The Deep by Claire Nouvian

I was going to talk about Avatar this week, but I think plenty of people are doing that. Suffice it to say that I didn't love it unconditionally, but I did love it. Among (many) other things, the alien planet really looked alien, and it had a variety of cool animals and creatures populating it.

Which brings me around to The Deep. I'm absolutely terrified by creatures that live in the ocean--not in rivers or fishbowls, just in the ocean--but I'm also fascinated by them. They're so beautiful, and different, and complex, and simple, and alien. That's what this book is about.

This is an oversize book, one that you'll want to read at a table, and there's hardly any text. The whole book is huge, full-color pictures of deep-sea animals on black, like the cover, and it is truly amazing. The vast majority of them were animals I had never seen before, despite my ocean-dweller fixations, and they're animals I couldn't have made up if I tried. Each one has a small, inconspicuous paragraph with it's significant informtion, and every so often there are short essays to give you an impression of the big picture (ha, pun) but they support the pictures, not the other way around.

After I read this I immediately went out to look for more, but there's not much out there for laymen. This is the best of its kind, with current information and pictures you can stare at for hours. I knew there was some strange life on Earth, from pachyderms with prehensile noses to my weird grandmother, but I never knew there were things like this.

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Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

Raise your hand if you've heard of Nikola Tesla. If you're in an engineering-type field you probably have, or if you've read a lot about the early 1900s, but after relentlessly quizzing everyone I ran into while I was reading this, most people don't know the first thing about him, so it might surprise you to hear that he was the greatest inventor ever, period.

I was first introduced to him in the movie The Prestige, which is an amazing movie that everyone should see, and see more than once. I thought he was a fictional creation for a long time, but when I found out he wasn't I knew immediately that I was going to be fixated on him for a long time. If ever there was a real-life mad scientist, it was Tesla.

Tesla first invented practically everything we ascribe to other inventors like Edison and Marconi. In some cases his early work inspired later inventions, in some cases other inventors used his basic inventions in their apparatus, and in some cases there was outright theft. Tesla patented all of his work, (scientists still find that their "new" inventions now can't be patented because he already did it a hundred years ago,) but the constant legal battles kept the public confused as to who invented what. That combined with his iffy business skills and other random factors lead to him being little remembered today, even though he was a famous and celebrated inventor in his time. (He did get his name on the Tesla coil, which is used to produce the alternating current we use, and he valued making such a contribution to history over the money he might've been making, but I only wish he was remembered for everything he deserved! )

Tesla was truly a visionary. He made intuitive leaps even beyond where our technology is today. He described and demonstrated things, like fire he held in his hand and a "death ray" that could vaporize aircraft (not built and demonstrated) that we can't figure out how to recreate. He did a lot of his work in his head, which only adds to the befuddlement and awe. While other inventors were still messing around inventing with wireless radio equipment he was already building and demonstrating remote-controlled submarines. The government wouldn't buy them.

On top of his brilliance his friends loved him, and even just reading about him made me dream about seeing beautiful, magnificent things that no one has ever seen before. Reading his biography was like reading an amazing science fiction novel, only it was all true!

I don't have enough room to summarize the whole book with all his achievements and ideas, so I highly recommend picking up this biography in its newest revision because it's clearly and thoroughly written, with equal parts emotional prose and technical explanation. I haven't read any of his other biographies yet, just skimmed a few things and read articles, but there seem to be plenty of them available, just in case you can't find Man Out of Time.

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Review: Art of Darkness by Sara K. Schneider

I got this book about six months ago courtesy of LibraryThing and Cuneiform Books (which seems to have only published this one book... odd). I was pretty frantic with worry about something else entirely, and I read the whole thing in one day because I was desperate for distractions. That aside, I'd recommend reading it slowly to remember the details.

Art of Darkness is a very interesting nonfiction book on a topic that I've never seen addressed before--the art and science of false identities. It looks at how false identities are created, from fake IDs to real-time performance on the street, from con men to undercover police. The history of false identities is intermixed with descriptions of methods and discussions of the various issues associated with having one, including the criminal aspects and the problems some undercover cops have disengaging themselves from their deep cover identity.

It was very understandable from the point of view of someone who only knows about crime and crimefighting from TV. It did drag and get repetitive in some chapters, but like I said I've never seen a book about this subject before, so she doesn't get too specialized and tries to stay general. There are a lot of different viewpoints and plenty of firsthand information from interviews Schneider conducted.

