Category Archives: Biography

Looking for Something Good to Read?

Posted on by
reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

The stack of books I’m excited to read in 2015 is already pretty high, and to make room, sorted the books of 2014—keep, donate, donate, keep, keep. Handling them again and in writing last week’s post on the 11 very best, I couldn’t help thinking how many more really good ones there were! All 22 **** books of the past year.

Mysteries & Thrillers

  • Sandrine’s Case by Thomas H. Cook – originally I gave this 3 stars, but when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, slapped on a fourth
  • The Golden Hour by Todd Moss—believable political thriller, awesome first novel
  • Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin—an always-satisfying outing with Edinburgh’s Inspector John Rebus
  • Mystery Girl by David Gordon—a wacky Hollywood tale with oddball characters and LOL dialog
  • The Cottoncrest Curse by Michael H. Rubin—I met Rubin, so bought his book about late-1800s murders on a Louisiana plantation. So glad I did!
  • Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger—won all the big mystery world prizes in 2013
  • Spycraft by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger—non-fiction, describing the technologies of espionage (and avoiding recent scandals entirely)
  • The Reversal by Michael Connelly—Harry Bosch AND Mickey Haller
  • The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty—really makes his Belfast-during-the-Troubles setting work for him

Other Fiction

 Biography, History, Politics

Great Places

  • The White Rock by Hugh Thomson—adventurers still discovering lost Inca outposts
  • The Danube by Nick Thorpe—from the Black Sea to the river’s origins in Germany
  • The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich—this sociologist walked more than 6000 miles of NYC streets and talked to everybody

 Stephen King

book, imagination

(Cinzia A. Rizzo, flickr.com, CC license)

The Imitation Game

Posted on by
Alan Turing, codebreaking, Bletchley Park

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Eagerly awaited general release of The Imitation Game (trailer), starring Benedict Cumberbatch in a superb bit of acting, and was not disappointed. The story, hidden for almost 30 years, is by now familiar—Alan Turing, the brilliant but eccentric Oxford student admitted to Bletchley Park’s code-breaking team, figures out how to decrypt messages generated by the Nazis’ super-secret Enigma machine, shortening WWII by two years, and, oh, by the way, inventing computers in the process.

Last month Andrew Hodges, author of the book the movie’s based on, was in town for a talk—a bit dazed about this great success 30 years post-publication—and his insights (summarized here) were, frankly, helpful. He powerfully described the homophobia that pervaded the British intelligence services (and society in general) in the 1950’s that made Turing a target. Also the greater significance of the apples, alluded to only glancingly in the movie and without context. Turing was fascinated with the Snow White story, and saying more drifts into spoiler territory.

I earnestly hope someone said to him what Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) says near the end of this film. Clarke responds to Turing’s lifelong struggle with being different from other boys and men, and says how he “saved millions of lives by never fitting in,” as Tom Long put it in The Detroit News. Or, “Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine,” says the movie’s tagline.

There’s a little too much standing in front of the marvelous prop constructed for the movie, which the producer says is like the original Turing machine, just not in a box, so you can see the works. The secondary characters are thinly developed and no doubt worthy of greater interest. However, the scenes of Turing as a young boy (Alex Lawther), trying to come to terms with his differentness, are heartbreaking. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 89%; audience score 95%.

****The White Rock

Posted on by
Inca Masonry

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By Hugh Thomson – When I was in the 7th grade I came into possession, I cannot recall how, of a pamphlet about the Incas. No more than 20 pages, it was probably not scientifically accurate, especially since understandings about this civilization have evolved considerably since it was published, primed with new discoveries and interpretations, but it seized hold of my imagination, and I’ve never recovered. The Incas built on the achievements of previous groups to extend their empire throughout the high Andes, establishing looser affiliations with trading partners in the jungles and on the coast, until their offhand destruction by the Pizarro brothers in the 1500’s.

No surprise, then, I was easy prey to the charms of The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland, which tells of TV documentarian Hugh Thomson’s several bold trips through Inca country as a young man in his twenties and, after waiting out the passing plague of the ultra-violent Shining Path movement, his renewed adventures seeking as-yet unexplored and under-explored Inca cities, including Old Vilcabamba, the last jungle redoubt of the last Sapa Inca, Tupac Amaru. Thomson weaves into his narrative the history of the Incas and the state of native Peruvians today. The book contains several maps (which could have been keyed to his journeys), a glossary, and welcome photographs.

Inca stairs, Emmanuel Dyan

(photo: Emmanuel Dyan, Creative Commons license)

The possibility of new discoveries yet to be made is part of the continuing appeal of Andean exploration. The conquistadors were so intent on acquiring gold and silver that they ignored everything else, and Peru “is one of the few places left in the world where new ruins continue to be discovered,” says Thomson.

Because the Inca had no written language, and because their arts were destroyed by the fires of smelters or simple desecration, their remaining stone buildings, having stood half a millennium or more, are a stubborn, silent testament to their achievements.

This book is a tribute to the adventurers who are looking up, up to the mountains, following the ancient Inca roads. Well beyond the Machu Picchu overrun by tourists lies a world of still-unknown cities and outposts. Overlooked in the days of human betrayal, and sometimes hidden by encroaching nature, the old Inca roads and stone stairs beckon.

The Theory of Everything

Posted on by
Stephen Hawking, Eddie Redmayne , Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

Eddie Redmayne & Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything

The uplifting Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (trailer) is well worth seeing. The basic outlines of the story are well known. In his student days at Cambridge, Hawking developed a neuromotor disease that affects the body, not the brain, and was given two years to live. Such a diagnosis would end the ambitions of most people, but he survived to become preeminent in the fields of theoretical physics and cosmology with numerous British and international honors, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor.

Hawking also has tried to make the complexities of the physical sciences accessible for non-scientists, and his book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies. I have the Illustrated edition, and I’ve read it, picture captions and all. (So, I actually know what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is: let’s see, you can know the speed of an object or its location, but you cannot know both at the same time. Please, no questions.)

Eddie Redmayne is superlative as Hawking, and Felicity Jones convincing as his devoted first wife, Jane. The film avoids the typical mawkishness traps, in large part because, as Rene Rodriguez says in the Miami Herald, “Redmayne keeps you focused on the soul of a man trapped inside a malfunctioning body.” The supporting cast is singularly excellent too.

The movie is based on a book written by Jane, whom Hawking met at Cambridge shortly before the neurological problems began to surface. The couple have three children, and he is portrayed as a loving father. It ends some 25 years later, in the late 1980s.

There’s only a smattering of science and mathematics in the movie; in general, it’s about coping against greater odds than a person can at all reasonably be expected to overcome. The movie suggests, not unreasonably, that Jane’s determination was a significant factor in keeping him alive. Not just surviving, thriving. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 84%.