Do you have authors who so transport you that you read unappealing books by them? I’ve no interest at all in the subject matter of Po Bronson’s latest, written with Ashley Merriman, called NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. But the man is such a vigorous writer, I’ll grab this as soon as possible.
One of the genetic topics I undertook to pursue and follow, on an erratic path to find ‘truth’ and story ideas, was that of stem cells. How controversial and mysterious they seemed! Well, I’ve just concluded a 2006 primer with the bloated title of The Stem Cell Divide: The Facts, the Fiction, and the Fear [...]
Mostly from the latest Readings catalogue: Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, on Trotsky and art, The Lacuna Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey’s historical, novelistic gaze at USA From a great novelist, a personal exploration of vegetariansim, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals I’m not sure where I found this, but I was drawn to David Kessler’s The End [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
Research crunches side reading, so October was a poor month. A bit of travel in November invites a flood of fiction: Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing Ward Just is a much-praised novelist virtually unknown in Australia – I’ll try his latest, this year’s Exiles in the Garden I hope the latest Ian Rankin – [...]
I’m still savouring Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography (I’m a third of the way through her second volume Matisse the Master). One aspect of Matisse that captivates and astounds me is how he is driven by some volcanic impetus, again and again, to innovate, at huge cost to his psyche and his family. In June 1914, [...]
Let’s get the disclaimer over with. I know and like Joel Magarey, but I hadn’t read more than a few advance pages of Exposure: A Journey before I bought it, and I was most keen to check it out. The good news: this is one of the most individualistic, lyrical memoirs around. Exposure is nominally the [...]
Everyone uses simulation these days, Autocad being a prime example. I’m particularly interested in it because safety analysis of nuclear reactors involves massive multi-branching computer programs, a kind of simulation I guess, called PSAs (Probablistic Safety Analyses). As well, reactor operators, like airline pilots, practise (if that’s the word, train might be a better term) [...]
Days after stumbling across a new book on oil, Peter Maass’s Crude World, a regular email from Harper spruiks a fascinating, more general book on energy, Amanda Little’s Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Any book that comes with blurbs by Robert Redford, Jim Rogers (Duke [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
One of The Australian Financial Review’s regular magazines, badly named as Boss, has a business books section that rarely yields anything worthwhile. But the latest issue throws up two intriguing possibilities: Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong is ‘written with aplomb’ - Stewart, apparently an ex-founding partner of a management [...]
Always on the lookout for readable books about energy sources, I was delighted to read Jonathan Hiskes’ interview (on Grist) of journalist Peter Maass, about his new book Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.
Also posted in Coal's End |