Pigology by Daisy Bird, Camilla Pintonato

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

You eat like a pig. Your place is a pigsty. You're hogging all the limelight. Pigs equal insults in many a mind. This book hopes to set a few records straight and give you a basic grounding in how to choose, own, raise and care for your pig, regardless of what your intentions are. I'm an almost lifelong vegetarian so I would never eat a pig, but I do like the animals. Ignorantly associated with squalor, pigs are not dirty animals - unless they're forced into being so by their human predators. They're also smart - more than dogs even - and among the most intelligent animals in the world.

But they are exploited hugely. Whether your plan is to do that or to have one as a pet, this book will set you up with the basic information you will need to make smart choices and to care for your animal competently. It's laid out according to the following section headings (although there's an introductory section, which for once I did read, that's not included in the content listing for some reason):

• Bon Appetiti
• Food All year Round
• The International Pig
• Sausageology
• Everything But the Squeal
• Pigs and Humans
• The Mythological Pig
• Chinese Zodiac
• Wit and Wisdom
• Fame!
• Worth Their Weight in Gold
• The Perfect Pigsty
• pigs as Pets
• A rainbow of Breeds
• A rainbow of Breeds
• Vietnamese Potbellied Pig, Odssabaw Island Hog
• Danish Protest Pig, Meishan
• Gloucester Old Spot, Large White
• Black Iberian, Mulefoot

The book is amusing and colorful, with entertaining illustrations and enough information to set you on the right track without being a PhD dissertation. I commend this as a worthy read for anyone wanting to pig out and go hog wild!

The Fastest Woman on Earth by Francesca Cavallo, Luis san Vicente

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a remarkable story of a truly strong female character in real life who overcame a childhood inability to use her legs, and abandonment by her birth mother, to grow into being a competitor in the Paralympics and other contests, from sprinting to marathons, and winning scores of medals, including seven Paralympic golds.

Tatyana was abandoned at a home for kids in Russia, and spent many years there, getting around using her hands for legs for her first six years, because the home could not afford a wheelchair for her. This made her arms very strong. Deborah McFadden happened to visit this home as a commissioner of disabilities working with the US Health Department, and ended up adopting Tatyana, who then went on to her successes in school and in pursuing higher education academic studies.

This is a great introductory book not only to this outstanding athlete, but also to the Paralympics and to people with disabilities. I commend it as a worthy read.

Night Creatures by Rebecca E Hirsch, Sonia Possentini

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the BeeGees song that spent eight weeks at number one in the later seventies, tied to the movie Saturday Night Fever, but reading this I kept finding that lyric in my head, suitably adjusted, of course:

Listen to the ground, there is movement all around
There is something going down, and you can feel it
There are creatures in the air, there are critters everywhere
And it's something you can share, if you believe it
Those denizens of night come with the waning of light
Taking over the world as we sleep
They're hunting and gathering, and spreading through the night
They are Night Creatures, Night Creatures!
They know how to live it!
Night Creatures, Night Creatures!

Of course that song was Night Fever, but now you know happens when I haven't had enough sleep! Gorgeously-illustrated by the elegantly-named Sonia Possentini, and written with panache by Rebecca Hirsch, this book takes a look at some of those living things that populate the evening, night, and early morning, such as bats, bobcats, fireflies, mice, owls, rabbits, raccoons, skunks and others. The book talks a little about each, their favored time to prowl, their diet, and so on. It's makes for an absorbing and educational introduction to a world not many young children are familiar with, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Buzz, Sting, Bite by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook, read delightfully by Kristin Milward, is a wonderful overview of the insect world and the importance of all of them - even the annoying ones! Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is a professor of conservation biology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences located about 10 miles south of Oslo. She writes well, and with a nice sense of humor which isn't lost in the English translation that I listened to.

There are nine main chapters, the title of each being self-explanatory:

1. Small Creatures, Smart Design: Insect Anatomy
2. Six Legged Sex: Dating, Mating, Parenting
3. Eat or be Eaten: Insects in the Food Chain
4. Insects and Plants: a Never-Ending Race
5. Busy Flies, Flavorsome Bugs: Insects in Our Food
6. The Circle of Life - And Death: Insects as Janitors
7. From Silk to Shellac: Industries of Insects
8. Lifesavers, Pioneers, and Nobel Prize Winners: Insights From Insects
9. Insects and us; What's Next?

Here are some quotes directly from the book description - which for once in a rare while is accurate and useful: "Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not pollinate. No cocoa, no chocolate." "Blowfly larva can clean difficult wounds; flour beetle larva can digest plastic; several species of insects have been essential to the development of antibiotics." "There are insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet." What's not to love about a book like this?! I commend it heartily.

Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by the author (I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own material for audio-books if they can), this book gave me mixed feelings at times. Overall, on balance though, I considered it a worthy read. The aim of it is to discuss how this planet changed over the course of the ice ages in North America, with a reference here and there to other parts of the world, and how this affected humans and their habits and migratory patterns. The way the author does it is to take trips and relate his experiences to things that may - or may not - have happened to ice age peoples who lived on the North American continent back then.

There's a lot of information dispensed here, but it's often mixed in with the author's own personal experiences and sometimes I think this muddies the waters. At one point he writes a mild admonishment that we should not imagine that people back then necessarily viewed the world in the same way we do today, and under different conditions. They had their own lives and drives, he advises, but then he goes right back to relating his experiences to theirs! It sounded a bit ambiguous.

The text is evocative and sometimes overly imaginative, but it never gets wildly out of control and it does tell an interesting story that really makes a reader (or in this case a listener) think about these things in new ways, which is what I liked about this. There's some technical information, but not an unwelcome amount, and I enjoyed that - learning about an era which is often not covered in the textbooks that like to ramble on about dinosaurs or early African hominids. It gave me some good perspectives about life back then, and on how hardy and creative these people were, and what they had to contend with. I commend this as a worthy listen.

Back to Earth by Nicole Stott

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm always rather skeptical of conversion stories - someone did something and it opened their eyes to an issue or gave them a new perspective. There's something fundamentally wrong with a society that thinks someone's miraculous conversion somehow imbues them with an authoritative voice or a spiritual gift or something, whereas someone who has seen and been guided by this same revelatory light all their life, rarely gets any credit or any sort of spotlight on their equally valid and majorly contributing 'non-conversion'.

It's entirely wrong; even ass-backwards, but it's how we work on this planet unfortunately. I know authors typically don't write their own book descriptions, so this isn't on her, but the blurb here says "When Nicole Stott first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are." I'm sorry, but if you have to be shot 250 miles into space at 25,000 mph to realize this, then you've been sleepwalking through life, and you really don't deserve much credit for your epiphany.

I was interested in this book because it seemed to offer a scientific perspective on how we can help Earth, but by a third in I was already disillusioned with it because I'd learned nothing to that end. I'm not saying what I did read wasn't interesting at all; there were parts that were engaging and informative, but none of it had to do with helping fix the problems on Earth.

The story was very autobiographical, with the author calling everyone 'my friend' or 'my dear friend' if she knew them at all, and it carried a sense of desperation to it. It's irrelevant to the reader how close the author is to person A or person B and this constant repetition of that 'friend' mantra had an aura of pathos to it. Not that this is a critical disaster. It just struck me as rather odd in the same way it does when an author writes the more pretentious 'utilizing' instead of simply typing 'using'.

There were parts where the author seemed to start in on a topic and then just abandon it, or go off at a tangent. One example that comes immediately to mind was about painting in space. None of this of course helps save Earth, but I happened to find this particular piece quite fascinating, yet instead of talking about the actual painting she was doing, it seems like she lost interest once the paint was on the brush, and essentially abandoned that story!

In contrast, other tangential stories about life in space or astronaut training seemed like they went on forever or were repeated several times instead of letting the issue go like she did with the art. It made for a messy story overall. These things had nothing whatsoever to do with with applying what had been learned in space to solving Earth's problems, and if all of these extraneous parts had been excised, it would have made for a very thin book indeed. It's like she couldn't make up her mind whether to write an autobiography or an Earth-self-help book, and so we got a disjointed and somewhat repetitive mishmash of both.

The real disaster though, lay in other directions. In the first third of this book, the closest it came to discussing how technology can help Earth, was when discussing the water shortage and how many people are denied a basic human right: access to clean, fresh water. They have filtration units in the space program which take all water - even sweat and urine - and purify it so that it's cleaner than most water you can get on Earth, including that microplastic-infused bottled water that far too many people drink under the delusion that it's healthier than tap water. In some countries I'm sure it is, but that's rarely applicable in the USA. Nowhere in this discussion did the author say how this was applied to helping people on Earth. More on this anon.

The worst part of this section of the story though was that the author mentioned Guy Laliberté. This guy is a Canadian billionaire and gambler who founded Cirque du Soleil, but the latter enterprise, which is multinational (and in which Laliberté has now sold his interests, I understand), was all that got mentioned in the story - that and the fact that Laliberté paid thirty two million dollars to take a space tourist trip. The author talks like this was a deliberate trip to raise awareness of problems on Earth. It was a fail with me, because I never heard of this guy going into space so my awareness was not raised by his $32 million investment. I don't know how many people did hear about it because the author never discusses that.

