Archive for the ‘Biography’ Category
Friday, March 21st, 2008
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| Author: | Simon Winchester |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2003 |
Simon Winchester does what he does better than any other science writer I know. He starts with one well-known natural disaster. Introduces us to many of the people affected by the unfolding events. Then weaves in information about the geography, geology, history, state of technology, and then puts it all together and tells the story of the disaster. |
In this case, Winchester provides many details about the effects of the eruption of Krakatoa on the air around the world. This eruption also caused a sea-surge, which also killed many people. He also discusses the "top ten" (I think it was ten) volcanic eruptions in history.
This book also provides a great overview of the history of the theory of continental drift, which I think is currently thought to be the cause for volcanism in much of the world.
Obviously, not for the squeamish. But a must-read for everyone else who lives on Earth.
-- Emily |
| Similar books |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 |
Posted in Biography, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Death is a central theme, Gifted, History, Reading level: age 12 and up, Science | Comments Closed
Thursday, September 6th, 2007
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| Author: | Karen Hesse |
| Illustrator: | Robert Andrew Parker |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction, historical |
| Year of publication: | 2000 |
"Read this book," my 12 yr. old ordered me. "I'm pretty sure you'll like it. I liked it a lot."
And I did indeed like it a lot. And, I learned a lot about sea voyaging in the late 1700's too.
Hesse based her tale on fact -- there was really a young boy named Nick Young who "appeared" on the roster of Captain Cook's ship Endeavour quite a few months after the ship had left England, but before it had put into any port. Hesse guessed that he had been a stowaway and was discovered once it was too late to put him ashore.
Nick's story is told in the form of his journal entries for the entire voyage, each of which provides a date, a latitude and longitude (in measurements of Capt. Cook's time, which means that if a reader were to want to follow Nick's journey on a globe, one would have to do a little math), and an approximate location in words.
In Hesse's imagination, but perhaps this is truly how it happened, once Nick is free to show himself, he makes himself useful as assistant to the ship's physician, writing tutor, and friend to the Goat and the dogs and many of the sailors.
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Captain Cook proves an adept leader and for many months of the three year journey; he kept nearly everyone on board alive and healthy. But seafaring was risky in those years. There was violence; the close quarters of the ship required stringent enforcement of rules -- punishment was by lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails or worse -- and Nick does lose many shipboard friends to accidents and disease. My usually very sensitive daughter accepted these sad events because, she felt, they were the historical reality and also because Nick helped us experience them through his accepting (if sometimes tearful) eyes.
Because the tale is told in the voice of a boy, it is not challenging to read. However, Nick does have a strong grasp of sailing terminology and 18th century turns of speech. The glossary at the end of the book and the maps on the inside covers are useful additions.
-- Emily Berk |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Stowaway |
Posted in Animals, Biography, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Dealing with bullies, Death is a central theme, Dickensian, Fiction, Gifted, History, Reading level: age 8 and up | Comments Closed
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
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| Author: | Sylvia Nasar |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | For grown-ups
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| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | Non-fiction, biography |
| Year of publication: | 1998 |
Biography of the brilliant mathematician, John Nash. "How could you, a mathematician, believe that
extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from
Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and
Olympian manner.
"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the
same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them
seriously."
In this workmanlike biography of the brilliant mathematician John Nash,
Sylvia Nasar, a journalist, describes Nash's pioneering early
mathematical discoveries, his decent into madness, and his eventual
recovery and receipt of a Nobel Prize in Economics.
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Along the way, Nasar describes: - How MIT and Princeton became celebrated research institutions.
- How members of the mathematical community, many of whom had not been well treated by Nash, even when he was well, cooperated to make sure he survived when he was too ill to work.
- The story of Alicia Nash, Nash's ex-wife who at tremendous cost to herself made sure that Nash was cared for throughout his life.
- How the Nobel committee decided to award its prize in Economics to Nash (sounds like the process was as lovely as the making of sausage).
Nasar is much less successful at explaining the mathematics, Nash's as well as everyone else's. In fact, she seems to often resort to just listing mathematical disciplines and then saying that they are hard to do.
It reminded me of a visit to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit we paid a bunch to visit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry last summer. The exhibit consisted of quite a few obviously very expensively produced wooden models of sketches of machines that Da Vinci drew in his journals. Next to each model was a large poster explaining in text and diagrams what the machine was supposed to do. I think that the word "genius" was used at least once, possibly several times, in each of these posters. However, the posters never actually stated whether the machine would actually do what Leonardo intended it to do.
