The Professor and the Madman - Book Review

The Professor and the Madman (USA)
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (UK)
Harper Collins 1999
Reissued 2005

As I have mentioned previously, I like Simon Winchester. He has a knack for finding unusual stories and gems in history and writing good books about them. This is the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was created.



I LOVE reading historical factual stories such as this one. One can learn much from books like this. And any book from which I learn something new, is a good book in my opinion.


A few things I liked about this book:

1. One will assuredly learn a thing or two about the English language, in reading it. You will learn some obsolete words, the origin of some words, and just get a refresher of other, more common words. Each chapter begins with a dictionary entry of a particular word, some very normal words, some more exotic words.

2. The parallel lives of the two main characters are interesting to follow. One feels real emotions for both. There are a few shocking moments in the book, which stand out quite a bit in front of the otherwise fairly tame narrative.

3.I always wondered how they compiled all the words in a dictionary. It was great to learn how they did that.

4. The book covers an array of themes and topics, and a fairly diverse geography. Mental illness, civil war, sexual propriety, crime and punishment, one can learn a little bit about a lot of issues in the reading of Simon Winchester's book.

Overall, though, this book was a nice, quick read, a good plot, and you will learn a thing or two from it. I enjoyed it very much.

I read this book for the Bibliophilic Challenge

J.D. Salinger, author of 'Catcher in the Rye,' has died

"Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger has died at age 91 in New Hampshire.

The author's son, in a statement from the author's literary representative, says Salinger died of natural causes at his home. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.

"The Catcher in the Rye" with its immortal teenage protagonist - the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield - came out in 1951 during the time of anxious, Cold War conformity.

Salinger wrote for adults, but teenagers all over the world identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy.

In later years, Salinger become famous for not wanting to be famous, refusing interviews

Original source

Full obituary

The Geographer's Library - Book Review

The Geographer's Library
by Jon Fasman
Penguin Press 2005

I thought this book would be an intellectual thriller, but it turned out not to be much of either. The most interesting part of the narrative are the short descriptions of the 15 objects that make up the geographer's library.



The geographer was a real person, Al-Idrisi, a Spanish-Muslim philosopher, cartographer, linguist, and scholar who served in the court of King Roger of Sicily in Palermo in the year 1154.

The word Library implies a collection of books. There are no books. Just a collection of mundane objects that seem to have some importance. An importance that is not made obvious until the very last chapter.

Those brief but vivid stand-alone chapters about the objects were very interesting and they kept me reading this book all the way through the other parts where nothing much happens.

I found it rather disconcerting to have to switch centuries every chapter from the present to the library back to the present day story and then drop back into another object again.

This meant the book did not read in a very smooth manner but jerked its way through the entire story to the very end. I have mentioned previously in this blog, how much I dislike sudden changes of time in books. Authors do need to be more careful with this style.

The present day story is about Paul, a recent college grad investigating the death of a professor at the college he just graduated from. While Paul is asking questions to gather information on the professors obituary, he has a series of vaguely threatening experiences, most of which go nowhere.

And the ending - where everything was all wrapped up in the last chapter like a parcel ready for delivery?? Well...the objects are used to become immortal. The professor whose obituary Paul was writing was supposedly immortal - if you can beleive that.

The trouble is that there is absolutely no mention of HOW the objects are used to become immortal. I would have liked to have known that. I would also have loved to have learnt more about the geographer himself - Al Idrisi.

While I did read the entire novel, it never caught my attention like the Thieves of Baghdad did.

Thieves of Baghdad - Book Review

Thieves of Baghdad - One Marine’s Passion for Ancient Civilizations and the Journey to Recover the World’s Greatest Stolen Treasures
by Matthew Bogdanos
Bloomsbury Publishing 2005


This has got to go under the Relic Hunters Challenge with a title like that!!!



I thought this book would be dry and academic but NO it turned out to be much more exciting, and so well written that I finished the entire book in 6 straight hours.

Colonel Matthew Bogdanios was in the USMC (United States Marine Corps) reserve. He had a degree in classical studies as well as a law degree. He worked for the District Attorneys office in NYC. He started the book off with a very detailed and exciting description of what he and his family (wife and 3 kids) went through in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. After 9-11 he returned to active duty.

In 2003, the US invaded and occupied Iraq. Shortly after the occupation began, the news began drifting out that the Iraqi National Museum had been looted and that many many treasures were missing. Questions were being asked as to why the US troops had not protected the museum and its treasures.

Matthew dreamed up an idea of how he wanted to help. He wanted to go into Iraq and find those treasures. He loved ancient history, he had a degree in the classics and he had spent several tours in Afghanistan and the middle east so he knew the culture and the region.

First he had to get permission from the top brass and then gather a team together. This he did with alacrity. He had many contacts in the military, customs and immigrations departments and the police.

So in 2003 the Joint Interagency Coordination Group (JIACG) acounter terrorism investigative team combining the miitary, FBI, CIA, Immigrations and Customs enforcement (ICE)and Treasury was set up. Matthew was made Deputy Director.

