octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

It's a great idea to have "readings for the fatigued" in a textbook. Interviews, novel fragments, bit of Monty Python... they all made a difficult subject matter much clearer for their presence. Unfortunately I liked the readings better than the actual text! And I think I got more out of them too. Which is no disrespect to Pettman, he was one of my favourite lecturers back at uni and had a way of talking that was particularly characterised by clarity, as if he were only reminding you of something you already knew. His writing doesn't have quite the same reach, or perhaps that it's just I find it easier to grasp written concepts when those concepts are illustrated by imaginative example...

3.5, rounding up to 4 stars. it's an odd experience, reading this for the first time at a time when Trump is President of the US instead of Bush. From my (admittedly outsider) perspective, things do not seem to have improved. Ignorance, anti-science, and corruption go on apace. What I found slightly irritating though was Gore's refusal to place blame where it ultimately belongs: with the electorate. He can bang on about his TV theory all he likes, and there's probably some truth in it, but the determination of the US electorate as a whole to be screwed over by their politicians is part of this equation that no-one's really looking at. Ignorance is a choice, and you can have bribes and threats and propaganda hung about you but you still have to choose not to think, and large proportions of society seem to be all to happy to do so.

Interesting and very readable account of the life and work of Charles Babbage. In a lot of ways it's painful to read, as it's the story of a deeply imaginative thinker and scientist who fails to achieve his goals. Swade doesn't shy away from the times when this failure is a result of Babbage's own efforts - he could be a grumpy, impolitic individual with a penchant for shooting himself in the foot, but that at least makes him a very human subject for a biography.

What I found most interesting was the final third of the book, which covers the efforts by London's Science Museum to build, for the first time, a complete and working Difference Engine. The work that went into it is incredible, and I've never really appreciated before how much goes into finding funding for special museum pieces. I'm not sure if the Machine's still there, but next time I'm in Britain I'm going along to the Science Museum to have a look.

An enormous and weighty doorstop of a book, covering humour in the English-speaking world with extracts from various novels, plays, short stories, non-fiction etc. These extracts cover some 500 years of writing, and what really astonished me was how much humour changed over the centuries. I am prepared to believe that the contemporaries of the writers included found them highly amusing, but for my own part giant swathes of this book were deeply, painfully unfunny. (On the bright side, this meant some of the actually funny stood out all the more - I choked with laughter at the Lawrence Durrell section, for instance.) In general things improved as time went on, but give me Bill Bryson any day.

Extremely well-researched if rather dry snapshot of the state of energy resources and research at time of writing. That time happens to be the 1970s, so this is clearly not applicable to today's energy issues but it's nonetheless an interesting snapshot of the period. Foley is primarily concerned, I think, with establishing a need for energy conservation and adequate planning for future use. That's a recommendation that still holds value today, given our continued reliance on oil and other fossil fuels. One interesting fact that I never knew: apparently back in 1273, London had an anti-pollution law that banned coal-burning in the city. One can only wonder what those law-makers would make of coal today!

This book is pretty old now (it was originally published in the early 1970s I believe) but its bite-sized essays on humans and the environment are clear and thought-provoking. To leaven the science, it's cleverly punctuated with a number of readings from non-science sources - including The Grapes of Wrath and A Modest Proposal. What's bumping this up to 4 stars from a likeable 3, however, is the inclusion of a reading that I've never come across before: a pamphlet written by John Evelyn, first published in 1661, in which Evelyn rants in hugely entertaining fashion on the disgusting level of smoke and air pollution in the London of his day. (Highlights include: "And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall cloud of SEA-COALE?" / "...poisoning the Aer with so dark and thick a Fog, as I have been hardly able to pass through it, for the extraordinary stench and halitus it sends forth" / "Whilst these are belching it forth their sooty jaws, the City of London resembles the face rather of Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli, or the Suburbs of Hell, than an Assembly of Rational Creatures...") Poor old Evelyn goes on and on and on and it is both tragic and gloriously entertaining.

I tell you, I'm keeping hold of this book just for that reprinted pamphlet.

This should be a great deal more interesting than it is. In Conquest's defence, the book appears extremely well researched and it's clearly the result of immense time and study. The subject, too, is one that is genuinely compelling - it's basically a how-to of propaganda and agitprop in moulding a society's perception of itself. The writing itself, however, is dull as ditch-water. It actively sucks the interest out of the political and literary train wreck that was freedom of speech in the USSR, which is really rather disappointing as the subject could certainly bear a more lively approach.

Not the greatest, but in fairness the largest part of the reason the Daleks are so awesomely scary is their creepy creepy voices, and no novelisation can capture that; they're bound to be more disappointing in print. That being said, it's amazing how much more tolerable Susan is here than in the tv programme - must be the absence of that nails-on-chalkboard scream. Anyway, it's been a while since I've seen the episode this is based on, and while there are some changes the book version skips along at an enjoyable pace. I'm not sure that it's a total success having Ian be the narrator - he comes across as a bit unpleasant, and the relationship between him and Barbara here is wholly unconvincing.

Look, I like poetry. I love poetry, actually - even did my PhD on it. And I've come to think that, more than prose, poetry dates. This doesn't have to be a bad thing - the Pearl, for instance, is utterly fantastic and its language is older by far than what's in here. And what's in here isn't all bad - occasionally Spenser comes across a turn of phrase or a sense of narrative that caught my attention, and Walter Crane's illustrations are amazing. I also enjoyed the set-up of it, the matching poem to month and mood. But for the most part, this just feels dated to me, and not in a good way. I was going to call it twee but it isn't really; that's an unfair assessment. But take January's poem: a shepherd boy falls in love with a girl called Rosalind, who doesn't appear to love him back, so he throws himself on the ground and breaks his pipe in pieces so he can't play it anymore, in a sort of emotional tantrum which may well explain why Rosalind is steering clear in the first place. That sort of thing - hysterical melodrama that verges on (what to the modern eye can appear as) the very purplest of purple prose. Very different from today's poetry, which is admittedly far more to my taste.

I dunno. I'm hoping to wade my way through Spenser's Faerie Queene later this year. Here's hoping it's an improvement.

I recently unearthed this little volume on my shelves and read it again out of pure nostalgia - I actually walked the King Ludwig Way, about 15 years ago now maybe? And this was the guidebook I used to do it. Very clear and useful, and it helps me remember the various places along the track really well.

It's a fantastic walk, if you get the chance you should do it (the highlight, apart from the castle, was the beer at Andechs Abbey). You could do a lot worse than this pocket-sized guide to see you on your way.