Eubie's notes

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. I enjoy Bryson. I’ve enjoyed several of his books. This ranges from why there button on the sleeves of men’s coats to child labor laws. Good book for reading during distracting times.

Other Bryson books I’ve read:

• A short history of nearly everything
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
• In a Sunburned Country
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
• I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson. I enjoyed the history of the Chicago World’s Fair and plan to read Larson’s latest book “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin”.

Plugged: A Novel by Eoin Colfer. This was his first book for “adults”, though I enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books even though they were written for a younger audience.

Legacy of Honor: The Values and Influence of America’s Eagle Scouts by Alvin Townley. A good book to read at a Boy Scout summer camp in July. The book interviews men across the country who look back on what and how earning the Eagle rank has helped them.

I hope soon to be the parent of an Eagle and I hope the time and effort has been worth it. One thing about the Eagle award is that it is earned by the boy. There are a lots of parents and scoutmasters pushing, but it’s the boy’s award.

Even in the Scouting organization, only about 2 percent of boys who have even been in Scouting earn Eagle. I’ve been a Scout leader in a troop where the percentage is higher. The current group of boys working on their Eagle are boys I’ve known since they were in Tiger Scouts.

Red Gold by Alan Furst — a World War II mystery. This wasn’t Furst’s first book, but I liked the book enough to want to ready his first book.

In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Stephen Levy. Google is one of the key disruptive companies of this past decade. It’s more than a history of Google, it also helps explain the company’s core values as compared with many of its earlier competitors. One of the best stories was about the people with AltaVista, being worried that Google’s results were so good that users would not spend enough time looking at the ads that supported AltaVista. Remember AltaVista and others that are now part of the Search Engine Graveyard.

Levy also wrote How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web for Wired magazine in 2010j, which was passed around in our office to help us understand Google.

One Second After by William R. Forstchen — An EMP pulse chance life forever in the United States with the focus of the book being Black Mountain, N.C., a favorite place for me. The books is sobering and unsettling and is a book that people are passing along to others. See Forstchen’s web site at One Second After. Many years ago I enjoyed another post-apocalyptic tale Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jeffy Pournelle

Act of Will by A.J. Hartley — Hartley lives in Charlotte, but the book is set in a fictional world in the middle ages. I liked that the book was less than 340 pages and not the large volumes I see in similar quest stories. This was my first book by Hartley, but I’d like to read more.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee — Helps explain why there is no single war on cancer, because cancer is not one thing. And making the battle even harder is that cancer evolves. Cancer evolves making promising cures ineffective. It is the dark side of life and will remain a part of our lives, because it is created from our lives. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2011.

206 Bones by Kathy Reichs — Still searching for writers similar to Michael Crichton, one of may favorite authors. This was my first book by Reichs, and the writing style reminded of author Robert B. Parker.

Missed this issue over the past two weeks.  The Big Spill Over ‘Three Cups of Tea’ caught my eye because of Rye Barcott’s N.C. connections. He was in Charlotte last week promoting his book It happened on the Way to War.

Author William Zinsser, in Greg Mortenson book under review after CBS report, on book publishers: “I don’t think they much care whether it’s true or not.”

• The Big Spill Over ‘Three Cups of Tea’
• ‘Three Cups of Tea’ Will Be Reviewed By Publisher

• Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut — Vonnegut helps keep the world in perspective.
• America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation by Jim Rasenberger — a close looks at the year 1908. The stories of the Wright Brothers and the Model T were the most interesting.
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton — this may not have been his best book, but mediocre Crichton is still better than many.
• The Little Book of Big Dividends by Charles B. Carlson — with a rising stock market one is tempted to re-consider owning individual stocks, forgetting lessons learned not so long ago.

• Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. — Good book, and it led me to read another Michael Crichton book.
• The Modern Scholar: Unseen Diversity: The World of Bacteria by Betsey Dexter Dyer
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. –I remain fascinated on stories about how things went wrong. It is so different to look back compared with being there at that time.”

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman — I expected to hear about the nuclear arms weapon plans. I was surprised to hear how advanced the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program was. Also the Soviet Union’s attitude during this period was to publicly deny they had broken treaties banning building biological weapons and they assumed the U.S. was lying too.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed — good look at the central banks of the U.S. and major European countries between World War I and II, and how little they really understood. Keynes is portrayed well in the book with a better grasp of the economic impact of the central bank’s actions.

Deception by Jonathon Kellerman