Reader’s Diary

Julian Stockwin

This is the first book in Stockwin’s Kydd series in which Thomas Kydd is an officer. In it, Kydd - a former pressed sailor - struggles to find his place socially with his friend Renzi as his Professor Henry Higgins

This is a good book, devoted more to manners and personal conflict than action. Part of the story revolves around Kydd’s exposure to the new US Navy; he is tempted by their more egalitarian style.

I have some concern that the sailor’s-eye view that distinguished this series will no longer be present, but the book does move the series and its characters forward.

Douglas Niles, Michael Dobson

In this alternate history a US defeat at Midway and a major accident at Los Alamos mean that Japan must be invaded. It’s an interesting premise, interestingly worked out, but the story’s character development is weak and the authors spend way too much time describing chains of command.

Greil Marcus

In sometimes overwrought prose Greil explains the connection between Dylan’s 1967 recording sessions with The Band and Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music“. There’s some interesting discussion of the way seemingly meaningless lyrics mean more than they appear to mean.

David Edgerton

The theme of this book is that the lifetime of a technology should be studied as much as its invention.  We’re used to heroic inventor stories, but little attention is paid to the continuing development, propagation, and long term use of their inventions.   Another point Edgerton makes is that the most important use of a technology is not necessarily found where it was invented.  Here he uses the humble corrugated metal sheet as an example of a technology from the West that is much more important, and more ubiquitous, in the undeveloped world.  This is an interesting and revealing new way of looking at the history of technology, but the Edgerton attempts to cover too much ground for a short book.