Bookish Thoughts

I hadn't known that the main character in Carl Sagan's Contact  was based on a real person until my mother-in-law gave me this book for my birthday. It's a biography of Dr. Jill Tater, inspiration for Ellie Arroway, who as devoted almost her entire life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As such, it's also a history of that field of study. The subject matter is interesting, especially when it comes to the financial struggles, under-the-table deals and slapped together technology that are more apparent in SETI than any other field of science. And Dr. Tarter is certainly an interesting woman. But I had a hard time with this book. Mostly because I still can't figure out how the author meant to organize it. There was probably a method to her madness, but I found the book jumped around too much for me to really follow the thread of Dr. Tarter's life. Her second husband is mentioned two chapters before her divorce, in a way that makes it seem like her ...

The second half of Art Spiegelman's  Maus , a comic book about his father's experiences was a Polish Jew during WWII and the lasting effect they've had, mostly concerns itself with Aushwitz. All told Spiegelman's father, Vladek, spent just under a year in the prison camp Aushwitz. He worked various jobs, including as a tinsmith and fixing shoes, trying to stay one step ahead of the ovens. Throughout this he was doing his best to bribe guards, both to secure enough food for himself, and to do whatever he could to keep his wife alive. This story is juxtaposed against the present day, where Vladek has become a stingy man with failing health and serious marital problems with his second wife. Art's tumultuous relationship with his father is the real core of this book. He struggles to understand his father and how he came to be the man he is. He worries about portraying him in a negative light, but also wants to stick to the truth as he understands it. This is a reall...

I first read Maus back in high school (or college? I must have been college, because I'd borrowed the books from a friend and ended up having to mail them back to her) and I've been wanting to revisit it ever since. It is, in some ways, yet another holocaust book. But there's enough of a unique perspective here to make it an important addition to that specific genre. This is the story of Art Spiegelman coming to terms with his father's experienceas a Polish Jew during WWII, with the loss of his mother, and with the strained relationship between his father and his father's second wife. The framing of the story portrays a series of interviews between Art and his father, where he struggles to get the story chronologically, while also struggling with how to present the story. He's particularly concerned with the fact that his father embodies the stereotype of miserly Jew, and he doesn't want to give the fire any more fuel. By addressing it head o...

I came across Roise Rua in a small bookshop in Donegal, Ireland. It was originally written in Gaelic by Padraig Ua Cnaimhsi and was later translated into English by JJ Keaveny. It tells the story of a woman, Roise, who was raised on the island of Arranmore, off the coast north of Donegal. Cnaimhsi spent many years interviewing Roise about her life on the island and used those interviews to put together the book, which is told from the first person perspective. The first two-thirds comprise an autobiography of Roise, and the last third is a collection of stories that either happened before her time or didn't fit into the main narrative. It was definitely an interesting read. Roise's life was so unlike anything I have any experience with. She spent most of her young life as a migrant worker, working as either a servant on farms in Ireland or picking potatoes in Scotland. The money was sent back home to her mother until she finally decided to settle down and get...

The Boy Genius and the Mogul tells the story of the invention of television. This is one of those inventions where you can't really point to one person. It's not like the lightbulb and Thomas Edison or the cotton gin and Eli Whitney. Television was something that a lot of people were working towards at the same time, a race to create this new technology that everyone expected and could tell was very near. It was also at the time when science shifted from lone men with a lot of money and leisure time inventing things on their own to massive, well-funded research divisions under the umbrella of technology companies. So there isn't really one person who can take credit for the invention of television. But there are a handful of key people, and one in particular whose ideas, at least, were a few years ahead of everyone else. The book focuses in on Phil Farnsworth (namesake for the professor in Futurama ), a young genius who worked tirelessly to get a television i...

Lauren Redniss'  Radioactive  is a light biography of Marie Curie, focusing on her love life and scientific discoveries. When I say light, I mean that this book took me about three hours to read, total. It's more of a display book than anything else, with really cool art and nearly self-contained stories on each page. You could easily flip open to any page in this book and start reading without missing too much. Here are a few examples of pages from the book, which are really cool to look at: The science isn't very detailed. The author chooses to give a very basic overview of the concepts of radioactivity, nuclear fission, and half-lives. But that didn't really bother me, in part because I just liked looking at the art and in part because I already have a decent understanding of most of the science. Redniss intersperses the story of Marie Curie with a history of her work through science. She touches on some of the "miracle-cure" radium-based pr...