I recommend this book for people interested in true crime. It's also a great writing resource, not just for those writing crime fiction but for anyone writing something involving a fake ID or an impersonation. However, it's not really light reading or reading-for-pleasure material.

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Review: The Quintessential Gentleman by Henry Russell

Bonus review this week, since Mini Book Expo and Ulysses Press were kind enough to send it to me and I'm not sure if the review is overdue or not. I hope not, obviously, and I don't think it is.

Anyway, I read a lot of books about style and etiquette. I take none of the advice and follow none of the rules, but I find it very interesting and great research for the writing of certain stylish and mannerly characters. The Quintessential Gentleman is honestly one of the better ones I've read, because it's both funny and useful. If you can't read the type on the picture, it says "The Quintessential Gentleman: An Ironic, Sometimes Irreverent Guide to 21st-Century Manners by Henry Russell, Elegant Englishman."

This book was published in 2006, and it's suitably modern. It doesn't stress rules, since most people expect you to be flexible anyway, but instead shows appropriate attitudes to have and/or things to say in a huge variety of situations. The One Great Rule of stylebooks is, in my experience, that being a gentleman consists of being considerate to the needs of others and that little else is necessary.

Henry Russell is very funny in his candid, realistic approach. He doesn't focus on the usual round of what cut of suit to wear and which fork to use, but instead presents a few paragraphs on each topic and sub-topic, including but not limited to what to say at a bar mitzvah, what to write in a thank-you note, and how to get rid of boring people who want to talk to you. It's not so much a plan of action as a guide to strategy.

This book is slightly smaller than a dvd case and just under 200 pages, a very quick read that gets the job done. Some others I recommend are Freakin' Fabulous by Clinton Kelly, and anything by John Bridges.
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Review: Kingdom of the Occult by Walter Martin

Bonus review this week, seeing as I'm pretty sure this review is more than a few days overdue. (Very sorry, Thomas Nelson. This book is freaking huge.)

The Kingdom of the Occult is an updated, October 2008 version of The Kingdom of the Cults, originally published in 1965. It is 733 pages long, 678 if you don't count the Q&A appendix, counselling assessment appendix, bibliography, or index. It contains in-text footnotes, along with case studies, graphs, etc., and suggested resources at the end of each chapter.

The goal of this book is to investigate cults/cultism, examine cults' influence on America and the world, compare/contrast Christianity and cultism, and prepare Christians to speak to members of the occult. It aims to do this by historical analysis, theological evaluation of each cult's beliefs, and apologetic contrast between the cult and Christianity.

I had some issues with the theology presented, but I won't go into that. E-mail me if you want a rant. What I will say is that the main impression I got from the book was paranoia and Us vs. Them. My advice is to read it while you're awake and paying attention, to do wide research to back things up, and make sure to look up all the Bible references so you know what's being talked about.

This book would be very useful for any kind of research on the subject, much more than for casual reading. There's plenty of information, including statistics etc., that would come in really handy for papers or presentations, and it suggests or mentions plenty of other sources to look at for each topic that it addresses.

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Review: A Passion for Books by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

I love to read books about books. I don't personally know that many bibliophiles, so I like the sense of community I get. I'm also interested in the history of books and bookmaking and book-people and everything else. Unfortunately, I find that a lot of these books-about-books start to ramble in the third or fourth chapter, and it can be difficult to actually obtain information from them.

This book's full title is "A Passion for Books: A book lover's treasury of stories, essays, humor, lore, and lists on collecting, reading, borrowing, lending, caring for, and appreciating books." Rather than being one person rambling, it is instead a collection of said stories, essays, humor, lore and lists, gathered from a wide variety of times, places, and people. Each essay explores a new topic, with plenty of useful information and interesting tidbits to sink my teeth into, without having so much that I'm overwhelmed or worse, bored.

There are cartoons, humorous essays, lists of must-reads, informative articles, and character sketches of the most famous (and infamous) bibliomaniacs. There's something to suit anyone's interests, or in my case, to suit all of my interests! Some of my favorites were the essays concerning book collecting, something I didn't know much about before. Other highlights were Umberto Eco's essays on how to run a public library and how to justify a private one... he's funnier than I gave him credit for!

This is definitely my favorite book in its field, but my other book-about-books review from November can be found here, and a list of a gazillion recommendations for more books can be found here. My favorite in the list is The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski.