But here's the thing: this guy paid $32 million!! How many of those problems he claimed he was highlighting could have been solved by putting that $32 million directly into solving them? The author never explored that, and this bothered me. The guy is a billionaire. He could have paid a hundred million to help solve the problems he was raising awareness about and he would never have missed that, yet he's presented in this book as some sort of hero for his work! I don't get that mentality at all.

To me it seems equally likely that he just wanted to take a trip into space and could afford it, which is fine, it's his own money, but then he turns around and tries to 'justify' the extravagance by saying it's an awareness-raising trip. Maybe it was, but who knows? I don't. I just know $32 million went into space and none of that particular amount contributed to bringing "one drop" of clean water to any child. Reading this, I confess I sometimes thought that maybe it's the author's awareness which needs raising?

I was enthralled with the space program when I was a kid, but lately I've wondered more about the PoV of those who ask: why is this money being sent into space when we need help on Earth. I was disappointed in the author's retort to that. It seemed outright facetious to me. She effectively side-stepped the question by redirecting it. She said the money doesn't go into space, it's all spent right here on Earth. That was hilarious, Nicole. Yeah, it's spent on Earth, and a small portion of it goes into setting up experiments in space that can help people on Earth. Thinking people get that. But NASA's space shuttle program cost almost $200 billion in total. Each flight cost $450 million.

So the question, Nicole, is not where the money was spent, but how much value for money we got for that $200 billion. Was it truly worth it? Yeah it was thrilling, but who did it really help? Yeah, there have been concrete returns from the spending, in terms of computer advances and medicine and so on, but where's the evidence that those advances could not have come about by directly investing the $200 billion in technology and medicine?

Did we have to go to space to get these advances? I've never seen a justification for that, and it wasn't discussed in this book. Australia built six seawater desalination plants for ten billion. How many of those would $200 billion buy? Seventy percent of Earth's surface is covered with saltwater and forty percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of it. Desalination uses a huge amount of energy, but water is most scarce where it's hot, and it's hot because the sun is shining. Can you say solar power?! No alternatives were ever discussed.

I like the space program. Always have, but it needs to be justified, not blown-off with facetious comebacks. In the sixties, robotics, AIs, and computers were pathetic compared with what we have today, but now we do have robots very effectively working on Mars. So what exactly is the justification for sending people into space? I've seen some halfhearted justifications, but never anything that truly made me nod my head in agreement.

Now if everyone had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food in their belly, clean water, sanitation, and an education in their brain, then by all means blow $200 billion on sending people into space. Until then, there needs to be serious justification for what we spend set against what we can realistically expect to get back from it in temrs of direct benefits to those who most need them. The author never offers any such cost analysis.

The justification needs to be spectacular. it needs to be something that's essential, that can only be done by humans, and that can only be done in space, otherwise it's simply not justifiable when people are starving and suffering, and homeless, and living in migrant camps and being recruited into under-age armies, and drinking disgusting water, and suffering diseases. Anyone with a functioning mind can see that with ever having to go into space.

It needs to be spectacular because, as the author explains, it costs dramatically more money to send a living thing into space than ever it does a robot. It costs more because humans have to be coddled as the author makes quite clear. They're not evolved to live in space, with little gravity tugging on them, and with the brutal cold, the radiation, and a complete vacuum. That's where a heck of a lot of the money goes: into coddling people who are out of their depth - or height in this case! The question that really needs to be asked is: can automation and even robots do the same work that's being done? This question isn't explored in this book either.

Don't tell me it can't be done. It used to be that to fight an air war you needed trained pilots in expensive aircraft - aircraft also designed to coddle humans. Now we have drones doing a lot of that work. I'm not saying it's great, or even justifiable, but it is being done. So you can't tell me that we couldn't achieve the same thing in space - not when we're already doing it, for example, on Mars right now.

But the thrust of this book is about how we can learn lessons from space that we can employ on Earth and the first of these seems to be that we can purify water, but the fact is that the Bill Gates foundation funds the development of waste processing facilities that can be deployed in countries with little infrastructure, and which will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity. None of this came from space exploration. It came from human ingenuity and a challenge to solve a problem. Bill Gates has never been into space and neither - to my knowledge - have any of the people who developed this system. The investment was spent right here on Earth and is already solving problems.

So that brings us back to what this book has to offer in terms of learning lessons from space? The amusing book description has it that the author knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station, but this is such a simplistic view of things that it's laughable. The people who are selected to go into space have to pass a barrage of tests and psychological considerations. They're not regular people!

