Scott’s Book Review: What Worlds Will You Explore?

  • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures
    A software architect foresees potential issues in a design and judges which way will instill the most business success in the long run. Unfortunately, in almost every scenario, trade offs permeate every option. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Learning to anticipate problems with wisdom set great software architects apart from merely experienced ones. In this book, several experienced authors look at those trade offs in the context of distributed software…
  • Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
    All the way back to Galileo sharing about Jupiter’s moons, science has relied upon visualizations to communicate its findings. Some things are just better depicted visually instead of through words. In contemporary society, information graphics have played an increasingly larger role as computers quickly translate data into a more accessible format. Newspapers and Internet websites have made them commonplace. Even though this book was written in 1990, before ubiquitous computing, it identifies the philosophical and…

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The World of Science & Health

  • Meharry Medical College
    Soon after Emancipation, large efforts were required to meet the needs of formerly enslaved people. A medical college was founded in Nashville as a department of Central Tennessee College to train black doctors to address the needs of the underserved blacks across the country. Now called Meharry Medical College almost 150 years later, the school continues to educate healthcare professionals and advance “the worship of God through service to man.” This book chronicles its history…
  • Analyzing Social Networks, 2nd Edition
    With so much Internet data available through social media, social networks have entered the popular consciousness. They have long been used by social scientists to analyze complex research questions, so the theories are robust and tested by time. Still, many of us worry about reading about a technical topic that’s not in our traditional field, but this book proves accessible and engaging. It introduces the topic while exciting readers’ minds with relevant concepts that can…
  • Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics & the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear
    American religion has bifurcated along ideological lines in recent decades. Some voices trumpet a moralistic approach while others trumpet a compassion-driven approach. Some of the early splitting can be observed in the story of how the church treated those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s. Moralistic voices today still seem to hold the loudest places in the Christian church, but compassionate approaches can be seen everywhere. Journalist Michael O’Loughlin records some of those stories before…
  • Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science
    Most problems that contemporary society faces require experts from more than one discipline to explore them through research. Traditional fields of knowledge have become so subspecialized that teams, not individuals, are now the units to advance knowledge. Yet institutions and individuals are usually poorly equipped and organized to address these challenges. They often still exist in a dated mindset where different spheres of knowledge exist in hierarchies, not collaborative networks. The National Academies in the…

The World of Technology & Work

Business / Management

Software / Engineering / Analysis

  • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures
    A software architect foresees potential issues in a design and judges which way will instill the most business success in the long run. Unfortunately, in almost every scenario, trade offs permeate every option. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Learning to anticipate problems with wisdom set great software architects apart from merely experienced ones. In this book, several experienced authors look at those trade offs in the context of distributed software…
  • Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
    Agile practices of project management have transformed how software is developed. Planning an entire project from the start often leads to unmet objectives and cost overruns. Agile instead proposes to start small by developing a minimal viable product and growing one feature at a time. In an age of the Internet’s instantaneity, continual deployment makes agile an achievable possibility. These authors, whose careers have all been hewn in software to some degree, propose undertaking the…

The World of People Skills

Writing / Communication

  • Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
    All the way back to Galileo sharing about Jupiter’s moons, science has relied upon visualizations to communicate its findings. Some things are just better depicted visually instead of through words. In contemporary society, information graphics have played an increasingly larger role as computers quickly translate data into a more accessible format. Newspapers and Internet websites have made them commonplace. Even though this book was written in 1990, before ubiquitous computing, it identifies the philosophical and…
  • Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte
    Edward Tufte’s books on data visualization are nothing short of legend among us information geeks. A political scientist by training, he demonstrates how well-conceived visualizations can effectively communicate insights and how shortcomings can create catastrophes. He continues his famous series on visual imagination with this book on the intersection of data and art. He shows how displays of evidence can move readers much like art and how poorly constructed displays can inhibit good judgment. Tufte’s…

Research / Education / Mentoring

  • Meharry Medical College
    Soon after Emancipation, large efforts were required to meet the needs of formerly enslaved people. A medical college was founded in Nashville as a department of Central Tennessee College to train black doctors to address the needs of the underserved blacks across the country. Now called Meharry Medical College almost 150 years later, the school continues to educate healthcare professionals and advance “the worship of God through service to man.” This book chronicles its history…
  • Analyzing Social Networks, 2nd Edition
    With so much Internet data available through social media, social networks have entered the popular consciousness. They have long been used by social scientists to analyze complex research questions, so the theories are robust and tested by time. Still, many of us worry about reading about a technical topic that’s not in our traditional field, but this book proves accessible and engaging. It introduces the topic while exciting readers’ minds with relevant concepts that can…

Topics

The World of Social Science

Individuals

  • Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently
    Teachers are often taught different learning styles as channels to reach other students. Workplace leaders, however, often don’t have a deep background in education. Yet they are tasked with challenges in communication that require that they address wide swaths of people, who usually think differently than them. In this book, Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur educate readers about how to apply ideas about learning styles to the modern workplace with the hope of increasing the…
  • It’s About You Too: Reducing the Overwhelm for Parents of LGBTQ+ Kids
    As LGBTQ+ people recently have gained increased societal acceptance, more children become “out” and self-aware of themselves, often at a young age. This effect is a good thing because it prevents youth from feeling oppressed for who they are. The social support for those “coming out” is increasing, but support for parents of those children is presently lacking. Mostly, parents are admonished to be supportive, but they usually lack a safe space to sort out…

