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Review: A Wild Pursuit by Eloisa James (audiobook)

25 May

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

This one didn’t work all that well for me. Eloisa James is an excellent writer, but I just didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t find their antics entertaining.

Summary via Goodreads.com:

It is whispered behind the fans of London’s dowagers and in the corners of fashionable ballrooms that scandal follows willfully wild Lady Beatrix Lennox wherever she goes.

Three years before, the debutante created a sensation by being found in a distinctly compromising position. Now, the ton has branded her as unmarriageable, her family has called her a vixen, and Beatrix sees no reason not to go after what — and who — she wishes.

And she wants Stephen Fairfax-Lacy, the handsome Earl of Spade. Beatrix, with her brazen suggestions and irresistibly sensuous allure, couldn’t be more different from the earl’s ideal future bride. Yet Beatrix brings out a wildness in the earl he has tried to deny far too long. Still, he’s not about to play love’s game by Lady Beatrix’s rules. She may be used to being on top in affairs of the heart, but that will soon change.

I’ll start out by saying this: The complexity of the relationships in this book were fun to follow– there was a lot going on, and the intricacies were well constructed. I loved Arabella, even if I didn’t agree with, well pretty much anything she did. I hated Esme’s mother exactly as much as was intended. The writing was fantastic, as I expect from Eloisa James.

I love character-driven books. In particular, that’s what i enjoy about romance novels– the ones I enjoy give me a chance to explore the world of another person. For this to work for me I have to like or identify with the character. In a different sort of book, I can deal with an unpleasant heroine, but not in a romance.

As you can guess, I didn’t like the main characters here.

I was almost completely neutral on the only real male character, Stephen Fairfax-Lacey. I didn’t hate the other characters. They’d have been entertaining enough secondary characters, if I’d had a main character I could relate to. In fact, if you like a little more edge to your romance heroines, you might well love this one.

But Beatrix uses her sexuality as a weapon, and pursues an encounter that will undermine a friendship. Esme orders away the man she loves, and then pouts because he actually goes. She undercuts the arrangements she made with a friend to salvage her own pride. And so on.

In the end, I’m certain it isn’t a bad book, just one that didn’t completely work for me. In the ways it didn’t follow the usual structure of a romance novel, it may not appeal to some, where others may appreciate the way that it breaks out of the usual patterns.

Audio Notes

Sound Bytes @ Devourer of Books

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes.

Narrator: Justine Eyre was the narrator for this book.  I think she did a good job, but since I didn’t like the characters, it made it hard to like her.

Production: No problems, no extras

Print vs. Audio?  I suspect I personally would have done better in print with this one, although not by much.  I can distance myself from characters I don’t like better when they aren’t in my head.  Depending on where I am when I am listening, I can find the steamy scenes… awkward, and they are much harder to skim through (and this was a very steamy read).  But there aren’t any problems with the audio production that would lead me to recommend against it, just know your own tastes.

 
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Posted by on May 25, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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Review: How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue (with book club notes)

19 May

Cover: How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg DonohueMy rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

How to Eat a Cupcake is a wonderful book about truly becoming an adult. It’s about friendship and what makes a family. It’s about starting a business. And it’s about cupcakes.

Summary via Goodreads.com:

Funny, free-spirited Annie Quintana and sophisticated, ambitious Julia St. Clair come from two different worlds. Yet, as the daughter of the St. Clair’s housekeeper, Annie grew up in Julia’s San Francisco mansion and they forged a bond that only two little girls who know nothing of class differences and scholarships could—until a life-altering betrayal destroyed their friendship.

A decade later, Annie is now a talented, if underpaid, pastry chef who bakes to fill the void left in her heart by her mother’s death. Julia, a successful businesswoman, is tormented by a painful secret that could jeopardize her engagement to the man she loves. When a chance reunion prompts the unlikely duo to open a cupcakery, they must overcome past hurts and a mysterious saboteur or risk losing their fledgling business and any chance of healing their fractured friendship.

When I first read the description of this book (probably not exactly the words above, but something close to it), I thought it would be the light, fluffy, fun kind of woman’s fiction (dare I say– chick lit?). I like light, fluffy, fun books, but chick lit often seems to rub me the wrong way.  I found the description of this book interesting enough to be willing to give it a try anyway.

I’m glad I did. The book is fun, but not the light, fluffy kind, and not the annoying, “why don’t these women just grow up” kind. It’s thoughtful and multilayered, with characters that are real and appealing (some more immediately than others).