They're purposefully selected for tolerance and sociability and education level and so on! To pretend you can extrapolate from this highly-managed microcosm of Earth's population to the world at large is to show a disturbing level of ignorance about how people are in real life, especially people who are stressed, and deprived, and poorly educated, and poor, and tired, and sick, and hungry. You can't take the harmony of that micro environment and expect it to translate to a world where 74 million people willingly and freely voted for an asshole like Donald Trump. It doesn't work.

At one point I read, “I’m pleased that today we recognize the value of international partnership and cooperation and don’t focus so much on competition." Has the author met China? It's home home to almost a third of the human race which is having nothing to do with the ISS, and is going its own sweet way in space and on Earth. At another point I read, that Earth’s oceans will boil in a billion years, but it's not that simple.

Yes, in a Billion years our climate will change due to changes in solar output, but the oceans and not going to instantly boil away at that point! it will be a slow change, but slowly accelerating as the sun increases its brilliance and eventually, its size. But a billion years from now it won't matter because humans will either be extinct through our own willful scientific ignorance (Republicans I;m looking at you), or have moved off Earth onto other planets. So again, this seemed inapplicable.

So, in short, I cannot commend a book that so dissipated its resources, and so consistently failed to meet its own aims.

Thinking Better by Marcus Du Sautoy

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Okay! On to some reviews of books, as opposed to idiotic book descriptions. Described as "The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life" I have to say up front that I was disappointed in this book. Maybe it’s just me, but there really didn’t seem to be anything here that I could use in my life, and worse than that, I didn't see much benefit in modern everyday life to be derived from the shortcuts that were discussed here. Some of the math and how it was arrived at historically was interesting, but it also felt rather repetitive after a while, and it was largely historical.

I am not a big fan of book descriptions which can be misleading at best, so I was amused by the one for this, which claims that the book is "above all practical." The description also said, "Du Sautoy explores ... whether you must really practice for ten thousand hours to become a concert violinist, and why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI." With regard to the violin: the people who did that study were annoyed when people started claiming they had discovered that it takes 10,000 hours to become a virtuoso. They said it misrepresented what they reported. The bottom-line is that are no shortcuts to becoming a maestro or a maestra.

The fact is that you do need to practice long and hard, and there's no way around that. Not that I plan on taking up the violin (or the cello, which is what was discussed here), but I resented that the book description suggested otherwise about shortcuts. The only shortcuts offered here were of the lesser variety - in that you can play a note in more than one way on a stringed instrument, so adjusting fingering can enable you to play a difficult piece more easily - but in order to realize that you still have to learn to play the piece competently - which is what takes the time! So this was misleading at best.

The part about "why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI" is equally misleading. AIs are not as bad as this indicates. Yes, they can make mistakes, but they can also find shortcuts humans failed to see, and they're getting better all the time. Humans really aren’t!

Based on the fact that this book really failed to deliver on the implied promise - that we can make use of math to inform us of beneficial shortcuts in our lives, I felt it failed. The book delivered on stories of how shortcuts have been found using math in the past, and even led to great discoveries, but none of this really had a whole heck of a lot to do with your average person's everyday life, and the book failed to offer anything I could see that would benefit me in my life. So while the math was interesting in places and some of the historical paths to discovery were educational, I felt the book fell short of its implied promise and I cannot commend it.

The Shaytan Bride by Sumaiya Matin

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a horrible story, but I mean that in a good way. To know that Muslim women are treated badly is one thing, but to have it slapped in your face repeatedly as this story does, is a shattering experience.

Sumaiya Matin moved with her family from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Thunder Bay, Ontario as a young child, and effectively grew-up Candian, but still Muslim of course. Her family ties ran deep though, and when she returns on what she thinks is merely a visit, she has no idea that her family plans to marry her off while she's back in Bangladesh.

In Canada, she'd met and fallen in love with a Sikh guy, but this was not her family's plan for her, and neither she nor Bhav, the guy she fell for, knew how their relationship might work. They knew only that they wanted it to. Trapped in Bangladesh, cut-off from friends, denied access to a phone, Sumaiya had to struggle against everyone to ensure that it was she, not they, who determined what her future would be. She proved to be stronger than they, but strong as she is,mstill she could not make everything come out all right. The story was educational, uncomfortable but necessary to read, and in many ways depressing.

In a similar vein, it was not all plain sailing for me, as a reader. I am not religious, so my mind is often boggled at what believers believe and what they bring upon themselves. I was unaware of how deep the fantastical beliefs of some cultures still run, even now in the 21^st century. The stories of the Shayṭān Bride and the deep-seated beliefs in jinn were disturbing. It turns out that two-thirds to three-quarters of Bangladeshis believe in these spirits and in possession by such spirits, and women tend to believe more than men.

The story of the woman possessed by one such spirit was disturbing. I don't believe she was. It was doubtlessly a medical condition, but the story was quite moving and unsettling. There are also female jinn named jiniri, which I can no doubt have fun with in some future story I write!

