The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich Often, I read National Book Award winners from yesteryear, but I don’t follow great writers who are currently alive. I decided that I wanted to buck that trend by reading this work. It tells about an everyman’s search for social justice amongst Native Americans. The story spans the distance from North Dakota to Washington, D.C. Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant While reading a previous biography on Grant, I…
The author Bodnar is a professional blogger and freelance writer. She maintains several blogs and operates in several roles – like a ghostwriter for blogs and for books, an author of books, and a maintainer of for-profit blogs. She distills wisdom from her experiences as she teaches how to blog. She covers everything from the basics of blogging to writing effective copy, from earning money from your blog to garnering a readership. She also includes…
Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, has served in several administrations, both Republican and Democratic. In this book, he exposits his experience in regulation to suggest more effective ways to do so. Instead of partisan pro-con analysis, he suggests to measure costs and benefits, an idea originally implemented by Reagan through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This practice provides a pragmatic – Sunstein calls it “technocratic” – way of assessing which regulations are…
European and Western disillusionment with life was at a peak after World War I. The twentieth century was supposed to be humanity’s greatest; instead, it was full of greater ways (think, nerve gas, machine guns, and trench warfare) for humans to destroy themselves. In this context, Kafka wrote this novel, published only after his death. In this story of an everyman, the dilemma of Josef K. (or just K.) raises the question of what we…
This Memorial Day is appropriate to celebrate one of our nation’s forgotten saviors. Although Lincoln is often credited with guiding the nation’s rebirth by preserving the Union, none of this would have happened without Ulysses S. Grant’s leadership. Still, Grant is often denigrated as an inept drunk and a butcher of soldiers. This view simply was not shared among his contemporaries who viewed his grace in Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse as foundational in national…
Dante’s Divine Comedy is famously organized into three sections: hell (inferno), then purgatory, and finally paradise. The first section (hell) is generally considered the greatest of the three, and Robert Pinsky attempts to re-translate the verses in this edition. Dante intentionally wrote the Divine Comedy in the Italian of commoners (instead of the Latin of scholars) so that the masses could read it. Therefore, it is appropriate for Pinsky to translate the Inferno in a…
The Great Influenza by John Berry There is no book more appropriate for our time. This is the best history of the last major pandemic – and the deadliest in history. If you want to learn what will help us overcome COVID, first figure out what helped us overcome H1N1 Influenza. The Plague by Albert Camus One of the modern era’s greatest takes on a pandemic, Camus’ work reminds us what life is really about.…
In recent years, JavaScript (JS) has seen a resurgence in popularity. From NodeJS on servers to PhoneGap on mobile devices to common standards in web browsers, JS seems to be everywhere. ES is the abbreviation for ECMA Script, the standard which JS implements. This book covers in detail the advance of the ES standards from earlier days (ES5) to 2019 (ESNext). Much effort has been given on the issue of “callback hell” and features resulting…
Despite watching tennis religiously throughout my life, I did not know the name of Charlotte “Lottie” Dod. She was a five-time winner of Wimbledon in the late 1800s. But she was more than a mere tennis player. She was an ice skater, a tobogganist, a mountain climber, an endurance bicyclist, a hockey player on the English national team, a championship golfer, and an Olympic silver medalist in archery. Quite the resume. After her sporting days…
This book is the manicured transcript of an event in New York City in the 1980s. This seminar featured six prominent writers influenced by different faith traditions. They spoke on how their religious beliefs/practices changed the way they wrote. By commenting on a practice as timeless as writing, this account captures much of religious writers’ sentiments towards their craft. All of these six speeches were interesting. They covered faith traditions as disparate as Roman Catholicism,…