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

  • AI & Machine Learning for Coders: A Programmer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence
    I’m a tad suspicious about listening to books that are too deep in the weeds with code. If they’re about programming concepts, audiobooks can be suitable, but if they involve code like this one, I like to have a physical picture of the lines of code. However, I was pleasantly surprised that this book conveyed many ideas despite communicating code aurally, too. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are huge topics today. I read…
  • Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth
    I read anything that Edward Tufte writes. This “father of data visualization” has taught classes at Yale on the subject for decades. His books have also taught the reading public how to present data more effectively in the digital age. This work represents his fifth book. While his other books focus on getting the data right, this one’s subject meanders around transforming presentations into a form of art that provokes an audience response. I enjoyed…

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840 reviews

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The World of Science & Health

  • Enjoy Your Science Meeting! A Practical Guide to Getting the Most our of Attending Scientific Conferences
    For scientists and researchers, conferences provide opportunities to learn, network, and see what others are doing outside of their own lab or institution. They also give opportunities to disseminate one’s work and receive feedback from a wider audience. Thus, they serve as crucial gateways to accelerate a career. Like everything else, however, there’s a learning curve, and conferences cost someone money. It’s in any scientist’s best interest to learn how to get good at the…
  • On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service
    Because of the COVID pandemic, the name Tony Fauci has become incredibly politicized. To some, he is a villain who took over the country through a pandemic. They cynically blame him for all of America’s woes from the coronavirus. To others, he’s a hero for speaking life-conveying truth in a public-health crisis when most others equivocated. I’m in the latter camp, and this book, a memoir mixed with an apologia, certainly explains his perspective on…
  • Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill
    In psychiatry, “serious mental illness” is substitute language for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These two difficult diseases account for much of the homelessness that American cities see. Thus, these two diseases also account for much of where tax dollars go. The utterly tragic part, however, is that decent biomedical treatments exist for these diseases; in America, the infrastructure to treat them does not. Why? And what can be improved? This book, originally published in 1988…
  • Understanding Tech Transfer: A Brief Guide to University Technology Transfer
    This short, accessible work outlines a typical tech transfer office at a university. Research universities drive innovation across entire industries and local economies, and smart companies can figure out how to leverage partnerships for commercial successes. The university office that facilitates that is called “tech transfer.” These offices received increased momentum when a federal act in 1980 allowed universities to license their innovations for profit while under federal funding. At 31 pages, this book is…

The World of Technology & Work

Business / Management

Software / Engineering / Analysis

  • AI & Machine Learning for Coders: A Programmer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence
    I’m a tad suspicious about listening to books that are too deep in the weeds with code. If they’re about programming concepts, audiobooks can be suitable, but if they involve code like this one, I like to have a physical picture of the lines of code. However, I was pleasantly surprised that this book conveyed many ideas despite communicating code aurally, too. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are huge topics today. I read…
  • Understanding Tech Transfer: A Brief Guide to University Technology Transfer
    This short, accessible work outlines a typical tech transfer office at a university. Research universities drive innovation across entire industries and local economies, and smart companies can figure out how to leverage partnerships for commercial successes. The university office that facilitates that is called “tech transfer.” These offices received increased momentum when a federal act in 1980 allowed universities to license their innovations for profit while under federal funding. At 31 pages, this book is…

The World of People Skills

Writing / Communication

  • Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth
    I read anything that Edward Tufte writes. This “father of data visualization” has taught classes at Yale on the subject for decades. His books have also taught the reading public how to present data more effectively in the digital age. This work represents his fifth book. While his other books focus on getting the data right, this one’s subject meanders around transforming presentations into a form of art that provokes an audience response. I enjoyed…
  • Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators
    Reality-based thinking isn’t popular in American society today. From policy and religion to social media and town halls, science is viewed with increasing suspicion. While it’s easy to blame entrenched economic and social interests, we in the scientific community must look at ourselves in the mirror, too. Too often, all our presentations are too abstract for the general public to understand. Too often, we hide behind science’s authority instead of admitting our limitations. In turn,…

Research / Education / Mentoring

  • Enjoy Your Science Meeting! A Practical Guide to Getting the Most our of Attending Scientific Conferences
    For scientists and researchers, conferences provide opportunities to learn, network, and see what others are doing outside of their own lab or institution. They also give opportunities to disseminate one’s work and receive feedback from a wider audience. Thus, they serve as crucial gateways to accelerate a career. Like everything else, however, there’s a learning curve, and conferences cost someone money. It’s in any scientist’s best interest to learn how to get good at the…
  • CV Handbook: A Curriculum Vitae Owner’s Manual
    For a graduate student, making a CV – shorthand for Curriculum Vitae, a longer form of résumé – can be a daunting task. Those of us who have seen the CVs of eminent scholars might be intimidated that our first CV will look comparably weak. The CV offers an opportunity to define a professional identity, but when someone with power sees that someone else has violated unwritten rules, the CV could be quickly thrown into…

Topics

The World of Social Science

Individuals

  • Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill
    In psychiatry, “serious mental illness” is substitute language for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These two difficult diseases account for much of the homelessness that American cities see. Thus, these two diseases also account for much of where tax dollars go. The utterly tragic part, however, is that decent biomedical treatments exist for these diseases; in America, the infrastructure to treat them does not. Why? And what can be improved? This book, originally published in 1988…
  • My Life Story & the American Mental Healthcare System
    The course of my life changed in 2001-2003, years shortly after I graduated with my undergraduate degree from college. I had always thought I’d spend my work-life trying to help people think better about God, religion, and their lives. During this time span, however, I began to suffer from bipolar disorder, a form of mental illness more serious than, say, depression or ADHD. Nothing in my life before had prepared me to deal with this…

