clock … watching time, the only true currency

Sitting on the shelf at a quiet moment this summer, Assembling California by John McPhee beckoned once again. (My first read was before I started clock.) McPhee’s quiet, steady gaze at a topic feeds a similar curiosity in the reader, even about topics previously unconsidered. This story is how California arrived at its current physical [...]

[Read more →]

(Note: I’m six months late in starting to catch up with my reading this past summer. Every journey starts with a single step, and all that. I started this post in June.) Eighteen months after seeing the movie, I read Atonement with interest. The book drenched me in gloom, but in such a way that [...]

[Read more →]

By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score! A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the [...]

[Read more →]

With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by. Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but [...]

[Read more →]

At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago. Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a [...]

[Read more →]

Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished. The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of [...]

[Read more →]

History gets written to react to the present. So when Juan Cole, a professor at Michigan wanted a new way to comment on the Middle East (beyond his blog), he wrote a book. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East chronicles the French attack and occupation in 1799-1800. Napoleon was smart enough to scoot back to [...]

[Read more →]

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military [...]

[Read more →]

Katherine Neville wrote The Eight more than 20 years ago. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, this form of modern-day treasure hunt for mythical historical artifacts found a new audience (its first?). Neville’s book was reprinted and can be easily found in bookstores. I picked it up on the way to Hawaii in February, and [...]

[Read more →]

In contrast to Murakami, I’ve read most of Wallace Stegner’s fiction, and embraced his non-fiction, too. So, finding a new-to-me slim 1987 volume of three lectures thrilled. The American West as Living Space at its heart explores how water — and its absence, often enough — defines the region. We’ve endured our third dry winter [...]

[Read more →]