In conclusion, This is a heart-breaking story of female subjugation, cruelty, and strength, of love and loss, and of one woman determined to be the author of her own destiny, and for that, I commend it.

On the Road to Tara by Aljean Harmetz

Rating: WARTY!

This is a large format print book replete with photographs from all stages of the production and all aspects of it. But it's not just a picture book. It has a lot of text describing aspects of the production from the acquisition of the rights to the novel, to the filming itself. If you're a big aficionado of the book or the movie, or are deeply interested in film-making, then this is a worthy read, but overall I have to say it wasn't worth my time. I found it interesting in parts, but it was too big, too full of fluff, and far too repetitive to be of great value.

If there's one thing that runs through this book, it's the constant and monotonous drumbeat of producer David Selnick's obsessive-compulsive micromanagement and meddling. It's really more of a book about him than it is about the movie, come to think of it and frankly, it's tedious to read this much of that topic. Yes, his behavior was an important part of how the movie got made, and yes, once in a while it's interesting to hear about how interfering and uncontrollable he was, but to hear it in every other paragraph is truly irritating and belabors the point long past its sell-by date.

I felt the book seriously overdid that at the expense of other things it could have related, but apart from where it talks about Selznick's behavior, the book seems superficial, skimming over other important and interesting stuff until it gets to the next Selznick-o-thon. I can't commend it as a worthy read for this reason.

The Conscience of an Agnostic by Robert K Cooper

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is a very short book, and frankly after reading it, I wasn't sure exactly what it was trying to do, but for me it failed if judged by what the book description declares is its aim.

The premise is supposedly that "it is simply impossible to determine, with any degree of confidence, as to whether there is a transcendent, creative being which is responsible for the existence of the universe. The conclusion that inevitably flows from this realization is that agnosticism is the most intellectually honest position to espouse" but the author seems like he's on a crusade to debunk the theistic arguments (which frankly isn't a difficult thing to do) without paying any attention to the atheistic ones, and so he fails to establish the very premise that he claims is the only rational position.

To the best of my knowledge, the atheist position doesn't declare there are no gods, but instead declares that there's no convincing evidence for any gods. As Richard Dawkins and others have put it, most people have no belief in most gods. Atheists just believe in fewer gods than do believers. But if the author's aim is to establish that agnosticism is the only intellectually honest position, then he doesn't make that case here. A quick glance at the chapter headers is enough to make that argument:

• What is Agnosticism?
• What is Religious Faith?
• Common Objections to the Bible
• The Random Cruelty of Life: Murderous Dictators
• The Random Cruelty of Life: 20th Century Disasters
• The Random Cruelty of Life: The Deadliest Natural Disasters
• The Random Cruelty of Life: Mass Shootings

You rather get the idea from this that the book is largely US-centric and targets almost exclusively the Christian faith - otherwise why have a chapter devoted to the Bible, but none devoted to the Koran, or the Vedas, or the Tri-piṭaka and so on? So while you can argue (if you like!) that it addresses the Christian faith, it fails to make any case at all for agnosticism with regard to other faiths. The assumption, also, is that the creator god we’re supposed to be agnostic about, is a loving one, and seeks - from the abundance of chapters on the topic - to dispel this notion by having almost half the book devoted to the random cruelty of life, but what if this creator god merely sets things in motion and doesn't have any interest in beneficence or otherwise? The book fails to engage that.

The book also completely fails to address the scientific perspective, with regard, for example, to how the universe came to be and the fact that there may be multiple universes. It fails to address the four billion years of life on the planet which existed nearly all of that time without any living thing (at least on Earth!) wondering if there were any gods. What was that all about, if there's supposed to be a benign creator? It also fails to address any of the philosophical arguments for or against gods.

The last couple of chapters are "Assorted Quotes and Humorous tidbits" and "Quotes from Yours Truly: More Humorous tidbits" neither of which make any argument for anything and seemed more like filler. Quoting someone saying something about a god isn't evidence for or against any position, and listing celebrities who are agnostics makes no more of an argument for agnosticism than does listing holocaust deniers make an argument that there was no holocaust.

I didn't get the point of this approach at all, and especially not the employment of so much space which fails to take on the premise of the book in any meaningful or useful way, and neither do I see the point of those last two frivolous chapters when the point of the book still has not been made. For me the book had no real focus or thrust; it seemed half-hearted and rambling, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski

Rating: WARTY!

If you look at an older version of this book, which is what I read, you will see this on the cover: "Why England Loses, why Spain, Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport." A more recent edition had this: "Why England Loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport."

