I first saw Chris Hadfield on the excellent Stargazing Live on the BBC and on the strength of that appearance I thought his book would be well worth reading. Despite his many achievements and talents, the book paints him as a humble guy who’s keen to contribute but at pains not to hinder (read his chapter on “Aim to be a Zero” and you’ll get the idea). This book has much to say on the importance of working in a team towards a common goal – I would recommend it alongside How to Win Friends and Influence People for anyone embarking on life in the corporate world.
Category Archives: Book Review
Book Review – An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth, Chris Hadfield
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Book Review – Never Go Back, Lee Child
This story was long awaited, partly because the author has been building up to the meeting of Jack Reacher with Susan Turner and his journey across America to Virginia for several books – this association started in the book 61 Hours, so definitely worth reading that one and before this. On the other hand, this book is one of the best Jack Reacher thrillers, so you might not want to wait. I was waiting to read this in paperback, but was delighted to receive it in a beautiful hardcover edition for my birthday.
I prefer Jack Reacher novels when he works with an accomplice, often a woman, to solve a case and hand out his own brand of justice to the perpetrators. Never Go Back fits the bill and matches The Enemy for excitement and daring plot as a result. There are other plot twists – this book is all about Reacher’s past coming back to haunt him. Does he have a child? Has one of his many violent episodes resulted in a conviction that will see him jailed? Will his previous service in the army see him forcibly conscripted to serve his country again? I tried hard to pace myself reading this one, having polished off other Reacher novels in a couple of days and then having a long wait for the next one. Unfortunately, once I was a few chapters in, I was hooked and as usual sped through it. The compelling question was – having gone back, would Reacher leave again? Or would he finally have re-discovered a life for which it was worth settling down?
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Book Review: 1000, Gavin Robertson
This book was pretty ordinary, which made me wonder how often you can accurately identify a rotten book within the first chapter? If you have a good prediction rate, you could save valuable reading time for better books. A give-away from this book was the amount of the story that was told via dialogue. Whole chapters without any narrative. And another flaw was the lack of emotional depth – much is made of a “Famous Day” that Kay and Simon spent together – so why not, you know, actually put it in the book. It needn’t even be at the start – tuck it in further down the book – but don’t leave it out completely!
Now, I think I would have given up on Free Fire too early, because that turned out to be pretty good. On the other hand, this book was poor and the only reason it escaped two stars was due to a much improved final couple of chapters.
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Book Review: The Broken Window, Jeffery Deaver
Another in the Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs series from Jeffery Deaver – this one is pretty good and hints at the dangers for society with the growth of corporations that store massive amounts of data about private citizens.
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Book Review – The Enigma, Andrew Hodges
I don’t usually read biographies, but this excellent biography of Alan Turing was given to me as a gift and I found it fascinating. There are plenty of plaudits for the treatment Andrew Hodges has given his subject and I agree he’s done a first class job. Even more so if you read the author’s notes at the end of the book and appreciate just how little material was freely available and the personal hardships the author entailed in order to write the book. His sources were the biography written by Turing’s mother and the academic papers/records available. Subsequent to that, Hodges interviewed many of the main players in Turing’s life in order to reveal much of the character of the man as well as to fill in the gaps in his life history.
For me, Turing was famous for the Universal Turing Machine and the Turing Test – it’s interesting to learn that he also touched other areas of pure mathematics and science. The technical details on his approach to writing computer software are just as relevant – given that he was involved in the earliest computers in the 1950’s and the biography was written in the 1980’s, it’s great to know that Turing exhorted the earliest programmers to factor their code into sub-routines and to test their software!
Another lesson to learn from the biography was that, whilst Turing was happy to work individually and largely avoided self-promotion, that approach limited his opportunities. If he had been more savvy in this regard and been more amenable to building working relationships, who knows how much more he would have achieved.
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Book Review – The Black Box, Michael Connelly
This is another Harry Bosch novel from Michael Connelly. I liked some of the back story where Bosch duels with his new statistics-led boss and has to get creative in order to continue with the investigations that matter to him. I found the main plot rather tenuous and didn’t buy into it – not one of Connelly’s best.
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Book Review: The Redbreast, Jo Nesbo
This is the best book by Jo Nesbo that I’ve read. It stands out due to the quality of the back story that he tells, set during World War I. It’s also set early in the timeline of the lead character, Harry Hole, and includes how he met Rakel (who features heaviliy in other stories including The Snowman).
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Book Review: Free Fire, C.J. Box
I picked this book in my local book shop, not having read anything by this author before. It took a couple of attempts before I was hooked, but once the main character, Joe Pickett, had travelled to YellowStone Park and begun his investigations, I really enjoyed it. The character breaks the mold for this kind of thriller: he isn’t particularly violent (and admits to being rubbish with a weapon) – that side of things is left to his side-kick, Nate); he doesn’t seem all that sure of himself (unlike Jack Reacher or John Corey). He is determined though and the beautiful setting of the main action made this an enjoyable read.
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Book Review: The Sleeping Doll, Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver has introduced a new character. Special Agent Kathryn Dance is the star of this thriller and, for me, it’s every bit as good as one of his Lincoln Rhyme books. There are massive parallels – Rhyme is an expert criminologist who can track the movements of a suspect by the merest grain of sand that falls from his trousers; Dance is an expert interrogator who can pry into the innermost thoughts of a suspect by spotting the tiniest signals from their body language. I was impressed at the technical depth the author shows in his knowledge of the Kinesics (he even includes a list of books for further reading). And I loved the passage when Dance phoned up Rhyme for advice in the middle of the book and talks to his assistant Amelia Sachs, the other star of those books – priceless. 
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Book Review: Foundation’s Fear, Gregory Benford
I picked up this book, the first of “The Second Foundation Trilogy, authorised by the Estate of Isaac Asimov” after enjoying Foundation and Earth. The author admits that he hasn’t tried to imitate the Asimov style – instead, his aim was to explore the character Hari Seldon and his early work on Psychohistory. I really enjoyed the passages concerning Seldon and his wife Dors – especially on the tourist planet when they were immersed into creatures called Pans. However, I couldn’t fathom the passages based on Joan of Arc and Voltaire and ended up skipping whole chapters, without noticeably losing the main thread. I wouldn’t rush to read another by Benford, but I’ll brave the next in this series at some point (it’s written by someone else!).
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