Reader’s Diary

Jay Greenspan

“Hunting Fish” has a promising premise: author travels the country playing poker against less-experienced players (the “fish”). It’s too bad Greenspan doesn’t really deliver. The book is just interesting enough that I didn’t give up on it, but it’s not consistently good as a travelogue. As to the poker, we get details when he wins, but his losses aren’t as well documented. By the end of the book I started to wonder if the author is fooling himself when it comes to his poker prowess.

R. Cameron Cooke

World War II submarine novels tend towards stereotypes, but R. Cameron Cooke manages to avoid most of them in this one, which relies more on character than on technical details or action. Happily for fans of the genre, action and technology aren’t completely absent, but are properly subservient to the character development.

A. Richard Turner

This is a short, nicely illustrated book that puts Florentine Renaissance art in the context of its times. It makes great background reading for a trip to Florence.

Chris Scarre

This is a well-illustrated and accessible popular reference that descibes each Roman emperor and his reign. There is some overlap, which makes it easy to drop in anywhere but which makes reading it cover-to-cover a bit repetitious. The book has a useful bibliography and does a particularly nice job of showing the modern remains of various emperors’ buildings.

R. A. Scotti

This is a must-read for anyone who has visited or is planning a visit to the Vatican. Scotti does an excellent job on describing how multiple personalities over a long period of time created a unified whole. A minor flaw is that it exaggerates the role that the money spent on St. Peter’s had in fueling the reformation.

Neil Gershenfeld

This is an interesting but too-brief look at the development of “fab labs”: low cost design and manufacturing facilities that are, the author claims, the manufacturing equivalent of the personal computer. It’s fascinating stuff, but would have been better covered by a skilled technical journalist like Stephen Levy rather than by the movement’s protagonist.