Getting to know Annie was easy. She’s worked hard for everything she has, she makes time for friends, and she misses her mother. She’s perhaps a little too open and trusting for her own good, at least where everyone but the St. Claire family is concerned. She’s a genuinely nice person.

Julia is definitely not nice. Driven and successful are (at least in the beginning) the most polite words to describe her. In this, she takes after her own mother. But there is more to her than that, even if she has trouble seeing it herself. Her complicated love life, with a secret she’s waiting for the right time to disclose, isn’t helping. And beginning to realize how her long past behaviour affected her one-time best friend isn’t making her feel any better about her life now.

These women are both still young, but are finally settling into the people they are going to be, and it’s a pleasure to watch them grow.

Equally, I was involved in seeing the process of them building a business together, and watching them figure out why unexpected obstacles (like vandalism) were being thrown in their path.

And reading about the cupcakes themselves was, well, the icing on the cake.

 Book Club Notes

After I accepted this book for review (thank you, Harper Collins!), my friend Ruth nominated it for discussion for one of my book clubs.  I supported it, and enough other people were interested that it was one of the books selected.   I was slightly concerned about the potential fluff factor (our other group has read a few fun books where were enjoyed by all, but there was really not much to say), but was mostly excited about the possibilities.

The concern and excitement both skyrocketed when Ruth (who worked on Meg Donohue’s website) arranged for her to join us at our meeting.  We’ve talked about author visits before, but it has never worked out (way too many authors live on the East Coast, and are in bed before our California book club meets, so even Skype tends to fall through).

Luckily, having Meg visit worked out wonderfully.  We all liked the book (I checked before she arrived), and she was sweet, charming and very interesting.  It was a lot of fun to get definitive answers to some of our questions, and to learn more about the process of writing and publishing a book.  The latter aspect (and the introductions and get to know each other chat) took the place of our usual social time, and I don’t think anyone minded!

The discussion would have gone well even without Meg’s presence.  There was plenty to talk about.  We touched on the characters, their motivations and how we reacted to them; the effect that social class had on the characters, and particularly on the two girls growing up and their relationship; the seamless way that the reader was given information about what was happening; the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various love interests portrayed in the story;  the nature of the friendships and family relationships; the setting of the book and how it is portrayed, even a few individual word choices…

I’d recommend How to Eat a Cupcake for book clubs to read and discuss.

 
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Posted by on May 19, 2012 in books, M, reviews

 

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Review: The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

17 May

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Emily St. John Mandel writes books that are unlike any others I’ve read. For her books, that’s a very, very good thing. I’ve really enjoyed all three of them.

In this case, I don’t know whether to describe this more as a thriller with a very literary bent, or a novel about the uncertainty we all face as we move from our teenage dreams into adulthood (which has a mystery/thriller plot as a frame). It doesn’t matter. I enjoyed it as both, although probably more as a look at life than as a mystery.

Here’s the summary via Unbridled Books:

Gavin Sasaki is a promising young journalist in New York City, until he’s fired in disgrace following a series of unforgivable lapses in his work. It’s early 2009, and the world has gone dark very quickly. The economic collapse has turned an era that magazine headlines once heralded as the second gilded age into something that more closely resembles the Great Depression. The last thing Gavin wants to do is return to his hometown of Sebastian, Florida, but he’s in no position to refuse when he’s offered a job by his sister, Eilo, a real estate broker who deals in foreclosed homes. Also, Eilo has shown him a photo of a ten-yearold girl who could be homeless and in trouble. The little girl looks strikingly like Gavin and has the same last name as his high school girlfriend, Anna, from a decade ago. Gavin—a former jazz musician, a reluctant broker of foreclosed properties, obsessed with film noir and private detectives and otherwise at loose ends—begins his own private investigation in an effort to track down Anna and their apparent daughter who, it turns out, have been on the run all these years.

The key to this book was some great characters– completely ordinary people, with ordinary quirks that got each of them into extraordinary situations.

In the book, the Lola Quartet was a group of musicians at a performing arts high school. They were skilled enough for the high school scene, but that didn’t carry through to adulthood. Music flowed through the book, influencing their lives, and popping up as a continuing tie between the characters, even long after they’d dropped all contact with each other.

Each member of the quartet (as well as Gavin’s girlfriend and his sister) was part of the story. Each had quirks and foibles, but I could understand how most of them came to make an incredibly bad decision that snowballed in a way to destroy the life each was expecting to live.