Yeah, so Leonardo was a genius. And with that and, what is it now, $1.50, you can get on the subway.
The cool thing about Nash was that he was a genius who did truly work at his craft. He specifically chose problems that people he respected labeled as being difficult. (Nasar seems to look down on Nash's problem selection process, or perhaps she felt that Nash's colleagues did.) Once Nash had chosen a problem, he worked on it diligently and only gave up if he realized that the problem had already been solved.
The not so cool thing about Nash was that for the first nearly 70 years of his life, he was downright nasty to pretty much everyone he met or interacted with.
- Does meanness go with genius?
Based on my experiences with some exceptionally brilliant people, I don't believe it has to.
- Does madness go with mathematical genius?
Well, Godel was certainly suicidally nuts. Turing was driven that way, but seems to have been pretty sane for most of his life. Nash's explanation, that his mathematical intuitions "just appeared" in exactly the same way as the voices in his head, makes a lot of sense to me.
I often know things will happen long before they do. And I am often accused of "jumping to conclusions", or "being overly pessimistic", or thinking differently. And family members who think that my ideas are overly controversial are certainly quick to let me know they think I'm crazy to express them.
- Can madness be overcome through sheer will?
Seems like maybe Nash has succeeded in doing this, but maybe it's only because of his genius that he did. In explaining his recovery, he talks about how he now post-processes his thoughts and kind of throws away the ones that seem not-normal.
A Beautiful Mind is not a book for young readers. It describes a brilliant man's entire life (and if his mind was indeed "beautiful", it seems to me that it was beautiful in the way it processed mathematics, not beautiful in its humanity or generosity), including his homosexual experimentation, his fathering of a child outside of wedlock, his refusal to marry or even care for his mistress, and his neglect of his child. However, it gives interesting insights into the functioning of the intellectual community (and it most certainly is a community) and the advantages and disadvantages of being an unusually gifted person in our society. |
| Similar books |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Beautiful Mind, A: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash |
Posted in Biography, Child-raising, Computers in society, Conceptual: for grown ups, Female protagonist, Gifted, History, Math, Parenting gifted children, Reading level: age 12 and up, Science | Comments Closed
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
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| Author: | Frank B. Gilbreth |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 8 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1948 |
Skipping grades in school was part of Dad's master plan. There was no need, he said, for his children to be held back by a school system geared for children of simply average parents.
Dad made periodic surprise visits to our schools to find out if and when we were ready to skip. Because of his home-training program -- spelling games, geography quizzes, and the arithmetic and languages -- we sometimes were prepared to skip.
... The standard reward for skipping was a new bicycle.
My 12 year old loved almost everything about this true story about how a couple of pioneering efficiency experts raised their 12 children. Except the ending.
Although I tried to warn her about the ending by pointing out some of the foreshadowing and emphasizing that this is a true story, she was pretty much devastated by it. |
Homeschooling parents and those seeking ideas for enriching their children's learning opportunities will re-read this humorous collection of family anecdotes, written by two of the children themselves, often. Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, efficiency experts that they were, strove to ensure that even times of "unavoidable delay", such as when their children used the bathroom, were used for learning. For example, the father painted the constellations on the bathroom ceilings, hid messages in Morse Code throughout their vacation home, insisted that the children listen to phonograph records in French and German for the entire time they spent in bathrooms, etc., etc.
The story of the mother of the twelve children, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, is told in the biography, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth -- A Life Beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen".
-- Emily Berk |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Cheaper By the Dozen |
Posted in Biography, Child-raising, Conceptual: 8 and up, Female protagonist, Gifted, History, Homeschool, Math, Parenting gifted children, Reading level: age 8 and up, School | Comments Closed
Monday, June 18th, 2007
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| Author: | Simon Winchester |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2005 |
Simon Winchester begins and ends with the San Francisco earthquake (and fire) of 1906, but by the time he gets around to it the second time, he's provided descriptions of earthquakes and tsunamis throughout the world so detailed that I was almost afraid to finish the book. But how could I not? |
Winchester's descriptions of the people and places affected are compelling. For example, the Cassandra in me
was moved by the story of the fire chief of San Francisco, Dennis Sullivan, who argued "for years that the city was a tinderbox waiting to be struck.... He must have felt vindicated when, in October 1905, the National Board of Fire Underwriters declared that San Francisco's water-supply system... was in such poor shape that the hydrants would not be able to halt anything approaching a major fire." "[T]he San Francisco fires raged, at first wholly unchecked, for ... three days" after the earthquake. Within 12 hours, half of the city had been completely burned. "Time and again, since almost every one of the hydrants proved to be dry, the firemen could only look on impotently and suffer the jeers of the crowds which at first could not understand why nothing was being done to contain the inferno."
