Category: Books

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop – A Memoir, A History by Lewis Buzbee

I always am reading at least two books at a time. One on my Kindle and one in standard book form. This way if the Kindle battery dies or I am on an airplane taking off I still have a book to read. Yellow Lighted Bookshop is available in a Kindle edition but I borrowed my reading copy from my daughter.

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The Yellow – Lighted Bookshop A Memoir, A History by Lewis Buzbee is a wonderful book .It describes book stores, their history and the book selling business. I love book stores! Buzbee knows and describes many San Francisco Bay Area bookstores that I know and love. Many of these bookstores like a Clean Well Lighted Place for Books are no longer around but just thinking about them brings back fond memories.

John Tyler, The Accidental President by Edward P Crapol

A few days ago I finished reading John Tyler, The Accidental President by Edward P. Crapol. I have set myself a goal to read a biography of each American president. The list of the books I have read so far is here. 

John Tyler was the 10th American President. He served from 1841 to 1845. He was the first person to become president as a result of the death of the President. When William Henry Harrison died there was controversy about whether Tyler should actually become president or should just be designated as acting. His adversaries referred to him as “His Accidency”.

This biography focuses on what Crapol describes as ” Tyler’s mystical faith in America’s national destiny and closely examines  his life-long commitment to territorial expansion as the means to preserve the  Union as a slave holding republic.”

Crapol describes Tyler as: having “the stigma of being the nation’s only traitor president, a distinction lie gained from his support for secession  and the Confederacy.”

During Tyler’s presidency there was a horrible accident when a cannon exploded during a party on a boat near Washington.  Crapol says “To have a secretary of state, a secretary of the navy, a high-ranking  naval officer, and two other well-known public men perish in a single misadventure   was unprecedented in the nation’s history and remains the case  to the present day.”

Tyler was probably proudest of the significant roll he played in bringing Texas into the union. There were many opponents to annexation of Texas and Tyler worked both secretly and openly to make Texas a state.  Texas did not actually get admitted to the union until after Tyler was defeated in 1844.

I found Crapol’s biography of John Tyler very interesting but I wished he had talked more about Tyler’s background and his personal life. I would have liked to know a little more about Tyler’s wives and his relationships with them.

In preparation for this post I reviewed John Tyler’s Wikipedia article and I was surprised to learn that Tyler had 15 children! I don’t recall ever reading this in Crapol’s biography.

When I use my Kindle to search John Tyler, The Accidental President for references to Leticia, the name of Tyler’s first wife, I found only 5 references in the whole book. This absence of almost any reference to Tyler’s personal life made me feel like I only got half the story.

John Tyler

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

On our road trip I finished reading
The Blind Side by Michael Lewis and I am adding it to my
list of books completed in 2010.

I saw the movie Blind Side
with Sandra Bullock and I really enjoyed it. I assumed that it probably
wasn't worth reading the book since I already knew the story. But as
happens to me a lot, I enjoyed the book even more than the movie. I am a
fan of Michael Lewis' writing. His
baseball book, Moneyball, is one of my favorite books.

The
Blind Side is a very readable book, it gives you the real story of
Michael Oher but it also educates you about football, college athletics, recruiting, and everything a poor black kid from an inner city slum faces in life. It is impossible to overstate how disadvantaged Michael
Oher was. The Blind Side really makes you think about our society,
poverty and of course football. I highly recommend this book. I am putting Lewis' most recent book on my to read list.

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Basin and Range by John McPhee

Every list of suggested reading to learn about Nevada includes John McPhee's book Basin and Range. Basin and Range is about Nevada's landscape and geology along interstate 80. 

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People who've never been to Nevada often assume that Nevada is one big flat dessert. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Driving across Nevada you pass mountain range after mountain range separated by flat basins. It is a stunning landscape. Mcphee describes how this landscape was formed and how geologists came to understand it. Duke and I recently took another road trip exploring northern Nevada. I finished reading Basin and Range on the trip. It was fun to see some of the formations McPhee describes and to understand what we were seeing. Basin and Range is about geology, the history of geology and the history of Nevada.

 

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McPhee is a fantastic writer. His descriptions are lyrical and his science is engaging and understandable. Many years ago I read his book The Control of Nature. In it he describes our attempts to control mud slides in southern California and Lava flows in Iceland. That book has stayed in my mind as very few books do. Basin and Range was as compelling and memorable.

9800 Savage Road by M.E. Harrigan

In the fall of 1973 I was a senior at Iowa State University
finishing up my degree in Computer Science. Several times a week I went to the
placement office and signed up for interviews with companies who were coming on
campus to interview. After the on campus interviews I was sometimes called for
follow up interviews at the company’s headquarters. It was a heady experience flying
all over the U.S. imagining myself living and working in the city I was interviewing in.   Probably the most unusual
interview I had was a two day interview in Baltimore with the National Security
Agency. NSA does super secret work figuring out foreign signals intelligence.

The interviewers couldn’t tell me what I would be working on
and part of the interview process was taking 
a lie detector test. Unfortunately they had to get me a security
clearance before they could offer me a job and they told me it would be several
months before I could get a job offer. I had been working at Boeing in Seattle
for three or four months when I finally got their job offer. I’ve always kind of
wished I had gone to work for them.

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This is my draft security clearance application. I occasionally pull it out if I wan to remember one of the many addresses I had as a child.

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I just finished reading 9800 Savage Road by M.E. Harrigan.  
Harrigan worked for NSA for thirty seven years. 9800 Savage Road is her first novel and it was
great. It was a story of  espionage and murder inside the NSA complex and in Afghanistan. It was full of suspense and very believable. I could easily imagine myself in the middle of what was going on. I don't think anyone has ever written a story set inside the NSA which makes the book even more interesting.

I would highly recommend it.