Review: The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking

The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking by Olivia Fox Cabane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a varied collection of active thinking techniques some of which could even be labeled new age: meditation, etc. Be prepared for "loving kindness" and "mindfulness". Well, at the peak levels, it is all a head game and this motivating compendium of approaches reminds us of the activating effects of altruism, and the voice of genius that can be heard in zen-like tranquility. There are also useful approaches to corral brainstorming sessions in meetings, etc.

View all my reviews

Review: New World, Inc.: How England's Merchant Adventurers Created America

New World, Inc.: How England's Merchant Adventurers Created America by John Butman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read a lot of early American history; more in the past than recently. While few subjects cause so much ink to be expended, what more can really be said? This book really does bring, for me, a new perspective. Reaching back to the 1558 end of the Pale of Calais and the English wool trade interests, this book sets up the economic and social motivations for reaching out to the markets of "Cathay" through -- whatever would work -- the Northeast or Northwest passage. On the surface, this seems rather dry, but the social motivation are an unruly populace exemplified by Robert Kett. Kett's Rebellion was a revolt in Norfolk, England during the reign of Edward VI, largely in response to the enclosure of land. It began with a group of rebels destroying fences. One of their targets was yeoman farmer Robert Kett who, instead of resisting the rebels, agreed to their demands and offered to lead them. This is a small part, and Kett does not even rate an entry in the largest "Cast of Characters" I have seen, but it is one of the spicy tales of unrest that shows how England, certainly by the time of Elizabeth I, truly needed to find a new market for its wool goods. This economic need may seem easy to satisfy in a globe being conquered and colonized left and right, but England was much behind the game compared to Spain, Portugal, and even France. In probing around the New World looking for a toehold, the first came about (and this is something I learned here) as New Albion claimed by Sir Francis Drake for England in 1579 on the coast of what is now California. So, this was years before Roanoke, Jamestown, etc. Of course those more well-known settlements get their due, which seems rather anti-climactic and back into the familiar territory. The author here spices this up with some insight by explaining how the impact and perceived relevance of The Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony) versus the Puritans (Massachusetts Bay Colony) began to be crafted as a sort of American forefather mythology, really in the days after The Civil War. (The Pilgrims offering an ideal; The Puritans a pragmatism so loose as to even admit slavery.) Either way, all were ultimately after lucre...

[I received a copy of this book from the publisher to review.]

View all my reviews

Review: History of Number: Evidence from Papua New Guinea and Oceania

History of Number: Evidence from Papua New Guinea and Oceania by Kay Owens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Having previously reviewed Visuospatial Reasoning: An Ecocultural Perspective for Space, Geometry and Measurement Education, I was intrigued to learn more about the insights gleaned through years of study done with the varied indigenous peoples of the region. This volume focuses on the development of counting systems from body-part tallying (by fingers, toes, etc.) to more abstract application. The studies here approach variously the diffusion, categorization, and modern-day survival of the systems studied..."

[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]

View all my reviews

Review: Waylon: Tales of My Outlaw Dad

Waylon: Tales of My Outlaw Dad by Terry Jennings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a really great musician biography from Waylon's eldest. His backstage pass to the meteoric rise of outlaw country has details of Waylon's prodigious cocaine use, cameos from Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, and tales of life on the road during a hectic career in the '70s. Jennings inside view is both very forthcoming and unguarded while exuding a true love and respect for his talented and pioneering father from playing bass in The Crickets "The Day the Music Died" to unilaterally leaving drugs behind to be a better parent.

View all my reviews

Review: The Venlo Incident: A True Story of Double-Dealing, Captivity, and a Murderous Nazi Plot

The Venlo Incident: A True Story of Double-Dealing, Captivity, and a Murderous Nazi Plot by S. Payne Best
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Venlo Incident was a covert German Sicherheitsdienst (SD-Security Service) operation, in the course of which two British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agents were abducted on the outskirts of the town of Venlo, the Netherlands, on 9 November 1939.[1][2] The incident was later used by the German Nazi government to link Britain to Georg Elser's failed assassination attempt on German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, Germany, on 8 November 1939 and to help justify Germany's invasion of the Netherlands, while a neutral country, on 10 May 1940. However the plot, or actually its denouement, is just a brief bit ox exposition here. There is no real details on "Double-Dealing" or a "Murderous Nazi Plot". This is a POW memoir about "Captivity". Yet, it is a fascinating, detailed, and broad POW memoir. Author and British SIS agent Captain Sigismund Payne Best was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen between 1940 and 1945, and for a few months of 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp. So, basically all of WW II. He was really a celebrity inmate and did not have a typical POW experience, let alone a concentration camp experience, yet his many years as a German prisoner and insights into the psychological changes in long internment are engrossing. He also observed or crossed paths with many notable inmates, including Reverend Martin Niemöller (critic of the Nazis and author of the statement "First they came ..."), Leifur H. Muller (an Icelandic trader), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer the German pastor, theologian, spy, anti-Nazi dissident. It was while researching Bonhoeffer fascinating life of resolute convictions that I discovered this book.

View all my reviews

Review: A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First of all, kudos to Borders for a beautifully designed paperback edition with deckle edges and a heavy-duty cover with flaps usable for bookmarks, like a dust jacket on a hardcover.

Now, as for the content, this is what I want when I read other Dickens title: evocative description and metaphor, but with an economy unlike the over-writing I feel I encounter in his other novels. The setting from an American Revolutionary War espionage trial to the rapine of the freely wielded guillotine in a much bloodier revolution in France is recalls a fascinating era with as much of a sociological dimension to consider as The Holocaust: That happened.

I am not as much sold on the blood. I think the villainy of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, the cruel uncle of the heroic Charles Darnay, rather gets lots in this inter-generational and inter-continental tale. (I think Wuthering Heights does a better job with the decades of dastardly deeds perpetrated on a family by Heathcliff.) While on film he has been played by several actors and the Basil Rathbone portrayal of St. Evrémonde was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains as one of the Top 50 Villains I think it can be argued that the film portrayal much more "cut to the chase" than the book.

View all my reviews

Review: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this 2011 work just barely predates the 4 July 2012 discovery of a new particle that physicists suspected was the Higgs boson, I feel this is the best book I have read of several laying on the brane-based multi-verse theories. I feel as a popularizer of notions and having a low bar of entry, it is even better than Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. This is very easy to follow with clear analogies such as blurry photographs of a fly and the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and similarly works well to explain simply ideas like Planck constant and information capacity, the Copenhagen interpretation and, new to me, the inflaton field theorized to drive cosmic inflation in the very early universe. In short, an excellent summary introduction by a researched in cosmology with a gift for explanation.

View all my reviews