What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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Er I hesitate to mention this - purchased in Port Townsend having been convinced by by Sister to visit some of the artsy fartsy shops.

How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser an MIT prof.

A little 'spooky action at a distance' aka John Stuart Bell and his theorem, some crazy sponsors of physicists when times were hard - CIA, Esalen et al, and the return of the thought experiment.

finance quant types into computer trading history and frontiers might be interested.

heh heh heh - Port Townsend reminds me of some of the 'tourist shops' along stretches of Royal, and Magazine streets in New Orleans in their hey day. :cool:

Also read Failure IS Not An Option by Gene Krantz - brought back some memories even though I wasn't an operations cat. :greetings10:
 
mh said:
thanks for the kindle tip..
The movie w/ Helena Bonham Carter is very good too if you have not seen it.
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I agree, it was very good. I quite like Helena Bonham Carter, and have enjoyed all her movies that I have seen.
Ha
 
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A sixty or so page manual for my new Tmobile cell phone.
 
haha said:
I just read The Caine Mutiny. I remember seeing the movie with Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in the 50s.

It's been a long time, but I think the book is much better. I believe that Herman Wouk is not just a good writer, but a great writer.

Ha
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It was a great movie. Book is even better? Have to make room for it on the list.
"Who stole the strawberries?"
 
donheff said:
Lost in Shangri La is quite a good read. It is a true story about the rescue of a WAC and two men who were in a plane that crashed in a "lost" valley in New Guinea in WWII. Great adventure story and an interesting look at cultural miscues in both directions.
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Sarah in SC said:
Oh, man I loved Lost in Shangri-La and suggested it a bunch of pages back to some of the WWII enthusiasts on the board. Didn't you love it?
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I don't really read that many books, but saw a recc for this earlier on this or some other thread here and checked it out of the library. Couldn't put it down, Fascinating stuff. FIL might have been in New Guinea at the time of the story (he was a SeaBee in NG and the Philippines).

Great blend of military history, anthropology and just an interesting look into how different things were in the 1940's.

-ERD50
 
I just finished an excellent RE book:

Your Retirement Income Blueprint

by Daryl Diamond (2011).

It has excellent plans to structure income in a tax efficient way. It's Canadian content, so YMMV. I read it on Kindle, and then downloaded some of the summary points on my laptop.
 
haha said:
I agree, it was very good. I quite like Helena Bonham Carter, and have enjoyed all her movies that I have seen.
Ha
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Excepting the harry potter movies I am in complete agreement w/ you there.
 
Dame Stella Rimington, an MI5 careerist (rising thru the ranks to eventually become the Director General), is a good spy-action writer. Rip Tide follows a jihadist conspiracy involving a radical Mosque in Birmingham, Somali pirates and Greek shipping. A good read built on years of experience. It is one of a series featuring MI5 agent Liz Carlyle - I will have to try some more.
 
I finished a couple of non-fiction books recently. Moneyball (also a movie) now I am not a baseball fan, but I've enjoyed all of Michael Lewis books and this one was no exception. I think if you are big baseball fan this is a must read.

I also read Rawhide Down which was is about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. It actually was a very detailed look at what the Secret Service did that and to me the most interesting part was a minute by minute account of the ER team at George Washington hospital. Fortunately for the the President and the country the GW ER was just modernize a couple of years before Reagan was shot and was one of the top 10 ERs in the country, if Reagan had been shot most other places he would have likely been dead.
 
I just flew to NYC and back (from the Bay Area) for my grandfather's wake, so I picked up some ebooks for the trip. I read the three books of the Laundry series so far (The Atrocity Archives, Jennifer Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum) and Saturn's Children, all by Charlie Stross. I'd read the first two before so this was a reread of them. Great stories, really clever writing, Stross really turns a phrase well.
 
Retch The Grate said:
I just flew to NYC and back (from the Bay Area) for my grandfather's wake, so I picked up some ebooks for the trip. I read the three books of the Laundry series so far (The Atrocity Archives, Jennifer Morgue and The Fuller Memorandum) and Saturn's Children, all by Charlie Stross. I'd read the first two before so this was a reread of them. Great stories, really clever writing, Stross really turns a phrase well.
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Thank you for the review. I'm sorry about the loss of your grandfather.
 
thanks, he had a very long full and happy life of 97 years (and only gave up going into the office somewhere in the last few years). It was a really lovely wake.
 
Bought a box of books at a rummage sale, one was "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon. It's the story of his trip around the perimeter of the US on two lane blacktop roads. Very entertaining and I was shocked to find he had gone through my home town.
 
Nodak said:
Bought a box of books at a rummage sale, one was "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon. It's the story of his trip around the perimeter of the US on two lane blacktop roads. Very entertaining and I was shocked to find he had gone through my home town.
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That's a great book. I read it when it first came out.
 
Moemg said:
Just finished Grisham's "The Litigators " . Very good read ! I could not put it down !
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That's available for me to download from the library, but there's some bug on their system, and it won't let me log in.
 
Just finished Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This is a spectacular work by someone frequently mentioned as the most accomplished behavioral psychologist of the last 50 years. The excellent reviews do not do justice to an extraordinary work, engaging in its readabilty and thought-provoking in content. Micheal Lewis has a review of this book, which is fitting since Moneyball's focus on statistics and illusions of validity are based on Kahneman's work.

Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. And his work has turned utility economics or homoeconomicus on its head.
 
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