- Wodehouse, P. G. Psmith in the City. Woodstock,
NY: Overlook Press, [1910] 2003. ISBN 1-58567-478-8.
- The link above is to the only edition presently
in print in the U.S., a hardcover which is rather pricey for
such a thin volume. I actually read a 15 year old mass market
paperback; you can often find such copies at attractive prices on abebooks.com. If you're
up for a larger dose of Psmith, you might consider The World of Psmith paperback
published by Penguin in the U.K., which includes Psmith
Journalist and Leave It to Psmith along with this
novel.
- Stepczynski, Marian. Dollar: Histoire, actualité et avenir
de la monnaie impériale. Lausanne: Éditions Favre,
2003. ISBN 2-8289-0730-9.
- In the final paragraph on page 81, in the sentence which
begins «À fin septembre 1972», 2002 is intended,
not 1972.
- LaHaye, Tim and Jerry B. Jenkins. Soul Harvest. Wheaton, IL:
Tyndale House, 1998. ISBN 0-8423-2925-0.
- This is what happens when trilogies go
bad. Paraphrasing the eternal programming language COBOL,
“04 FILLER SIZE IS 90%”. According
to the lumpen eschatology in which the Left Behind series (of
which this is volume four) is grounded, the world will come to an
end in a seven-year series of cataclysms and miracles loosely based
on the book of Revelation in
the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Okay, as a fictional
premise, that works for me. The problem here is that while Saint John
the Divine managed to recount this story in fewer than 1600 words,
these authors have to date filled twelve volumes, with Tetragrammaton
knows how many more yet to come, stringing readers of the series
along for more years than the entire apocalypse is supposed to take
to go down. It is an accomplishment of sorts to start with the very
archetypal account of fire and brimstone, wormwood and rivers running
with blood, and make it boring. Precisely one paragraph—half
a page in this 425 page tome—is devoted to describing the impact
of of a “thousand mile square” asteroid in the the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean, while dozens, nay hundreds, of pages are filled with
dialogue which, given the apparent attention span of the characters
(or perhaps the authors, the target audience, or all of the above),
recaps the current situation and recent events every five pages
or so. I decided to read the first volume of the series, Left Behind (July 2002), after reading a magazine article
about the social and political impact of the large number of people
(more than fifty million copies of these books have been
sold to date) who consider this stuff something more than fantasy.
I opted for a “bargain box” of the first four volumes instead
of just volume one and so, their having already got my money,
decided to slog through all four. This was illogical—I should
have reasoned, “I've already wasted my money; I'm not going to
waste my time as well”—but I doubt many Vulcans buy these books
in the first place. Time and again, whilst wading through endless
snowdrifts of dialogue, I kept thinking, “This is like a comic
book.” In this, as in size of their audience, the authors were way ahead of me.
- Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics
Books, 2001. ISBN 1-56097-432-X.
-
- Lime, Jean-Hugues. Le roi de Clipperton. Paris:
Le Cherche Midi, 2002. ISBN 2-86274-947-8.
- This fascinating novel, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, is based on
events which actually occurred during the Mexican occupation of Clipperton Island from 1910
through 1917. (After World War I, the island returned to French
possession, as it remains today; it has been uninhabited since 1917.)
There is one instance of bad astronomy here: in
chapter 4, set on the evening of November 30th, 1910, the Moon
is described as «…très
lumineuse…. On y voyait comme
en plein jour.» (“…very
luminous;…. One could
see like in broad daylight” [my translation]).
But on that night, the Moon was not visible at all! Here is the sky above Clipperton at
about 21:00 local time courtesy of Your Sky.
(Note that in Universal time it's already the morning of
December 1st, and that I have supplied the actual latitude
of Clipperton, which is shown as one minute of latitude
too far North in the map on page 8.) In fact, the Moon was only 17 hours before new as shown by
Earth
and Moon Viewer, and hence wasn't visible from anywhere on
Earth on that night. Special thanks to the person who recommended
this book using the recommendation
form! This was an excellent read which I'd otherwise never have
discovered.
- Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. New
York: Three Rivers Press, [1946, 1962] 1979. ISBN 0-517-54823-2.
-
- Cahill, Thomas. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks
Matter. New York: Doubleday, 2003. ISBN 0-385-49553-6.
-
- Ferguson, Niels and Bruce Schneier. Practical
Cryptography. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing,
2003. ISBN 0-471-22357-3.
- This is one of the best technical books I have read
in the last decade. Those who dismiss this volume as “Applied Cryptography Lite” are
missing the point. While the latter provides in-depth information on a
long list of cryptographic systems (as of its 1996 publication date),
Practical Cryptography provides specific recommendations
to engineers charged with implementing secure systems based on the
state of the art in 2003, backed up with theoretical justification
and real-world experience. The book is particularly effective in
conveying just how difficult it is to build secure systems, and how
“optimisation”, “features”, and failure to adopt a completely paranoid
attitude when evaluating potential attacks on the system can lead
directly to the bull's eye of disaster. Often-overlooked details
such as entropy collection to seed pseudorandom sequence generators,
difficulties in erasing sensitive information in systems which cache
data, and vulnerabilities of systems to timing-based attacks are well
covered here.
- Vazsonyi, Balint. America's Thirty Years
War. Washington: Regnery Publishing,
1998. ISBN 0-89526-354-8.
-