I’m quite sure that I would never have been in the situation that led to one of them stealing a large amount of money, setting in motion the action portion of the book. On the other hand, I could completely understand how Gavin got into the mess he did. I’d like to think I’d have behaved differently. I can’t swear to it, given the pressures he was facing.

So, no one is living they life they expected in high school. Gavin came closest, actually going to work as a reporter, albeit on a smaller scale than he’d dreamed. He was engaged, and life was good, right up until it wasn’t. Thanks to a chance discovery by his sister, he sets out to find out what happened to his high school girlfriend when she just disappeared, and this sets up ripples leading into everyone’s lives.

The book is best when it is exploring the ties between the lives of the characters, and between where they thought they were going versus where they ended up. The mystery aspects where Gavin was hunting for what had happened worked well for me, both as a mystery and as a way of delivering the story of the characters. The action aspect, as the bad guys were chasing and threatening mayhem, worked well as a motivator for the characters, even if I didn’t love it for its own sake. (And I’m not sure why I didn’t. It was well written, and I’m a mystery reader. I certainly didn’t dislike it, or find that it distracted from the story!).

The book is beautifully written.  The words don’t get in the way, but they set the scene, the mood, the characters.  The book truly has a character of its own.  It’s a book I’ll keep thinking about.

Thank you to Unbridled Books for sending me a review copy of The Lola Quartet.

 
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Posted by on May 17, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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Review: The Shoemaker’s Wife by Adriana Trigiani

04 May

The Shoemaker's Wife CoverMy rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this sweeping story of a shoemaker and his wife.  It was my first book from Adriana Trigiani, but it certainly won’t be my last.

Summary via Goodreads:

The majestic and haunting beauty of the Italian Alps is the setting of the first meeting of Enza, a practical beauty, and Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, who meet as teenagers, despite growing up in villages just a few miles apart. At the turn of the last century, when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal, he is banished from his village and sent to hide in America as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Little Italy. Without explanation, he leaves a bereft Enza behind. Soon, Enza’s family faces disaster and she, too, is forced to go to America with her father to secure their future.

Unbeknownst to one another, they both build fledgling lives in America, Ciro masters shoemaking and Enza takes a factory job in Hoboken until fate intervenes and reunites them. But it is too late: Ciro has volunteered to serve in World War I and Enza, determined to forge a life without him, begins her impressive career as a seamstress at the Metropolitan Opera House that will sweep her into the glamorous salons of Manhattan and into the life of the international singing sensation, Enrico Caruso.

From the stately mansions of Carnegie Hill, to the cobblestone streets of Little Italy, over the perilous cliffs of northern Italy, to the white-capped lakes of northern Minnesota, these star-crossed lovers meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever.

This is how you make an interesting story about two seemingly ordinary people. “Turned over to a convent to raise” isn’t a common story, but it doesn’t have to be an interesting one. “Heading to America to work menial jobs and send money to family at home” is a common story, one told many times before. In Trigiani’s hands, even the ordinary details serve to bring the characters to life, to lift them off the pages of the book.

I loved the characters, who weren’t perfect, but were real. They were interesting people, inspiring in a small way, the kind you can believe, the sort of people you could imagine knowing. They’d have interesting things to say, great stories to share.

Trigiani’s writing makes it all come alive. I feel like I have a real sense of rural Italy, of New York and New Jersey, of Minnesota, of life in the shoe maker’s shop, in the sewing factory, and at the opera.

I loved the relationships in this book. The straightforward friendships found in unexpected places, the loving parent-child links, the more troubled parents and children, the complicated siblings, the love interests that were good while they lasted, the marriages that lasted… In all these cases and more, they rang true.

The writing is beautiful, the story is mentally and emotionally engrossing, the characters are rich and believable. Everything I’d want from a sweeping family story is here in this book.

I read this book as part of a TLC Book Tour.  Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book. For more information about Adriana Trigiani, see her website: www.adrianatrigiani.com, her Facebook page, and her Twitter account. For other viewpoints on the book, check out the other tour stops:

TLC Book Tours

 
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Posted by on May 4, 2012 in books, reviews, tour

 

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March/April Wrapup

02 May

I’m behind on my blogging.  I even missed my 3 year blogging anniversary in April.

I’m so behind that this post covers two months of reading wrap-up!  I’m still reading lots of books, just not writing about them as much.  In late March/early April, I was having trouble really getting into any books, but I think I’m back on more solid ground again.

I’m posting approximately one review a week, trying to keep this blog alive.  These are primarily books I received for review, although I hope to get some book club books back in the mix soon.