The primary task was to find evidence of terrorist cells, illegal weapons, terrorist financing and other violations of the UN Security Council resolutions directed at Saddam Hussein.

Matthew describes the day to day details of searching each and every room in the museum, looking for booby traps that may be have been left behind, locating some treasures still in storage and finding other treasures missing, liaising with the Iraqi museum staff and trying to encourage the locals to return what they had stolen, without paying out too much in rewards.

The team were very successful. People started telling them rumours of treasures in hiding. Slowly and surely the treasures were recovered.

One of the biggest treasures tnat Matthew really wanted to find was the Nimrud Jewellery. The rumour was that one of Saddams sons (possibly Uday) had taken the Nimrud jewellery from the Museum some years previously and hidden it with the intention of smuggling the jewllery out of Iraq. He never got the chance.

Finally after months of searching, Matthews team found the treasures in a box inside a flooded bank vault beneath Iraq's Central Bank in Baghdad. These treasures had been excavated starting in the 1980's from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II in the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, in northern Iraq. These antiquities date to the 8th and 9th century B.C.


Matthew and his team were responsible for recovering approximately 5,500 artifacts from humanity's earliest civilizations. They also exposed the link between the black market art world and terrorist funding.

Here are some of those exqusite pieces in detail.

American Gothic - Book Review

American Gothic
by Thomas Hoving
Chamberlain Brothers 2005

Todays book reviews are all my own books that I read during the latter half of my stay in Hospital.





Most Americans are familiar with the painting known as American Gothic. It's a very famous American painting. This book is about the life of Grant Wood, the painter, and the story of this specific masterpiece.

Grant Wood was born and raised in Iowa in 1891. He always had a knack for drawing and so in 1910, after High school, he enrolled in an Art School in Minnesota. In 1913 he enrolled at the Art Institute in Chicago.


Between 1920 to 1928 Grant made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of paintings.He was influenced the most by the 15th century artist Jan Van Eyck.

In the 1920s Grant lived in a carriage house in Cedar Rapids and tried to paint. He received one major commission - to create a stained glass window for a Veterans Memorial building in town. In 1932 Grant helped to found the Stone City Art Colony to help artists get through the depression. From 1934 Grant taught painting at the School of Art at the University of Iowa. He died of cancer in 1942, the day before he would have turned 51 years old.




This book gives a brief rundown of Grants life. It also gives a detailed overview of the American Gothic painting. It goes into details as to why Grant used certain images, lines, colours and so on. I enjoyed this book immensely. Despite American Gothic NOT being one of my favourite paintings.

I read this book for the Art History challenge.

The Last Secret of the Temple - Book Review

The Last Secret of the Temple
by Paul Sussman
Random House 2005

From the Back Cover
A two thousand year-old mystery – a pulse-pounding race against time...

Jerusalem, 70 AD. As the legions of Rome besiege the Holy Temple, a boy is given a secret that he must guard with his life...


Southern Germany, December 1944. Six emaciated prisoners drag a mysterious crate deep into a disused mine. They too give their lives to keep the secret safe: murdered by their Nazi guards...

Egypt, Valley of the Kings, the present day. A body is found amongst some ruins. It appears to be an open-and-shut case but the more Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police uncovers about the dead man, the more uneasy he becomes. And his investigation turns out to be anything but routine. Khalifa doesn’t know it yet, but he is on the trail of an extraordinary long-lost artifact that could, in the wrong hands, turn the Middle East into a blood bath. It’s a dangerous path he’s taking – and what’s more he’s not alone.

From ancient Jerusalem, the Crusades, Cathar heretics and coded medieval manuscripts to the Holocaust, hidden Nazi treasure and the murderous present-day, The Last Secret of the Temple is a thrilling rollercoaster ride of an adventure.

DETAILS
When the body of hotel owner Piet Jansen is discovered amid the ruins of an archaeological site by the Nile, it looks like a routine investigation for Inspector Yusuf Khalifa. But the more he learns about Jansen, the more he is reminded of the brutal murder, some years earlier, of an Israeli woman at Karnak for which he always suspected the wrong man was convicted. Ignoring the objections of his superiors, Khalifa re-opens the case, but to do so finds he's obliged to team up with bigoted, hard-drinking Israeli detective Arieh Ben Roi.

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, Palestinian journalist Layla al-Madani receives an anonymous letter. The writer claims to possess information that could radically alter the balance of power in the Middle East and requests her help in contacting Al-Mulatham, a ruthless terrorist leader whom she recently interviewed. In return she is offered the greatest scoop of her career, which, she is told, is intimately connected with the strange medieval manuscript that accompanied the letter.

Against a backdrop of escalating violence, Layla follows up the ancient cryptic document while Khalifa and Ben-Roi uncover the unpleasant truth about Piet Jansen.