Notice the changes? That's because this book is full of shit. It cherry picks its data (and there's precious little of that) to support the predetermined theses of the authors. Once in a while there's a rare nugget, but most of the good advice in this book is nothing more than commonsense, and most of the 'data' is nothing more than a few choice anecdotes which prove nothing. I don't think anyone with common sense would try to argue that statistics cannot be of value to the soccer world, but the authors really don't make that case here.

The big problem is that the book is regularly self-contradictory, negating in a later chapter what it only just got through asserting as a 'solid fact' in an earlier one. In short, it's a mess. It's way too long and rambling. It could be literally half as long and make the same points, but it would still be wrong. The volume I read was last updated in 2014, and here we are, and the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and even Iraq are not kings of the sport or anywhere near. I was just reading a coupel of days ago that United States will miss its third straight Olympic men’s soccer tournament. And Brazil hasn't done so much winning lately, either! Not that the book really makes an effort to explain why they're supposed to - and not that it really talks much about south American football.

One thing they really didn't cover in terms of international football, is something they mentioned briefly in team sports which is that picking the best players doesn't necessarily mean you have the best team. The players have to work well together, so it's not enough to buy the best forwards, midfielders and defenders, you have to buy the best who can integrate into a team to really get the results you want. I don't think they pursued that anywhere near as strenuously as they ought to have. Instead they seemed to be focusing on everything else, some of which was nonsense.

The book's main thrust is almost entirely on Europe which is quite plainly wrong. Europe has a strong football tradition, but it's far from the only region of the world which has such a tradition these days, and the book says literally nothing about women's football, like it doesn't exist, which begs the question: why the sexism? And why are women's international games producing significantly different results than the men's games? That's certainly a question worth exploring but it's not even touched on here. I can't commend this because it's very poorly done and does nothing to offer original or penetrating answers to the questions it poses.

Andy Warhol by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, Timothy Hunt

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I've read many of Vegara's books. This author must be a little demon workhorse to turn out so many of these ebooks. I believe there are like five dozen of them now, and I sure haven't read that many, but I have read quite a few. There has been only one, if I recall correctly, that I have not liked. This one was no exception to the likeability rule.

Andy Warhola, as he was originally, was the child of Slovakian immigrants who was shy and had an artistic leaning from an early age. He finished college and moved quickly to New York where he was able to find work as an illustrator, before he branched out into celebrating the mundane and became a world-famous artist, inspired by the soup cans from which he made his lunch each day.

This book tells a short, sweet, and nicely illustrated (by Hunt) story of his life and work and I commend it.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Rating: WORTHY!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though it was rather on the long side and a bit rambling, but it's a topic I enjoy greatly, and an author I love. On top of this, it was read beautifully by Sean Runnette. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own material, but I understand that there are good reasons why many authors do not. Though this reader isn't Dutch, listening to him reading it so well, it was one of those occasions where, with a slight stretch of the imagination, you can fool yourself into thinking that this is how the author would have read it.

The book rambles a bit and might be somewhat stodgy and overly academic for some, but it was precisely what I was expecting and I had no unpleasant surprises, only a lot of satisfying ones. There were scores of examples of animals' intelligence, with many interesting anecdotes and lots of descriptions of scientific studies which went into enough detail to explain why it was a scientific study and what result it showed, but without belaboring it. The studies have covered all kinds of animals from mollusks to monkeys, birds to apes, fish to elephants, and a variety of others.

The book explains how these studies differ and what they show, and how one study can or cannot be made to work with another species for an assortment of reasons. While it was thorough, I was never bored, and felt no need to skip a page or two. We learn how studies have changed along with our view of society and why older views as to the limitations of animal cognition are invalid, so it's as much a measure of change in human cognition as it is in measuring animal cognition, which is quite intriguing.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

Python for MBAs by Mattan Griffel, Daniel Guetta

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum: "We're return to this in a second" (We'll return...)

This was an impressive introduction to Python and quite the polar opposite of the confusing and unhelpful volume on Python which I reviewed earlier this month. This one did the job right and led into the topic with clear and simple terminology and examples. It explained everything as it went and offered lots of support and practice without overdoing it.

It's split into two sections. The first, by Griffel, in an admirable introduction that gets you up and running with Python. The second, by Guetta, is a workmanlike tour that takes you into real-world-inspired examples where you work business data sets and learn how to set them up, manipulate them, and employ them to extract the information you need. I was impressed by this book - by how simple and clear it was and by how well things are explained.

The only issues I ran into were those of a formatting nature which I seem to encounter quite often in Kindle-format ebooks. I did not encounter these with the PDF format version which I also checked out - it was just in Kindle. This is one reason I detest Amazon, because if your text isn't plain vanilla, their conversion process will turn it into kindling - hence the name of their format, no doubt!