Society

  • Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics & the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear
    American religion has bifurcated along ideological lines in recent decades. Some voices trumpet a moralistic approach while others trumpet a compassion-driven approach. Some of the early splitting can be observed in the story of how the church treated those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s. Moralistic voices today still seem to hold the loudest places in the Christian church, but compassionate approaches can be seen everywhere. Journalist Michael O’Loughlin records some of those stories before…
  • Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom by James M. Lawson, Jr.
    In hindsight, concepts about nonviolence indeed have proven the most revolutionary ideas from the twentieth century. The century itself was marred by mass violence – two World Wars, communist revolutions, the invention of the atomic bomb, and a Cold War threatening imminent destruction. Yet nonviolence exploited its foothold. Mahatma Ghandi used nonviolence to lead India to independence from the British Empire. Polish protestors used nonviolence to usher in the fall of communism. And civil-rights protestors…

The World of the Human Soul

Fiction / Stories / Poetry

  • Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
    In 1920s America, George Babbitt has it all. He lives in an up-and-coming, prosperous town. He has a family and two children. He has a successful job. He’s not a superman. No, he’s neither a CEO of a large corporation, nor a super-rich business tycoon, nor a famous celebrity. Nonetheless, he’s living a good life. But something suddenly happens to one of his close friends, and he calls his entire life into question. Today, we…
  • James by Percival Everett
    Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from…
  • The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century Chinese Romantic Novels
    This book shares two Chinese tales of romance, placed in the setting of the Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. Western concepts of love were just starting to take root then in China’s artistic community, and these novels portray the first attempts to integrate these foreign themes in Chinese society. At the time, marital love, based in centuries of Confucian thought, was grounded in families, not individual feelings, so Western concepts stirred the cultural pot.…

History / Historical Fiction

  • Meharry Medical College
    Soon after Emancipation, large efforts were required to meet the needs of formerly enslaved people. A medical college was founded in Nashville as a department of Central Tennessee College to train black doctors to address the needs of the underserved blacks across the country. Now called Meharry Medical College almost 150 years later, the school continues to educate healthcare professionals and advance “the worship of God through service to man.” This book chronicles its history…
  • Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March & the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation
    In the American Civil War, General Tecumseh Sherman’s march through the South is nothing short of legendary. Growing up in South Carolina, I heard about and witnessed the effects of how he set the secessionist state ablaze in retribution. The fall of Atlanta also carries a special place in history: It was a major victory on Lincoln’s resume before the midterm elections, and Gone with the Wind forever dramatized (albeit in a biased manner) how…

Biography / Memoir

  • The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House
    Social media has exposed what many women knew implicitly: Broad misogyny in American society is real… especially when a woman has a platform or power. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been a target for decades. Because she comes from a progressive district in San Francisco, she’s labeled as out of touch with most Americans. Her deep, religious faith rarely receives media airing. In this memoir, she demonstrates…
  • The Last Founding Father: James Monroe & a Nation’s Call to Greatness
    Virginians seem to dominate the early pantheon of American presidents. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians by birth. The last of these four – and the last president from the generation of founding fathers – is James Monroe. Most American high school students learn to associate his name with the “Monroe Doctrine” – the contention that Europe should not further colonize the Americas. While this position is perhaps his most lasting legacy, this…
  • Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
    Because of its followers, Christianity has gotten a bad wrap. Perhaps that’s just in recent years, but I know enough to suspect that it’s always been so. To put people in the pews, many pastors have appealed to minor parts of the Bible while omitting parts that would make its followers uncomfortable. Like the fact that Jesus hung out with prostitutes. Or that God’s loving forgiveness of humanity is absolute. Or that the first Christian…

Spirituality / Philosophy / Religion

  • Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics & the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear
    American religion has bifurcated along ideological lines in recent decades. Some voices trumpet a moralistic approach while others trumpet a compassion-driven approach. Some of the early splitting can be observed in the story of how the church treated those afflicted by AIDS in the 1980s. Moralistic voices today still seem to hold the loudest places in the Christian church, but compassionate approaches can be seen everywhere. Journalist Michael O’Loughlin records some of those stories before…
  • Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom by James M. Lawson, Jr.
    In hindsight, concepts about nonviolence indeed have proven the most revolutionary ideas from the twentieth century. The century itself was marred by mass violence – two World Wars, communist revolutions, the invention of the atomic bomb, and a Cold War threatening imminent destruction. Yet nonviolence exploited its foothold. Mahatma Ghandi used nonviolence to lead India to independence from the British Empire. Polish protestors used nonviolence to usher in the fall of communism. And civil-rights protestors…
  • Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
    Because of its followers, Christianity has gotten a bad wrap. Perhaps that’s just in recent years, but I know enough to suspect that it’s always been so. To put people in the pews, many pastors have appealed to minor parts of the Bible while omitting parts that would make its followers uncomfortable. Like the fact that Jesus hung out with prostitutes. Or that God’s loving forgiveness of humanity is absolute. Or that the first Christian…