Review: Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica

I hate memoirs. BUT, I have a weakness for workplace stories and rants. It lets off steam when those library patrons have been acting up again, or when the person in front of me in the Wal-Mart line is being a jerk. Waiter Rant is a sort-of memoir by the guy who writes the Waiter Rant blog, but don't worry... there's a lot more in it than what's on the blog, and it's only sort of a memoir.

It seems like this is a book about why he wrote this book, more than anything. And that's fine. He tells the story of how he became a waiter and what it's really like, from dealing with customers to dealing with other staff, and he does it with both humor and insight. He tells the stories of other people he's seen pass through the dining room. He tells about his fear of failure and how long it took him to decide to write this book. There are happy moments, sad moments, gross moments... just about everything, and even if you've never been a waiter I'm sure you'll sympathize. I'm also sure you'll decide to start tipping a lot more than you have been!

Equal parts personal history, work anecdotes, and insider information, Waiter Rant is a quick, smooth read. I was impressed with how orderly it was, structured almost like a novel with flashbacks and asides but everything being revealed in the right order. It ends shortly after he's gotten his book deal, and I was encouraged to go bang out the rest of the Great American Novel right then and there.

I hear he's writing a new book and I can't wait to read it, but until then there's Not Always Right, a blog about funny and stupid customer quotes, and Quiet, Please, the same sort of kind-of-memoir only about a librarian.

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Review: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

This is nonfiction, a sort of history meets personal essay of 372 pages counting the index and notes, 319 pages sans, with plenty of illustrations.

This book was a joy to read, a hymn of praise to the very act of reading. It focuses on that specifically, the act of reading, and it's amazing the amount of information there is to be had. There was some overlap with the history of books, history of writing, etc., but only in passing. It's really all about reading. There was a lot of information that I'd never come across before that seems to have been included just because it was interesting, and that was fine with me!

The book is organized in two main sections, "Acts of Reading" and "Powers of the Reader." There are chapter headings like "Learning to Read," "The Silent Readers," "Ordainers of the Universe," and "The Author as Reader." So instead of a moving through a chronological timeline, Manguel brings us into a much more organic narrative that actually resembles the way we read books. We skip back and forth between similar things, follow tangents that only make sense to us readers. We pause to meditate on single thoughts, and dash along through topics that aren't as mesmerizing.

Manguel draws us into what feels a very intimate group, tracing readers down through history all the way to us. It's a reassuring book; because reading is such a private affair it can seem lonely, but rest assured there are a gazillion other readers who have loved just the same things about their books as we do about ours. A History of Reading was informative, while remaining informal and very enjoyable.

Some other books that sit next to this one on the humongous bookshelf of my mind: The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petrosky, Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles, Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, and Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas. All of these were interesting in the same way, though the subject matter varies ever-so-slightly.

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Review - Athens: A History by Robin Waterfield

This is a nonfiction book that I read in relation to a paper I'm working on. It's a history of the city of Athens, from its founding to the modern day, published in 2004, 362 pages long including end material, and written by a man who lives in Greece and has translated about 20 texts from the Greek. I'll also mention that I'm learning to read New Testament Greek this year, so Greek history is that much more interesting.

I've read (relatively) widely about Athens and classical Greece; this stands out mostly for its modernity. It addresses issues that are most of interest to modern issues and the modern mind, and perhaps ascribes too much of that mindset to the Athenians themselves. Written for laymen, the prose is usually plain and clear, but with the occasional strange lapse into a conversational tone, and the author sometimes injects too much of his own opinion. He is very judgemental toward the treatment of women in classical Athens, but applauds the open homoeroticism contained in the games and symposia. Personally I'm a lot more interested in what the Athenians might have thought about those things that what the author thinks is politically correct today. (The currently accepted spellings, notation, research, and dates were also used, which was sometimes confusing to me but on the whole was helpful as an update.)

The writing is usually quickly paced, touching on the significant more than the detailed, and looks at the whole of Athenian history, not focusing only on the classical age. Each time period is approached from several angles and from a global perspective, which makes it easier to remember what happened when and tie it into the rest of world history. It's very apparent that Waterfield loves Athens, and his enthusiasm is part of what keeps the book fresh.

Overall this was a very interesting and helpful book, especially where recent discoveries are concerned, but I'd suggest reading it along with other books to get a more rounded picture of Athens. Here's a nice list provided by LibraryThing, if you're looking. Also, a good book of Greek mythology helps immensely -- try this one -- and some primary texts never go amiss.

Buy Athens: A History