The weird effects I saw in this version I have seen in other books too. It seemed like this effect, whatever it was, affected instances where the letter 'F' was combined with another letter - another 'F', or with an 'I', an 'L', or a 'T', or where a capital 'T' appeared with a lower-case 'H'. In the 'F' cases, that letter and its partner letter were omitted; sometimes a space appeared in their stead, other times the word just contracted like there were no missing letters. For example, 'overflow' would turn into 'overow', 'different' would become 'dierent', 'often' for some reason maintained a space and would read as 'o en', or sometimes 'oen'. 'Fifty-Five' would read as 'ty-ve' LOL!

Here are some examples:
"A survey by Stack Overow found that almost percent of programmers are self-taught..." (that's Stack Overflow)
"...even professional programmers constantly come across new topics and concepts that don't know but have to gure out how to learn." (That's 'they don't know' and 'figure out how')
"Yet the average uent adult knows only twenty to thirty-ve thousand words." (That's fluent, and thirty-five)
"...some of the Python data types (e.g., oats, integers, and strings)..." - yes, it was quite amusing reading about how much oats plays into the Python language. Of course, it's floats!
"A lot of what you're learning when you rst learn a programming language..." (first)
"...(think Microso Word..." (Microsoft - but insult them all you want, I'm not a fan!) "Note that the so ware we use..." (software) "...end. e front end..." (The front end)

Another problem is that sometimes numbers, written as numbers, were missing, so I'd read, "According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language currently has , ,. words. (Ever stop to think about what a . word is?" All the figures are missing, but the letters remain!

That aside, I consider this a worthy read and a great start for anyone wanting to get into python programming whether your ultimate aim is business use or not.

Hinduism by Gregory Kozlowski

Rating: WORTHY!

It's strange to see a book about an Indian religion not written by someone with an Indian name, but the author seemed to know what he was talking about and I got exactly what I wanted: a light coverage with enough detail to make me feel like I'd learned something, but not so dense that you get lost trying to listen to it while driving, so I considered this a worthy listen. The comfortable reading by Ben Kingsley helped a lot, too. Yes, it was that Ben Kingsley!

Hinduism is arguably the oldest extant religion on the planet and in its many forms has a billion or so modern-day adherents, but that doesn't mean it hasn't changed, warped, morphed, grown, or withered in that time. This book is rather short, so it cannot cover every eventuality, and that's not what I wanted anyway. I wanted an overview and I felt that's what I got, but I'm aware, as I hope other readers/listeners are, that one perspective from one author isn't necessarily an unbiased or fully-rounded one.

Without getting bogged-down in detail or going off into too many tangents (although there are some) this book covers Hinduism from the earliest beginnings to current day practice, and many aspects in between. I knew very little about Hinduism and its offshoots and sister religions, so I found this quite fascinating. I don't hold with religion myself, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in the beliefs and practices of others, and I was happy to learn about Hindu gods and worship customs and how various offshoots arose. So, as an introductory volume, this book satisfied my curiosity well, and I commend it as a worthy read.

The Perfect Theory by Pedro G Ferreira

Rating: WORTHY!

This book was much more my idea of a 'science for the masses' sort of a book. I have just reviewed A Natural History of Color negatively because it was hard to follow and too dense, and this book was the polar opposite. It had plenty of juicy detail, but it was written lightly, and in an easy style so when Sean Runnette read it to me so nicely, I was able to follow it even when driving and partly- or mostly-focused on traffic. To me that makes a big difference since I'm rarely sitting listening to books in an armchair.

The book follows the historical pursuit and discovery of relativistic physics, naturally discussing Einstein who opened this field, but there are many other contributors. Einstein, for example, is mostly closely associated with the famous formula E=mc⊃2, but the fact is that he was not the first to derive that equation!

Approximations to it had been expressed earlier by people like John Henry Poynting and Fritz Hasenöhrl, and Henri Poincaré came very close to the actual equation citing m = E/c⊃2, although he found paradoxes in his approach. Italian Olinto De Pretto also published the equivalent of Einstein's formula , effectively expressed as E=mv⊃2 where 'v' is the speed of light. Pretty much all of these people were dealing with a universe which contained aether - or so they believed. Einstein dispensed with aether because he correctly rejected its existence, but he was so widely read it is hard to believe that he was not aware of the equation before he ever wrote it down himself.

The book goes on to discuss gravity and acceleration, issues involving theoretic math versus practical physics particularly in relation to plans for developing a gravity wave detector. There are chapters on collapsing stars, singularities, black holes, and John Wheeler, the accidental radio detection of the cosmic background radiation, and dark matter. It ive sag rea thisotry fo the work, visits many of the contributors and tells a great story. I commend it fully as a worthy read or listen.

