Larry Kramer was an outspoken advocate in the 1980s, the early days of the AIDS epidemic. While many in the gay community were caught up in celebrating hard-fought sexual freedoms, Kramer argued that these freedoms must be curtailed somehow to protect against biological disease. This position, unfortunately, won him scorn from many fellow gays. However, he wrote this award-winning play in 1985 to advocate for his position while shining the light on what it was…
Sir David Attenborough is well-known to fans of the BBC in the United Kingdom for his interesting explorations on various topics, especially ones relating to natural history. In this book, he further dives into natural history about how the world has changed during his lifetime. His picture is quite bleak, with much of our wilderness becoming subsumed by humanity’s growth. Still, he manages to propose several hopeful strategies out of this crisis if we begin…
Former US President Lyndon Johnson is one of the more difficult to understand presidents. He reached the heights of politics through an assassination. He changed America permanently through the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-5. Pragmatically, he attempted to build a nation based on equal opportunity through the Great Society. He had an unparalleled genius for administrative leadership in the Senate and Oval Office. Yet he led the nation down a horrific course in Vietnam and…
This story of race, family, and other “ties that bind” is a product of its environment – South Africa around the end of apartheid – as much as it is a story of universal human nature. Told from multiple perspectives, it represents the hard work of reconciliation in a culture divided by so many ephemeral things like ethnicity or skin color. It is also a story about real horrors also dividing us like sexual abuse,…
Do you think America has never seen such polarizing times as ours today? Pulitizer Prize winner Jon Meacham stands ready to correct you and then to enlist you in the struggle for America to choose the better path. In this work, starting with Abraham Lincoln, he traces how historically Americans fought over choices that today might seem taken for granted – like women’s suffrage, lynchings, the right to vote, and trumped-up charges of political treason.…
I am a professional software developer with an interest in biostatistics. I picked up this book to gain a deeper understanding of Kaplan-Meier graphs and accompanying theories around them. This book went into many more details than I found accessible. Nonetheless, it introduced me to hazard plots and hazard analysis – a concept that I was able to apply to my work. Mathematics/statistics and R code are used heavily in this book. To garner the…
It seems that advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have always been just over the world’s horizon ever since the 1950s. Although General AI – the kind that mimics full human intelligence – still seems decades away, our society seems to be adapting so-called Narrow AI already. (In fact, for work, I develop software that uses Narrow AI approaches for use by research administrators.) Noessel seeks to explain how non-programmers can design software that helps us…
What happens when a character investigates her/his own murder? How exactly could that happen? In this book, FitzSimmons explores exactly that situation. He presents a dystopic vision of human cloning in which this “new” advance is used as an excuse to denigrate human life. By so doing, he advances the notion that progress in extending our science should correlate with progress in deepening our humanity. While doing so, this work of science fiction develops into…
This book is widely regarded as the definitive biography of Napoleon Bonaparte in the English language. After listening to this book, I find no reason to disagree. Napoleon was and is a huge figure in European history. He conquered swaths of territory and reformed national systems. He can only be compared to Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great in terms of impact. He did not wrestle England, his archenemy, to the ground economically or militarily.…
In the past decade, the JavaScript language has witnessed a renaissance of new activity. Once pigeon-holed as a language for web browser eye-candy, JavaScript can now be used for the entire stack (server-side, client-side, testing, and even command-line). In this book, Shute attempts to keep developers up to date with a high-level review of the advancements. While this book is not a classic (and what modern computer-language-specific book is a classic?), it serves the needs…