By @edent · Book Review · 450 words
Was the polymath John von Neumann an alien? Did he travel back in time to help us invent the future? Or was he just a complex man with a knack for building networks of interesting people? Ananyo Bhattacharya's well-researched book presents a tangled view of the man and his legend. It leaps back and forth […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 300 words
My friend Dr Joanna has written a marvellous book! Full of bone-eating snot flowers, stuffed with silly footnotes about antlions, and gorgeously illustrated. This is a quick rattle through over a hundred weird - and not-so-weird - animals. It is always amusing and occasionally gross. Banana Slugs, man... YEUCH! It is surprisingly adult in places, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review WWII · 1 comment · 450 words
World War 2 was won by many men with big guns and feats of daring-do. Sure, the boffins in Bletchley might have helped a bit - but it was bombs, muscles, and blokes which saved the day. Well, that's what we're all taught, right? Would it surprise you to learn that a significant contributor to […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi Ukraine · 1 comment · 300 words
I don't usually back Kickstarter campaigns - but I love sci-fi & fantasy, and I don't think I've previously read any from Ukraine. So this was an instant buy - and it is a delight. As with any translation, you have to accept that the phrasing may sound a little "foreign" and you won't immediately […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 14 comments · 700 words
People who fart about with computers like to give themselves highfalutin titles. We're not programmers; we're architects! Yeah, nah. I wish I knew who recommended this book to me so that I could properly thank them. It is an astonishing series of life lessons viewed through the lens of architecture. Even to a lay-person like […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 450 words
I did not get on well with this story. I know every novel has to be about The Pandemic, but this feels like it really wants to hammer home that Boris Johnson wasn't an especially good PM. I mean, yeah, we lived it. We know. At its heart, a story about how a family survives […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 600 words
As the Middle-East convulses in yet another bloody war, and with no end in sight to the barbarity, we're all looking for a way to understand the horrors unfolding. So I went searching in the past. What set the seeds of today's conflict and was there any way to prevent it? This is a dispassionate […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review Sci Fi · 1 comment · 450 words
Imagine a world with inter-city rockets, where tourists still use film cameras. Where self-driving trucks sport a wide array of sensor apparatus and record all their data onto miles of magnetic tape. Where the latest Androids are life-like and can perfectly clone a dead man's speech, yet are powered by punch-cards. People make video calls […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review hacking · 8 comments · 400 words
This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 200 words
What if the heroine in a Jane Austen novel had visions of the future and the past? That's the rather compelling premise of Time Squared. But, ultimately, it doesn't really fulfil the promise. It starts as a fairly standard regency-style novel - which of the two dashing brothers will our orphaned heroine marry?!? Our protagonist […]
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