Footprints in the Dust by Roberta Gately

Rating: WORTHY!

This non-fiction audiobook tells stories of the author's volunteer travels as a nurse in stressed and war-torn areas of the world, mostly Africa and the Middle East, but no matter where it is, it seems that the problems seem to be always the same: primitive and disadvantaged locations and people, with poor equipment and limited supplies, and people suffering way beyond what would be remotely tolerated in the USA, yet struggling on regardless.

It's a depressing listen, but the only way to properly understand how bad things are for refugees and all others caught in civil strife, short of going there yourself, is to listen and to keep listening to stories like these. As the book description tells us, "There are more than twenty-two million refugees worldwide and another sixty-five million who have been forcibly displaced" and it isn't going to magically get better. This book tells stories of the author's assignments, and the things she had to endure, but more importantly it delivers crystal clear and disturbing visions of real people with a name, but no address, and children who she has met, and tried to help.

This book is well worth reading or listening to especially as narrated by Susan Boyce who did a compassionate job with difficult material. I commend it and the author for her service.

Early Texas Oil by Walter Rundell Jr

Rating: WARTY!

This was a large format picture book about the development of the oil industry from the first strikes in the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-thirties. Why it stopped there I don't know since it was published by Texas A&M University in 1977. I was sorry that it had disturbingly little to say about the environmental impact of oil. It has lots of photographs, all gray-scale, and quite a bit of text, which drily details the discovery and development.

Very few personal names mentioned here meant anything to me, although some I recognized, such as Howard Hughes's father, and his founding of the Hughes Tool Company which led to the more famous Junior's fortune. Parts of this story were interesting, but after a while it seemed quite repetitive and somewhat tedious as we got to read the same story over and over again, only set in a different exploited oil field spreading in a wide reversed 'C' shape across Texas, from Wink in the west, up to Phillips in the north, curving around through the charmingly-named Oil Springs in the east, and then down along the Gulf Coast to Corpus Christi in the south.

While there are some interesting and revealing photos of those early days, and some useful text here and there about the rough life some of those oil workers were forced to lead, my recommendation is to find what you need online in Wikipedia and other such sources unless you really and truly want a coffee-table book about oil.

I was disappointed that there was virtually nothing about what all this oil was used for prior to the burgeoning onset of massive motor transportation. Clearly it had other and valued uses - as a lubricant, for example, and a source of heating and even lighting perhaps, but there's almost nothing said about that. Overall I don't regret reading it, but I felt rather cheated that there wasn't more meat to it. The cover does make it clear that it's a photographic history, but still!

Treasures of Tutankhamun

Rating: WORTHY!

This picture book was put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art which sadly doesn't seem to think the writer(s) deserve recognition, so there is no author. There is writing. Someone wrote it, but MMA says no. We'll credit the photographers, but screw the writers!

That said the book was well-written and beautfully-illustrated. It gives a quite detailed story of how the tomb was discovered (as much by luck as by judgment, and at the eleventh hour, too!), and goes into some detail about many of the treasures. There are color plates and black and white ones, mostly of the original discovery. The tomb had been broken into by thieves well prior to the November 4th, 1922 discovery by Carter's workers, but for some reason, most of its treasures were untouched.

There are literally scores of pictures, and half of this book is a catalogue of the major finds, with images and a nice descriptions accompanying each. See? writing! But despite that sleight to the actual author(s) I commend this as a worthy read.

Super Cool Tech

Rating: WORTHY!

While there is a slew of production staff listed for this hardback print book, there is no one writer or group of writers listed unfortunately. Way to disenfranchise writers! The book itself is pretty cool, although it's somewhat out of date bow as any print version of a book such as this must be the moment it hits the bookshelves.

The one I read was published in 2018 and takes the form of a rather thick laptop computer, opening the same way (as a calendar rather than as a book). The cover and the ends of the pages are silver and the whole effect is pretty neat. It's published by the DK arm of Penguin. Or should that be the DK flipper?!

Inside is well over 170 fully-illustrated color pages divided into sections covering Play, Move, Construct, Power, Live, Future, and Reference, which is a look into a much more speculative future. The topics covered are games machines, holography, electric cars, space-travel, large machines, innovative buildings and homes, artificial intelligence, environment, and an assortment of other, high-tech or adventurous gadgets, items, and technology life choices.

The coverage is shallow, but varied and interesting, and it's definitely stimulating, especially to a younger reader, although it's not aimed specifically at any age range. I commend this as a worthy read. It was interesting to see what's come to pass and what's not made it based on what this book talks about as cutting-edge technology, and it has more hits that misses depending on hwo far it projects into the future.