The story stars Mickey Haller, a defence attorney with a complicated personal life (he has two ex-wives and a daughter). In this story, he has an innocent client – the question is, which of his clients is it, the highly privileged real estate broker, or the Mexican against whom there is cast-iron evidence? There’s also a nasty shock for his investigator, Raul Levin.
I picked up this novel having enjoyed the excellent film starring Michael McConaughey – I think the book is just as good.
Filed under Book Review
This is the first book by David Baldacci that I’ve read in a while. I enjoyed the early books in his King and Maxwell series, but thought they tailed off by the end. This book features CIA agents Will Robie and Jessica Reel, who have a tainted past with the agency, but are still at the top of their game. The real star of the book is a North Korean agent, Cha Chung, who has unmatched combat skills and an unshakeable character in the face of adversity.
This is a decent read and I may track down the earlier books in the Robie series, particularly The Hit which comes before this one.
Filed under Book Review
I read in May 2015’s CVU that there’s a proposal for std::make_array, a utility method in the same family as std::make_tuple and std::make_pair.
This would be a useful shorthand:
// Existing usage
std::array<double, 3> a = { 1.1, 2.2, 3.3 };
// Proposed usage
auto a = std::make_array( 1.1, 2.2, 3.3 };
The obvious benefit is that you would no longer need to specify the number of elements in the array, making the code more maintainable.
Here Is The City reports that a trader has been charged with fraud and market manipulation related to the Flash Crash of May 2010.
This story has been featured heavily in the press, particularly because the trader himself is so different to the usual trader stereotype (he lives in a pretty ordinary semi-detached house despite being worth £millions). He also protests his innocence and believes he was just good at his job.
I wonder if this guy will be the next subject of a block-buster Michael Lewis book?
Filed under Finance
I’ve written before that DeMille has written several one-off books which are terrific, as well as his John Corey series. This book is another one-off, introducing Frank Purcell, Henry Mercado and Vivian Smith. They are journalists/photographer following the war in Ethiopia in the 1970’s, and this book follows their quest to find the Holy Grail after it’s existence is revealed to them by a dying priest.
The story behind the book is itself fascinating – apparently, DeMille wrote it as a contemporary novel early in this career, but decided to re-write and re-publish it in 2013. The narrative is unmistakably by his hand, and there’s more than a hint of the character of John Corey in Frank Purcell. I’d be interested to know whether the original book had Purcell enjoying the same sense of humour or if that’s part of the re-write.
As with other DeMille books, this one is a book to relish rather than a page-turning thriller. It’s about enjoying the journey – and that seems appropriate for a book called The Quest.
Filed under Book Review
Having read several other books set against the background of the Foundation saga, I decided to go back and read the original books. I was impressed by the pace with which Asimov tells the stories – where David Brin’s sequel is 430 pages, each volume in Asimov’s trilogy is about 230 pages. Yet none of the passages in Asimov’s books feels rushed – it’s just that he tells a part of the story in beautiful prose, then moves swiftly on to another period/place. The gaps that he leaves give other authors the space to fill in their own stories, which is how the sequel trilogy fits in. In fact, I enjoyed Asimov’s trilogy much more this time having recently read the others.
Filed under Book Review
Apparently, the Apple Watch has a foldable charger in the UK. If this is it, it’s certainly innovative and begs the question why no one else has put a slimmer design on the market.
Filed under Technology
Traders Magazine notes that it’s now a year since Michael Lewis published “Flash Boys”.
After all, it’s not every day that a book launches attorney general investigations, inspires an exchange president to meltdown on cable news and spur Americans to buy a book that features an obscure trader from the Royal Bank of Canada to figure out why the price of his trades were increasing the instant he placed his order.
I read Flash Boys soon after it came out and thought it was excellent. Now, Traders Magazine points out that they talked to IEX before Lewis brought out his book.
The Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis is worth a read.
Filed under Technology
Amusing tongue-in-cheek rant by FSharpForFunAndProfit about why you *should* use a functional programming language.
Filed under F#
This excellent book introduces algorithms that are heavily used in daily life, yet are unknown to the general public. The author aims to introduce them without requiring advanced knowledge:
I assumed that the great algorithms would fall into two catagories. The first category would be algorithms with some simple yet clever trick at their core – a trick that could be explained without requiring any technical knowledge. The second category would be algorithms that depended so intimately on advanced computer science … Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that all the chosen algorithms fell into the second category!
The book is a fun read and despite knowing some of the details already, it helped to build my appreciation of the algorithms and their applications.
The algorithms covered are:
There’s also an excellent chapter on unsolvable problems, with a nod to Alan Turing.
Filed under Tech Book
musingstudio 