I'm healthy enough to feel like studying or reading non-fiction again, and have started this book, on the nature of expertise, and arguing that generally breadth is better than overspecialization ( Read more... )

By Amin Maalouf. I finished this book last night. It's been highly recommended, and I liked it. Not too long, and fairly simple in structure: chronological, with Crusades arriving, getting fought, and finally kicked out. I found it an engaging read. Some surprises or sociological points:

( Mercy cut for your reading page )

I finished Revolts. Farley is really good at writing thrillers. A friend's daughters get very excited watching tense movies or episodes, especially the youngest girl, even when they know the plot and outcome; youngest will get up to shake out tension, or hide from the TV, or cling to mother for comfort. I felt a lot like that reading this book, ( Read more... )

When I was very young I read a bunch of Walter Farley's Black Stallion novels. I even wanted to be a jockey, until I saw Feynman on TV and wanted to be a physicist, at around age 8 ( Read more... )

The whole Lady Trent series. I enjoyed re-read it, and some arc bits made more sense when I read them back to back ( Read more... )

I finished Pinker's book a couple days ago. I liked it. There were a few things I found to quibble with, and reviews pointed out some more, which is disappointing, but I don't think they cancel out the point of the book. Like the last one, the book is a linguist/psychologist doing amateur very long form journalism, so some errors aren't a ( Read more... )

_If a Lion Could Talk_, Stephen Budiansky, 1998 ( Read more... )

I gave to this book to G in 2003; I just re-read that exact copy. It's a neat book about... I'm not sure how to summarize it. The first chapter is about standard cube-square scaling laws as applied to animal size, and why elephants are shaped differently from antelopes. But most of the rest of the book is about warm vs. cold bloodedness, to ( Read more... )

Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky. Pretty engaging tome on the history of salt's use and extraction, and its legal or military entanglements. Trying to fund a government off of salt tax or monopoly has been common, and commonly hated, from Legalist China to British abuses in India. The US Civil War can partially be told as a history of fights ( Read more... )

1987 book I just finished, by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson. It's about the contact between white Australians and highland New Guinea in the 1930s, mostly done by Australian gold prospector Michael Leahy, with Leahy's 1930s photographs (and some 1980s ones, by the book's authors.) It's main sources are Leahy's diaries and 1980s interviews of ( Read more... )