Their investigations take them from ancient Jerusalem, the Crusades and the Cathar Heresy to Vichy France and the Nazi Holocaust. Forced to confront their own prejudices and demons, they unearth the existence of an ancient artefact of such symbolic power that, were it to fall into the wrong hands, it would plunge the Middle East into all-out war. Caught in a desperate race to recover the object before Jewish or Muslim extremist groups claim it as their own, the trail leads Khalifa, Layla and Ben Roi to a hidden cache of looted Nazi treasure. Deep within an abandoned mine in Southern Germany, Khalifa discovers that appearances can be terrifyingly deceptive.

This was an exciting book - I could not put it down. I read this for the Relic Novels Challenge.

Broken Window - Book Review

The Broken Window
by Jeffrey Deaver
Hodder Paperbacks 2009

Data mining is the industry of the 21st century. Commercial companies collect information about us from thousands of sources—credit cards, loyalty programs, hidden radio tags in products, medical histories, employment and banking records, government filings, and many more, then analyze and sell the data to anyone willing to pay the going rate.


Some people approve, citing economic benefits; others worry about the erosion of privacy.

But no one has been prepared for a new twist: A psychotic killer with access to the country's biggest data miner—Strategic Systems Datacorp—is using detailed information to work his way into the lives of victims, rape, rob and kill them and then blame unsuspecting innocents for the crimes. The killer's voluminous knowledge of the victims and his ability to plant damning evidence mean that even the most vocal protests of innocence go ignored by the police and juries.

The perp has, in short, found a perfect means to literally get away with murder—until one of his fall guys turns out to be Lincoln Rhyme's cousin, Arthur, who is facing certain conviction for first-degree murder. Though the two Rhymes haven't had any contact for years, Lincoln agrees to look into the case. In the process he unravels a spider web of crime that the killer, known only as Unknown Subject 522, has woven.

Rhyme, Amelia Sachs and the cast of the previous Rhyme books find themselves up against their most insidious villain, a man obsessed with collecting—from junk on the street to intimate details about our lives to the ultimate trophy: human lives themselves, which he sees as mere streams of data. This is a man proficient with razors and guns, but whose most dangerous weapon is information, which he wields with ruthless precision against those he targets on whim . . . and against those who try to stop him.

"How," Rhyme says, "can you defend yourself against the man who knows everything?"

As the invisible 522 attacks his pursuers through identity theft and outright torture and murder, the stymied police have to turn to the likely source of the data the killer uses—the eerie and monolithic Strategic Systems Datacorp, headed by the legendary data mining pioneer, Andrew Sterling, whose "mission" is the creation of a global empire based not on politics or money but on information.

"Knowledge is power," Sterling continually reminds.

And for Lincoln Rhyme, the case has an added dimension: Arthur's reemergence draws him back to his childhood and teen years and forces the criminalist to grapple with a tragedy from his past he has avoided for decades.

The Broken Window is classic Deaver fare: Taking place over three frantic days, the novel features dozens of twists and turns, fascinating, highly researched details—about identity theft, data mining and threats to privacy, as well as forensic science—and, of course, offers the typical multiple surprise endings the author is known for crafting.

Inside this novel were 6 pages of information categories that are normally collected about every single person. Very detailed information. VERY SCARY

Profile
Name
AKA and Aliases
Current Address
Addresses for past 10 years
Citizenship
Race
Ancestral History
National Origin
Physical description
Biomatic details (photographs, fingerprints etc)
Tissue sample
Medical History
Political affiliation
Fraternal affiliations
Professional affiliations
Religious affiliations
Military Service
Military ID
Weapons training
Units served with
Donations made
Psychiatric History
Myers Briggs type
Sexual preferences
Hobbies and Interests
Clubs
Spouses
Parents
Children
Siblings
Grandparents (maternal & paternal)
Other blood relations (living & dead)
Neighbours (past & present)
Co-workers
Clients
Acquaintances
Employment history (past & present)
Lifestyle
Food & Drink
Clothes
Household items
Appliances
Purchases (last 7 days back to last 5 years)
Books purchased
Books borrowed (library)
Other library activities
Films seen
Cable TV programs watched
Travel (last 5 years)
Languages known
GPS devices
RFID reports
PDA & mobiles
Criminal arrests & history
Watch lists
Surveillance
Restraining orders
Whistleblower history
Civil litigations (for and against)
Employment history, salary, reasons for discharge
Citations & reprimands
Days absent
Income (IRS) - foreign income, non reported income, assets (personal and financial)
Credit reports
Credit rating
Financial transactions (going back 5 years)
Telephone numbers - landline, cell and blackberry
old phone, fax and pager numbers
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) used - past & present
favorites/bookmarks
email addresses and contacts
email activity
websites - personal and profesional
websites visited (last 5 years)
Blogs
Social sites (Myspace, Facebook, Twitter etc)
Avatars
online personas
mailing lists
buddies & Friends
SEO results
Post Office boxes

They want to know everything about you and then they want make a lot of money by SELLING it. The only way to avoid this is to go "off the grid".