William Yenne
It’s Patton vs. Stalin and the entire Red Army in this alternate history. That’s a premise with a lot of potential. Despite some surprisingly - for military fiction - plausible romance, the plot degenerates into long recitations of unit numbers and locations, made all the worse by lack of maps. Yenne needs to learn writer’s maxim, “show, don’t tell”.
Wallace Breem
“Eagle in the Snow” is a well-told epic tragedy. The narrator is a fictional Roman general charged with defending the Rhine frontier, circa 400 AD. The weakening of Roman government, the venality of local officials, and the vast numbers of Germanic tribesmen pressing west lead to his inevitable defeat.
This is a handy guide to Mass for Catholics, people in the process of becoming Catholics, and, I suppose, people who are curious about why Catholics hop up and down so much in church. It’s safe to say that even lifelong Mass-goers will learn something they didn’t know about what we do and why. Somewhat surprisingly, given author Dubruiel’s “conservative” stance, he has good advice for people finding themselves in a poorly done or unorthodox liturgy: get over it and pray.
If you own a Mac, you should know the name Andy Hertzfeld. He was a member of the original Mac development team; his “Revolution in the Valley” is a first-person account of the birth of the Mac. This isn’t a formal history, rather it’s a collection of anecdotes, many of which can be also found at Hertzfeld’s web site.
John Markoff
John Markoff is the premier journalist covering the computer industry but he fails here to demonstrate the thesis of the book’s subtitle: that “the 60s counterculture shaped the personal computer”. He rescues some of the lesser-known PC pioneers from obscurity and points out that some of their lives intersected with Bay Area counterculture, but doesn’t convincingly show that the counterculture influenced the nascent technoculture.
Markoff’s account of the career of Doug Englebart, who can rightly be called the inventor of personal computing (though not of the personal computer), is interesting; ultimately, though, the book is too much about drugs and not enough about tech, though many of the anecdotes are amusing.