Print Books

  1. The Shoemaker’s Wife by Adriana Trigiani (review coming Friday!)
  2. Wild Thing (Peter Brown #2) by Josh Bazell
  3. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
  4. Hystera by Leora Skolkin-Smith
  5. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress
  6. The Chalk Girl (Kathleen Mallory #10) by Carol O’Connell
  7. Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet by Heather Poole

Nook Books

  1. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare*
  2. Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West
  3. The Maze Runner (Maze Runner #1) by James Dashner
  4. The Spellman Files (The Spellmans #1) by Lisa Lutz*
  5. Weddings Can Be Murder by Christie Craig
  6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins*
  7. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins*
  8. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins*

Audio Books

  1. A Wild Pursuit (Duchess Quartet #3) by Eloisa James
  2. So Much to Tell You (So Much to Tell You #1) by John Marsden
  3. Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer
  4. Always Time to Die (St. Kilda Consulting #1) by Elizabeth Lowell
  5. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
  6. Second Grave on the Left (Charley Davidson #2) by Darynda Jones
  7. Just Kids by Patti Smith
  8. Relic (Pendergast #1) by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
  9. Beauvallet by Georgette Heyer
  10. Ice Cold (Rizzoli & Isles #8) by Tess Gerritsen
  11. Baltimore Blues (Tess Monaghan #1) by Laura Lippman
  12. Eclipse Bay (Eclipse Bay #1) by Jayne Ann Krentz
  13. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins*
  14. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins*
  15. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins*
  16. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline*

A careful observation will show that I went on a bit of a Hunger Games spree after the movie.  After seeing it on the big screen, the books had an even stronger impact on me.  I’m not normally a visual reader, but I can now see the impact of having a visual in your head while reading.  I carried this through all the books when I revisited them.  This was during the time I couldn’t get into anything else I was reading, so I ended up taking a second trip through.  I moved back and forth between my Nook and MP3 Player.

I consider rereads (marked with a *) to be ineligible for top read nominations, which leaves The Shoemaker’s Wife as my clear top choice, followed by So Much to Tell You.  The Chalk Girl, Wild Thing, Blind Your Ponies, Swim Back to Me, Second Grave on the Left, Relic and Ice Cold round out the list of books I’d recommend out of this set.

So, adding these two months to the previous two takes me to 53 books read this year:  14 print books, 11 Nook books, and 28 audio books.

May’s books include How to Eat a Cupcake by Meg Donohue and Night Swim by Jessica Keener for my book clubs and The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel as a new book by a favorite author.  I’m also looking forward to Insurgent by Veronica Roth.  I’m still hoping to get back into the swing of writing more reviews as well.

 
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Posted by on May 2, 2012 in books, summary

 

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Review: Wild Thing by Josh Bazell

29 Apr

Cover Wild Thing by Josh BazellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wild Thing was slightly toned down from Beat the Reaper, in a way that worked well for me.  It’s still very funny.  It still has crazy adventure– chases, mysteries, multiple bad guys, and some really crazy stuff I didn’t expect going in.  It just doesn’t take it quite as far, particularly where the ick factor is concerned.

Pietro Brnwa (aka Lionel Azimuth, aka Peter Brown) is going to be odd man out anywhere– a former mafia hit man who left (or is that ran away?) to become a physician just doesn’t have an easy to find peer group, particularly when the mafia is trying to hunt him down. Seeing him as junior doctor on a cruise ship put me in a good mood at the start, but that’s not where this book was going.

Some random millionaire asked the right questions to the right people, and found just the person he needed to go monster hunting. This doctor has the knowledge and skepticism to spot a fake, and he isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.  Just as importantly, he has the skills necessary to stay alive in a variety of challenging situations.  More monsters than expected are found, of course, and it was tremendous fun to watch Peter deal with them while figuring out how much of himself he could afford to share with the beautiful paleontologist sharing the assignment.

There’s nothing deep about this book. It’s just fun. Luckily, it doesn’t get quite as icky as the first book in the series, and isn’t quite as intense. It was a very enjoyable read.

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company for sending this book for review.

 
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Posted by on April 29, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West

22 Apr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I asked for suggestions for a book to read at a time when I was feeling out of sorts and having trouble getting into anything I picked up.

Many books were put forth, several of which had been on my “to read” list for quite a while. I had more books on my shelf that I was looking forward to reading.  None of those called to me, perhaps because I was concerned about my mood getting in the way of something I’d normally enjoy.

Instead I picked up this new-to-me title, one that wasn’t necessarily a book that would really register on my radar. It turned out to be a very good choice– thank you to Kyle for suggesting it.

