Review: Columbus: The Four Voyages

Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Fascinating take on the complex and frustratingly vainglorious explorer. Finding a New World, he chooses violence, theft, and slavery as standard protocol. We are probably all the poorer for it, now.

The malingering of his men, the gold-thirst of Columbus and the shocked reaction and unheeded advice of Bartolomé de las Casas along with the Colubmus family affair of his brothers and son all add to this telling of start of the Columbian Exchange, including Columbus's hyper-Christian fantasies such that the Earth was pear-shaped and he found the base of the nipple-stem that led to Heaven.



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Review: Sister of Silence

Sister of Silence by Daleen Berry

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a story of woman who endured chronic date rape and when that led to pregnacy and prime time news attention, tried to build a house of love out of that mess. Sad, very sad, and a very real exposition of the psychology of vicitimization.



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Review: Basic Partial Differential Equations

Basic Partial Differential Equations by David Bleecker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



... The tight integration of the material show the work and effort the authors put in to creating this PDEs text. I have always felt the first PDEs text for a student should challenge the student’s earlier calculus text in size. This is an excellent text for a student’s first deep dive into this important, fundamental topic. It has the breadth and heft covering basic and advanced topics in the subject. It is unusual in my experience to see a work of this scope assigned as a university text for PDEs, so I advise the wise to consider this as a supplement.

See my full review up at MathDL Reviews.



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Review: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg

The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg by Doug Bremner

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



What should have been two books, ends up as one confused collision of stories. Fighting the good fight against big Pharma over the suicidal depressive effects of Accutane, Dr. Bremner gets a bug to hunt down this birth mother's grave and family. Part Two thus becomes a redemptive and heart-warming second story where Roche's private investigators and depositions fades into the background to the level of a whisper, which is probably what Bremer wanted at the time...



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Review: Essential Works of Stoicism

Essential Works of Stoicism by Moses Hadas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The meat of this slim volume is the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Auerlieus "To Himself". The rest is immaterial and doesn't matter, anyway. But the humble, searching tone of the other two works and the settled peace with acceptance and a reflective, circumspect attitude speaks with a voice that reaches across the eons to deliver wisdom.

This is the best, compact overview of classic Stocism I have ever seen.



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Review: Howard Hughes: The Untold Story

Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A fascinating, thoroughly researched and detailed exegesis of the mysterious and impactful life of Howard Hughes. Being brain-damaged, syphillitic, and enslaved by OCD would be a debilitating condition for you and I, probably leading to institutionalized. For the charismatic genius Hughes, it was merely crippling and it took six decades to do him in while surrounded by Mormons and sycophants. Along the way, the satyr chased skirts (Katherine Hepburn to Ava Gardner and beyond), kept a virtual harem, advanced aviation from military to commercial and built the family oil drill tooling fortune to a billion dollar fortune where he held sway over a vast empire that included an airline, entertainment studios, casinos, and more.

Probably among the most revealing exposes here (if among the most thinly documented) is that Nixon's famous recording deletion covered damaging admission to Hughes' money going into Nixon's pockets.



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Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was an affecting and moving read. In an intertwined tale that becomes enlightening and important, Skloot explains to read and guides in hand Lacks' family through a twisted history of changing medical ethics and one woman's family's frustrated attempts to learn the impact and understand the relevance to cancer and bioligical resarch the long-lived strain of their relative' cells.



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