What are you Reading or Read?

[Formerly YB-2]

Just wrapping up Gary Krist's "Empire of Sin", a history of New Orleans from the 1880s thru the 1920s. Gives pretty good coverage on the origins of jazz & blues in NO with the major players of the time (Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory, Sidney Baquet, George Bachet, Joe Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Louie Armstrong & Jelly Roll Morton, to name a few). Sad that most of them did not make it into the more modern era of recording.

[clpetersen]

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an American physician and oncologist. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Really well written and informative. Most striking is medical science' resistance to change - esp. the establishment of the link between smoking and cancer in the 1950's/60's

[Antonmb]

Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii
by James L. Haley

Very interesting and well-written history from the first visit by Cook in 1798 to the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom by the US marines in 1893, and annexation by the US in 1898.
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[crwilli]

The God Equation : Michio Kaku

I have been trying to understand the work on a unifying theory of the universe for 10 years. My goal is to be able to discuss a summary with my wife. I am still stuck at Einstein and can’t come close to understanding String Theory. I am hoping this book will help me.

[Imapo]

Originally Posted by Still-One

Ken Follett's - The Evening and the Morning

A prequel to Pillar of the Earth. The fourth in the KingsBridge series.

I finished Atlas Shrugged and started The Morning and the Evening. True to Follett's form, it is an very good read.

[CDG]

[Formerly YB-2]

Originally Posted by crwilli

The God Equation : Michio Kaku

I have been trying to understand the work on a unifying theory of the universe for 10 years. My goal is to be able to discuss a summary with my wife. I am still stuck at Einstein and can’t come close to understanding String Theory. I am hoping this book will help me.

Craig - Is your wife a physicist or mathematician? Is she giving you a test on this? You'll want to add in recent work on the B meson, as well. Those folks in high energy physics sure have some great toys to play with.

[crwilli]

Ha, No she is not but she’s smart. If I can’t explain it to her, I don’t it understand enough.

Let me get general relativity and string theory in my brain before introducing more.

[George Prentice]

Most Recently “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, by Yuval Noah Perkins... outstanding. I was a Senior Director of IT in several global companies... he understands the current technology and computing trends and paints very realistic pictures of the fundamental challenges they will pose to civilization in this century.

Before that I recently finished rereading “Atlas Shrugged” and “(Karl)Marx in 90 minutes”. Put these two together and you got something.

[jimtranr]

I've just dived into this. It's already a fascinating read.