Reader’s Diary

Marc Saltzman (Editor)

Saltzman interviewed a couple dozen big names in the computer game industry and then chopped the interviews up to fit into chapters organized by topic. It didn’t work. The book’s an unorganized, barely readable, graphically unattractive mess.

There is a some good information buried here, but digging it out is a chore. There are a few interesting anecdotes and some worthwhile advice to would-be game developers, but even that is vague and repetitious.

Thomas E. Ricks

In “A Soldier’s Duty” the US military is close to mutiny and two army officers, a man and a woman who happen to be in love, have to decide where they stand. Against the background of a war in Afghanistan a charismatic general manipulates disgruntled troops into a dishonest and unpopular presidential administration. The plot is interesting and the characters more believable than most found in military novels. Unfortunately, Ricks seems to have run out of steam towards the end of the book resorted to an unlikely deus ex machina to resolve his story.

Remy Rougeau
Fiction 2001

This is the story of a young man’s spiritual maturation in a Cistercian monastery. It’s a novel, but Rougeau, himself a monk, uses fiction to speak truth. It’s sometimes funny (some of the monks are very strange) but always serious:

These old faces he knew so well, men in search of God, no different from Saint Anthony or all the holy monks of old, these men had come to a remarkable place called the abbey, not connected to earth by geography. The holy desert. We have come to find God here, he thought, and we are breathing God. The holy desert is full of God.

“All We Know of Heaven” is a fine little book.

Joe Kita

When Joe Kita turned 40 he looked at the regrets in his life: the girl who came on to him in college who he was too shy to respond to, losing his hair, and 18 more that he writes about in “Another Shot”. But he didn’t just write about the regrets; blessed with a book contract and an understanding wife, he set out to put those regrets to rest. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, and sometimes sad. No middle-aged guy will fail to find something here that resonates. This isn’t a deep book, but it’s not nearly as superficial as the title suggests.

Benson Bobrick

This is a wonderful book. A better title might be “The Life and Times of the English Bible”, since Bobrick writes nearly as much about English and Reformation history from 1382, when the Wycliffe Bible was published, through 1688, when the accession of William III in the “Glorious Revolution” cemented England as a Protestant nation, as he does about the Bible itself. This is history as it should be written; it’s both lively and scholarly, well-written and full of interesting characters.

As the subject of the book would suggest, this book has a Protestant orientation. As a Catholic with relatively little knowledge of Reformation history, I found it illuminating. I was especially struck at how gradually English churchmen drifted from Rome. The Catholic English Bible translation - the Douai-Rheims Bible - is covered, though Catholics are more likely to appear in the book as heretic hunters than as theologians.

The only fault with the book is that it ends too soon; I would have enjoyed reading about post-King James translations. Based on the quality of this book, I look forward to reading some of Bobrick’s other books.

Dava Sobel

Galileo had a daughter who became a cloistered nun. She wrote him letters, which have survived. Dava Sobel builds her book around these letters. But the book, despite its title, is not so much about Galileo’s daughter as it is about Galileo himself. And in a biography of Galileo, his daughter’s letters are just not as important as Sobel makes them out to be. It we accept the book’s title as a description of what it is meant to be, it has too much Galileo and not enough daughter. If the book is really, as it seems to be, a biography of Galileo, there is not enough Galileo and too much daughter.

Sobel talks of Galileo’s gardening and his daughter’s sewing, but we never learn just why Pope Urban, a onetime friend of Galileo, was so determined to condemn him. We learn about the life of a cloistered Renaissance nun, but are not told exactly what Galileo did to improve the telescope. There is not nearly enough information here to help the reader understand Galileo’s scientific and philosophical world.

I do appreciate the fact that Sobel emphasizes that Galileo remained a devout Catholic despite the pope’s enmity, since this story is so often told as an anti-Catholic parable. And I also appreciate that the book is good enough to make me want to know more about its subject - its male subject, anyway.