Free Money
Foreign Correspondent
The Formula
Of these, Fresh and Foreign Correspondent are the best. In his commentary on Fresh, the director made the point that we often look forward to the violent scenes in movies the way we look forward to musical numbers. They're often the best edited and put-together bits and they're exciting. In Fresh, he said, he tried to make the violence very fast (in a "what just happened?" way and not a "cool! look how fast they're cutting between shots of the gun and people's faces!" way) and move on.
Foreign Correspondent is international intrigue and also love! Two characters decide they want to marry each other after minimal hijinks. Awww! Most of the story, though, is solid. It's Hitchcock. It takes place (and was released) right before US entry into World War II. It ends with a patriotic send-off to America during a blackout in London (Keep your lights on, America! They're the only lights on Earth.).
Books
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Best American Science Writing 2009 ed. Natalie Angier and Jesse Cohen
What Einstein Told His Cook by Robert Wolke
The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten
These are all excellent, A+, highly recommended. Spoon I saw on my library's page of books on-order, and I thought, "that's a neat-looking cover," so I put a hold on it. The same with Fiddler. Spoon is a science-light, anecdote-heavy trip through the periodic table of the elements, and it's fascinating. The King of France had a set of aluminum flatware for extra-special guests. Slightly less highly-favored guests used gold. There is sufficient science to understand the properties of elements (silicon is too bulky to do for aliens what carbon does for us), but the rest is stories. And Kean spends a fair amount of time talking about women in science (the three people who had done the most work on relativity before 1920 were women: Meisner, Joliot-Curie, and that one whose name I can't remember), which endears him to me. Fiddler is a collection of Gene Weingarten's features. It ranges from his piece on children's entertainer The Great Zucchini to the title piece, for which The Washington Post had Joshua Bell (who is apparently a famous violinist; if you don't keep track of famous violinists and the name still sound familiar, it might be because he did the actual violin-playing in The Red Violin) play in L'Enfant Plaza metro station for an hour, just to see what would happen. In other pieces, Weingarten searches for the armpit of America, only to try to convince his editor not to publish because it's October 2001 and snide is out ("you go back to that armpit," his editor says, "and find its heart"). He talks about his father's increasing blindness, he talks about going out to middle-of-nowhere Alaska. He talks about infant hyperthermia, usually caused by parents forgetting their children in hot cars. He goes to the home of a little girl, where statues cry oil.
Einstein is also WaPo-related: Robert Wolke has been writing the Food 101 column for the Food section for a while (since 2001?). I doubt Einstein would have known a lot of these things, since he wasn't a biologist or a chemist. Anyway. The book is designed as a reference volume. You look up "sugar" in the index, you read the pieces about sugar. But I read it straight through, which also works. It has a question-and-answer format ("I thought corn was a low-fat food, so how do they make corn oil?" "They use a lot of corn.") that works very well. Most answers have a short answer (see: corn oil) and a longer explanation with facts, figures, and/or accounts of experiments Wolke has conducted himself to test ideas.
Science Writing is a multi-colored duck. It has pieces about itching, torture, reducing crime in urban areas, possible worlds theory, astronomers trying to raise money for better or bigger telescopes. Every piece is good. It's worth noting, these are not scientific papers. These are articles from The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Onion. They are all, again, excellent. Good job, January.