Summary via Algonquin Books::

Hope is hard to come by in the hard-luck town of Willow Creek. Sam Pickett and five young men are about to change that.

Sam Pickett never expected to settle in this dried-up shell of a town on the western edge of the world. He’s come here to hide from the violence and madness that have shattered his life, but what he finds is what he least expects. There’s a spirit that endures in Willow Cree, Montana. It seems that every inhabitant of this forgotten outpost has a story, a reason for taking a detour to this place–or a reason for staying.

As the coach of the hapless high school basketball team (zero wins, ninety-three losses), Sam can’t help but be moved by the bravery he witnesses in the everyday lives of people–including his own young players–bearing their sorrows and broken dreams. How do they carry on, believing in a future that seems to be based on the flimsiest of promises? Drawing on the strength of the boys on the team, sharing the hope they display despite insurmountable odds, Sam finally begins to see a future worth living.

Blind Your Ponies is a tale of a small town. Almost everyone there has a big story. The adults are almost all there as a reaction to their past. These stories have an effect on the teens growing up, filtering down.

There are 6 boys on the basketball team. One seemed to have a fairly routine life (and very little time in the story). Two had relatively routine teen drama, and 3 had big stories, as did the coach and the assistant coach.

The biggest story of all was how these 6 kids came together to form a team with hopes of breaking at 90+ game losing streak against much bigger teams, with more resources of every sort to draw from.

I admit, I skimmed the long, in depth descriptions of the basketball games. I’m glad they were there, since they gave me a sense of what was really happening for the boys, but they aren’t what drew me into the story.

It was really the story of coach Sam Pickett learning from his team to put himself out there and take risks again. Sam’s story and character were compelling, and I was rooting for him as he took two steps forward then two steps back.

I loved seeing the team come together, but I don’t think the book succeeded in capturing the individual voices of the boys, or of any of the other characters except maybe Grandma. Grandma was a great character, with a perfect mix of loving care of her grandson (and pets), tenacious perseverance in the face of adversity, and elderly disregard for what anyone else thinks of her behavior.

The town was made up of great characters, and although I liked each individual story, the weight of all of them got to be a big much at times. Still, the tandem bicycle abandoned in a lover’s quarrel many years ago was one of the sweetest romances I’ve come across in a while.

Overall, Blind your Ponies was an enjoyable, inspirational read.

 
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Posted by on April 22, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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Review: The Chalk Girl by Carol O’Connell

14 Apr

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

This is one of the strongest entries in a series I really enjoy.

Summary via Goodreads:

The little girl appeared in Central Park: red-haired, blue-eyed, smiling, perfect-except for the blood on her shoulder. It fell from the sky, she said, while she was looking for her uncle, who turned into a tree. Poor child, people thought. And then they found the body in the tree.

For Mallory, newly returned to the Special Crimes Unit after three months’ lost time, there is something about the girl that she understands. Mallory is damaged, they say, but she can tell a kindred spirit. And this one will lead her to a story of extraordinary crimes: murders stretching back fifteen years, blackmail and complicity and a particular cruelty that only someone with Mallory’s history could fully recognize. In the next few weeks, she will deal with them all . . . in her own way.

I’ve missed Mallory in the 5+ years since Find Me, the 9th Kathy Mallory book. In fact, I’d more or less said good-bye to to series, since Find Me read like a series-ender to me. I still wonder if it was intended that way.

For those that haven’t read the series, Kathy Mallory is a very well behaved, extremely intelligent psychopath, working for the New York Police Department.   At least, as far as the reader knows, she’s well behaved.  If she had a good reason, mass murder wouldn’t be completely out of character, and she has the brains and know-how to be unlikely to get caught..  Luckily, she had strong moral guidance with her foster parents, who not only pointed her in the right direction, but set up a support system she could rely on even after they were gone.   It’s a setup with similarities to that in the Dexter books, although Mallory had been prowling the dark side for years before he came on the scene.

But Mallory is back from the road trip she took in the last book, and no one knows what to make of her. Even more so than usual. The events of the last book are dealt with in a satisfactory if not entirely satisfying manner.

Yes, Mallory is back, and she’s her old self again. If fact, this may be one of the best Mallory books. Mallory is in her element exploring a series of bizarre crimes. There are lots of twists and turns, hidden money motives, not so hidden money motives, and links to Important People, and at least one person that wants to be seen as important again, although arguably she never was.