Society

  • Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith & Fractured a Nation
    This history describes how evangelical culture and its attitudes about masculinity have shaped white Christianity and American politics. In so doing, it tries to describe why evangelical Christians, supposedly the among the most devout and religious, have chosen to support a politician who is anything but devout and resembling the Bible’s Jesus. Frankly, Kristin Kobes du Mez, a minister’s daughter, does an honest, thorough job. The evangelicalism she describes is wedded more closely to patriarchy…
  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
    Much as it’s hard to critique a William Shakespeare or a Mark Twain, it’s hard to critique Virginia Woolf. She pioneered women’s literature in the early twentieth century and helped lay its foundation for an incredibly successful, bustling marketplace in today’s world. Despite nagging misogyny, women writers receive deserved respect because of Woolf’s proposals to let women’s genius work. So in one sense, this book offers a distilled, timeless essay worthy of historical study for…

The World of the Human Soul

Fiction / Stories / Poetry

  • The Wishing Game: A Novel
    Lucy Hart had a horrible childhood, but one book series saw her through: The Clock Island series by Jack Masterton. Now, she’s an twenty-something working as a teacher’s aide. One of her students Christopher is a foster child whom she wants to adopt and who wants her to adopt him, too. The problem remains that teacher’s aides aren’t paid much. Despite Lucy’s best intentions, Christopher’s social worker tells her she’s simply not financially stable enough…
  • The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer
    CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia remain some of the best fantasy works for children in the twentieth century. This book from Meg Shaffer uses that template for inspiration to depict a magical world accessible only through a special spot hidden in the West Virginia backwoods. The story starts when two young men are lost, only to be found six months later in good health. No one is quite sure what transpired, not even the teenagers…
  • Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
    With evangelicals attempting a hold on political power in the name of morality, this book is as relevant today as it was when it was first penned around 100 years ago. Personally, I’m a devout Christian and coordinate a Sunday School class. I’m also a lover of truth and, like Sinclair Lewis, find the evangelical movement’s unwillingness to accept uncomfortable truths troublesome. This book scandalized the American public in 1927, and its study of humans’…

History / Historical Fiction

  • The Glorious Revolution: The History of the Overthrow of King James II of England by William of Orange
    Given recent events in American politics, I wanted to read a short history of perhaps the most bloodless revolution in Western history: the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England. In the short time on his thrown, King James II, a Roman Catholic, had sought to exert supreme power over England, which had been Protestant for some time. Though no polls existed then, he grew unpopular with an estimated 19/20 people against him. The English…
  • Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith & Fractured a Nation
    This history describes how evangelical culture and its attitudes about masculinity have shaped white Christianity and American politics. In so doing, it tries to describe why evangelical Christians, supposedly the among the most devout and religious, have chosen to support a politician who is anything but devout and resembling the Bible’s Jesus. Frankly, Kristin Kobes du Mez, a minister’s daughter, does an honest, thorough job. The evangelicalism she describes is wedded more closely to patriarchy…

Biography / Memoir

  • On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service
    Because of the COVID pandemic, the name Tony Fauci has become incredibly politicized. To some, he is a villain who took over the country through a pandemic. They cynically blame him for all of America’s woes from the coronavirus. To others, he’s a hero for speaking life-conveying truth in a public-health crisis when most others equivocated. I’m in the latter camp, and this book, a memoir mixed with an apologia, certainly explains his perspective on…
  • What’s Past is Prologue: The Personal Stories of Women in Science at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
    “What’s past is prologue; what’s to come, in yours and my discharge,” wrote Shakespeare centuries ago in The Tempest. For the most part, women have been excluded from the enterprise of biomedical research throughout history. However, that practice has been changing in recent decades, and the trend will likely continue in coming decades. The challenge is mostly obvious: How can a woman balance a career demanding high performance with a fulfilling personal life, often with…
  • 10 Little Rules for a Double-Butted Adventure
    A lot of people live under the rubric that life conditions us and forms us by teaching us fixed truths about ourselves. However, recent scientific discoveries have taught us that the brain continues to adapt (i.e., learn and re-form) throughout one’s entire life – a property called neuroplasticity. Therefore, our spiritual lives and self-image can grow so long as we live. Author Teri Brown and her new husband Bruce discovered this life principle as they…

Spirituality / Philosophy / Religion

  • Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
    Nadia Bolz-Weber co-founded a Lutheran church in downtown Denver, Colorado. Her life story itself is interesting, but this book tells the stories of her parishioners. Most of these people do not fit the traditional mold of a “Christian saint” yet have life experiences that integrate with the Christian Gospel. Yet she finds God’s touch in each one of them. Therefore, she writes openly about how they have affected her and taught her. Nadia’s central point…
  • The Virtue of Dialogue: Becoming a Thriving Church Through Conversation
    Increasingly, Christian churches have become echo chambers that only amplify a given leader’s viewpoint. Their messages resemble denominational perspectives or, recently, boost an interdenominational framework loosely resembling political ideologies. To many, like myself, such a framework conveniently forgets about the diverse, historic nature of Christian theology. Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, was once a megachurch but shrank in membership as decades wore on. It revived itself through becoming a conversational center where people participated…
  • Jesus & John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith & Fractured a Nation
    This history describes how evangelical culture and its attitudes about masculinity have shaped white Christianity and American politics. In so doing, it tries to describe why evangelical Christians, supposedly the among the most devout and religious, have chosen to support a politician who is anything but devout and resembling the Bible’s Jesus. Frankly, Kristin Kobes du Mez, a minister’s daughter, does an honest, thorough job. The evangelicalism she describes is wedded more closely to patriarchy…