Month: May 2009
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Book: Dreaming in Code
Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished. The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of…
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Book: The Good German
By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score! A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the…
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Book: American Places
At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago. Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a…
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Book: The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity
With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by. Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but…
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Movie: State of Play
State of Play makes a journalist (Russell Crowe) the hero in a corporate/political thriller that tries very hard. Sometimes, the movie succeeds. But with its reconciliation of the hard-core newspaperman and the young blogger and the final credits rolling over whirring presses as the newspaper prints the damning truth…State of Play felt like the modern…
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Book: Napoleon’s Egypt – Invading the Middle East
History gets written to react to the present. So when Juan Cole, a professor at Michigan wanted a new way to comment on the Middle East (beyond his blog), he wrote a book. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East chronicles the French attack and occupation in 1799-1800. Napoleon was smart enough to scoot back to…