The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s,The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. Shallow and lost, Kitty marries the intellectual and passionate Walter Fane, a bacteriologist on leave from the Far East who is madly in love with her. She does this purely so that she can be married before her younger sister, Doris, and to get away from her mother. They move to Hong Kong where, bored by the stifling climate and social mores, Kitty quickly starts an affair with the "perfect" Charles Townsend, the handsome assistant colonial secretary. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love. See the movie too. | ||
Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould. is the second volume of collected essays culled from his monthly column "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine, to which Gould contributed for 27 years. The book deals, in typically discursive fashion, with themes familiar to Gould's writing: evolution and its teaching, science biography, probabilities and common sense. | ||
Papillon by Henri Charriere. Henri Papillion was the only person to ever escape from the French Penal colony known as Devil's Island. The book is worth reading, the movie entertaining but neither is close to the truth. Papillon was sent to Devil's Island for a crime he didn't commit, but when you read the book, you will understand that they had the right man in jail. The movie is even more of a stretch than the book and Henri was the technical advisor on the film. | ||
The Partner by John Grisham. Grisham is an excellent formula writer much like Michener, but this book deviates from the formula in a delightful way. Many graceful plot twists along the way to a surprise ending. | ||
Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov. One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next he’s a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it’s the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil—so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty.Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.This is young Isaac Asimov’s first novel, full of wonders and ideas, the book that launched the novels of the Galactic Empire, culminating in the Foundation books and novels. It is also one of that select group of SF adventures that since the early 1950s has hooked generations of teenagers on reading science fiction. This is Golden Age SF at its finest. | ||
Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown & Christopher Vaughn. We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. We are designed by nature to flourish through play.Dr. Brown has spent his career studying animal behavior and conducting more than six- thousand "play histories" of humans from all walks of life-from serial murderers to Nobel Prize winners. Backed by the latest research, Play (20,000 copies in print) explains why play is essential to our social skills, adaptability, intelligence, creativity, ability to problem solve and more. Particularly in tough times, we need to play more than ever, as it's the very means by which we prepare for the unexpected, search out new solutions, and remain optimistic. A fascinating blend of cutting-edge neuroscience, biology, psychology, social science, and inspiring human stories of the transformative power of play, this book proves why play just might be the most important work we can ever do. | ||
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut, wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality. Published in 1952, Vonnegut was influenced by a numerical control machine (a programmable tool to make complex parts). This book is still fresh in spite of having supercomputers powered by vacuum tubes. I used to assign this book for extra credit in my programming classes. The question the class was asked to speak to was whether engineers have any responsibility for their creations. Another dystopian novel that lampoons both automation and capitalism. Showing the degradation they cause to the quality of life. Oops, Rush Limbaugh may be listening. | ||
Plugged by Eion Colfer. crime caper so outlandish, so maniacal, so wickedly funny, it could have only come from the mind that brought you Artemis Fowl. Daniel McEvoy has a problem. Well, really, he has several, but for this Irish ex-pat bouncer at a seedy, small-time casino the fact that his girlfriend was just murdered in the parking lot is uppermost in his mind. That is until lots of people around him start dying, and not of natural causes. Suddenly Daniel's got half the New Jersey mob, dirty cops and his man-crazy upstairs neighbor after him and he still doesn't know what's going on. Bullets are flying, everybody's on the take and it all may be more than Daniel's new hair plugs can handle. And Daniel's got to find the guy who put in those hair plugs--or at least his body--and fast, or else he'll never get that voice out of his head. Head-spinning plot twists, breakneck pacing and some of the best banter this side of Elmore Leonard's Detroit, will keep you on the edge of your seat and itching for more. Truly just fluff, but well worth the time and money. Like Janet Evonvich with more action. | ||
Practical Demonkeeping-by Christopher Moore. This is Chris's first book and not quite as good as the rest, but if you have read any of the others you will want to read this one too. Still in this ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and "roads" scholar Travis O'Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose. If this is the first of Christopher Moore's books you read, pay attention, Pine Grove gets revisited often. Soon you may feel like a resident. | ||
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. When Machiavelli’s brief treatise on Renaissance statecraft and princely power was posthumously published in 1532, it generated a debate that has raged unabated until the present day. Based upon Machiavelli’s first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyzes the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. Machiavelli added a dimension of incisive realism to one of the major philosophical and political issues of his time, especially the relationship between public deeds and private morality. His book provides a remarkably uncompromising picture of the true nature of power, no matter in what era or by whom it is exercised. This fluent new translation is accompanied by an introduction that considers the true purpose of The Prince and dispels some of the myths associated with it. It has the most comprehensive explanatory and critical notes found in any currently available English translation and the most comprehensive bibliography in any edition of the work. | ||
Psychology of Computer Programming. A look at some comical examples of things gone wrong in the world of computers. This is a great management book too. Too often managers don't look at the consequences of their decisions. This book is very funny but practical too. A bit dated in terms of the technology but worth the read. Our workforce would be much more productive if we could achieve the egoless concept.
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The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein. First came the news that a flying saucer had landed in Iowa. Then came the announcement that the whole thing was a hoax. End of story. Case closed. Except that two agents of the most secret intelligence agency in the U.S. government were on the scene and disappeared without reporting in. And four more agents who were sent in also disappeared. So the head of the agency and his two top agents went in and managed to get out with their discovery: an invasion is underway by slug-like aliens who can touch a human and completely control his or her mind. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And most of Iowa is already under their control. Sam Cavanaugh was one of the agents who discovered the truth. Unfortunately, that was just before he was taken over by one of the aliens and began working for the invaders, with no will of his own. And he has just learned that a high official in the Treasury Department is now under control of the aliens. Since the Treasury Department includes the Secret Service, which safeguards the President of the United States, control of the entire nation is near at hand. |
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