Screaming Penguin

I have not yet read Heavenly Intrigue : Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One Of History's Greatest Scientific Discoveries but I have read some of the debate over the book and heard a very interesting interview with the authors, Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder, on the current episode of Berkely GROKS.

The conculusion of the book, per the authors in the interview, is that Tycho Brahe was murdered, poisoned with mercury, and tha

I just want to point out that Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is one of the most powerful books I have read in years. The Handmaids Tale was pretty much required reading when I was in high school, and I have always been a fan, but I can't say enough about this book.

If you read the jacket, you will see comparisons to Orwell and Huxley. These are certainly warranted and there are small allusory bits that echo 1984 and Brave N

Rutter @ Clagnut points out:

Penguin are currently celebrating their seventieth birthday by publishing a special series of seventy short paperbacks priced at a measly 1.50 each. The spectrum of authors is astonishing, ranging from contemporary novelists such as Zadie Smith and Hunter S. Thompson, through non-fiction like Eric Schlosser and Simon Schama and classic authors including Roald Dahl, George Orwell and PG Wodehouse, to extracts from key publications in Penguin's history, such as Homer's Odyssey and the trial over Lady Chatte

From WaPo via Political Wire:

"Bashing" Thomas Jefferson "is an easy game," a Washington Post book review notes. "Among some historians, it's fashionable to denigrate the founder who spoke out the most passionately for democracy, equality, religious tolerance, separation of church and state and freedom of expression and conscience. But Andrew Burstein's Jefferson's Secrets takes a different tack, one that is more subtle, mo

Its been a while since I posted a book review. Not because I havent read anything but I havent read anything lately that was really good and inspired me to do a review, that is until now.

Michael Shermers books How We Believe - Science Skepticism and the Search fo