The best part of Chalk Girl was Mallory’s link with Coco, a stray little girl with William’s Syndrome, a little girl who will do anything to earn Mallory’s love. On the surface, these two have nothing in common. Dig a little more, and you see a close kinship of damage and healing. One more layer down, you see Mallory exploiting a helpless girl because she’s a witness to a crime. What’s under that layer?

Dr. Charles Butler, Mallory’s best friend and staunchest advocate, believes that there is nothing else, that Mallory would put this girl in harm’s way for her own ends. But maybe, just maybe, if you go one layer deeper, there is a spark of humanity in Mallory after all.

And now, the big question for those that haven’t yet met Kathy Mallory:  Where to start with the series, or even to pick it up at all?  I highly recommend the series, and you can’t go wrong starting at the beginning.  Unfortunately, I read them a long time ago, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual volumes have long since faded.   The Chalk Girl might also make an interesting starting place.  Most of the past that it pulls from happens before any of the books in the series, although most of the history has already been laid out.  I think starting here and then exploring the back story later could work well.

I picked up this book for review from the publisher at the NCIBA conference.

 
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Posted by on April 14, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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Review: The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

04 Apr

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars for general readers; 4 of 5 for the target audience.

Summary via Penguin’s web site:

Bell Laboratories, which thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America’s brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It was, in effect, a factory of ideas whose workings have remained largely hidden until now.

New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner unveils the unique magic of Bell Labs through the eyes and actions of its scientists. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries, and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time (and on the company’s dime), riding unicycles through the corridors, or pioneering the principles that propel today’s technology. In these pages, we learn how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.

Even more important, Gertner reveals the forces that set off this explosion of creativity. Bell Labs combined the best aspects of the academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds, creating a culture and even an architecture that forced employees in different fields to work together, in virtually complete intellectual freedom, with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations. In Gertner’s portrait, we come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to Bell Labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work.

I read this book because Bell Labs has an almost mystical reputation, and I was intrigued by the possibility of learning more about the reality behind the image.

The book did a very good job of describing an almost magical place and time, and almost caused me to mourn the demise of the old monopolistic phone company, which certainly is a large part of the reason so much could happen when and where it did.

I didn’t know much about this era, and liked hearing about the personalities that made the transistor a reality, and that started looking into information science years before anyone else even conceived of the necessity. These men (and they were all men) all looked at the world a little differently than everyone else around them.  There are very few places they would have been allowed the latitude to follow the sometimes esoteric, often far fetched paths they went down.

I appreciated how the book wove the personalities and the science of the discoveries with the business and the politics of the monopoly. For me, the most interesting part was at the end, where Jon Gertner analyzed the conditions that supported such an environment, and speculated on how such a place could happen today, and the aspects that exist in modern companies.

Personally, I was hoping for more of the computer history, more insight into the development of Unix. The book never promised this, and so it’s my own fault I was disappointed in this aspect.  I also was frustrated by the lack of women in the book.  I do realize that is likely a realistic representation of the time, so that’s another personal issue as opposed to a weakness in the writing.

However, even for the areas the book did cover, it never brought it all to life.  The information was presented effectively, but I felt I knew about the men described, but I didn’t know them.  The events never popped off the page or led me into new ways of thinking

I’d recommend The Idea Factory to anyone that is curious about the history of technology, but it isn’t the book I’d suggest to stoke that interest in someone who isn’t already intrigued.  I’m glad I read it, and found it worth the time it took.

I read The Idea Factory as part of a TLC Book Tour.  Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book.  For other views, check out the tour stops:
TLC Book Tours

 
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Posted by on April 4, 2012 in books, reviews, tour

 

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Review: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress

29 Mar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Summary via Goodreads.com:

The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors–the last of humanity–are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell. Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six–children who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool. Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanity–a future which might never unfold.

This was an interesting little book. Little is a key here, it felt almost more like a detailed short story than a full novel. It’s an exploration of a series of snapshots relating to a future world, with glimpses of how these people got there.

I found the characters secondary to the slow world-building, as I was filled in details of what the characters already knew and what they were just now learning, about what had happened to bring them into this situation.

Our current world was woven into the story in two ways, by the detective work Julie does into the intrusions into our time, and by the verbal history Pete and the other children hear from the original survivors. It’s enough to hook me in.

In the end, it felt complete, for all there was more left to explore. I was left thinking about the world, but not feeling like there should have been more.

Thank you to Tachyon Publications for sending me this book for review.

 
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Posted by on March 29, 2012 in books, reviews

 

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