Winchester's explanations of the geology are clear and frank. The appendix about the Richter Scale is worth the price of admission.
Obviously, not for the squeamish. But a must-read for everyone else who lives on Earth. And not just for those who live in California. Look up New Madrid in the index.
-- Emily |
| Similar books |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Crack In the Edge of the World, A: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 |
Posted in Biography, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Death is a central theme, History, Reading level: age 12 and up, Science | Comments Closed
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007
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| Author: | Janna Levin |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | For grown-ups
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| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | For grown-ups
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| Genre: | Fiction, biography |
| Year of publication: | 2006 |
What must it be like to be so intelligent that you can't trust anyone enough to believe him or her? So confident that you are right and that everyone else is wrong that you ignore the woman who loves you when she tells you that you must eat (and assures you that the food is really, truly not poisoned)? What must it be like to know that you are moral, that you have saved civilization, but to be convicted of immorality and forced to deny your true self?
Janna Levin (our madman who is not at all mad) worms us inside the minds of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and forces us to look out into the world through their eyes. When we hear Gödel's story, we may be tempted to think that paranoid insanity is part of terrific genius. But then what are we to think of Alan Turing (yes, he clearly was on the autistic spectrum, but he was not crazy and not harmful to himself or to others), who only wanted to solve very hard problems and love the occasional man and was forced to ingest hormones that destroyed his body and his self-respect? |
A very sad, but important book. A reminder that we must, must, must help our gifted children find communities in which brilliant minds are nurtured and supported and cherished for their idiosyncrasies. |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, A |
Posted in Biography, Computers in society, Conceptual: for grown ups, Culture, Dealing with bullies, Death is a central theme, Fiction, Gifted, History, Math, Parenting gifted children, Reading level: Grown up | Comments Closed
Sunday, March 11th, 2007
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Wonderful piece about the author of the book Wicked
My now-12 yr. old has loved the musical since she first saw it when she was around 9. But we (her parents and older sister) have suggested that she not read the book until she is older, although we agree that the book is much more wonderful than the musical.
— Emily
\”Before seeing the Broadway musical “Wicked†for the 25th time, Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel “Wicked,†was in the lobby of the Gershwin Theater last month persuading people not to read it. Granted, the people were 9, 10 and 13, and Maguire was telling their respective mothers that the book could be “a destination read for freshman year in college.†But when he saw the girls’ hangdog faces, he conceded that, if their mothers read it first and approved, they might try it at 16 instead. …\”
Mr. Wicked by ALEX WITCHEL
Posted in Biography, Broadway musicals, Child-raising, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Death is a central theme, Dragons and/or mythological beasts, Fairy tales, Female protagonist, Fiction, History, Reading level: Sophisticated reader, Science Fiction | Comments Closed
Friday, November 3rd, 2006
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| Author: | Sharyn McCrumb |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction, historical |
| Year of publication: | 2002 |
The book is actually the history of a song, rather than a story about a person who catches songs. And/or it's the story of how a song gets caught. |
In telling the tale of the song, McCrumb helps us learn the history of a special region of Appalachia -- the beautiful, remote, hilly part that straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
We learn, in "their own voices", of the boy who was stolen from his home island in Scotland and so brought the song to the New World, of his hard life during the Revolutionary War, and of his journey to Appalachia. The song then leads us into the mind of a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, which in this part of the country, literally pitched neighbor against neighbor, few of whom cared all that much for the Northern OR Southern cause. Because the song continuously eludes capture by the songcatchers, we then follow its course through family of a young girl in the early twentieth century and then into the mind of another soldier in World War II and then into the later twentieth century.
In each historical period, the song's lyric "When she/he came home, she was a-change-ed, oh" proves true both for those who go to war and for those to whom the war comes home.
Highly recommended for advanced young readers.
Note: The violence, suffering, and death caused by wars are described in short, sharp, riveting, but horrifying bursts that punctuate many of the stories told by the song's custodians.
-- Emily |
| Similar books |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Songcatcher, The |
Posted in Biography, Child-raising, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Female protagonist, Fiction, Gifted, Reading level: age 8 and up | Comments Closed
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
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| Author: | Dava Sobel |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1999 |
The story of Galileo's daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, is mostly peripheral to the story of Galileo himself, in this non-fictional biography. Along with interesting details about what life was like for the illegitimate daughter of a famous scientist in the late 16th century, the book also concentrates on the Catholic Church's determined and successful attempt to get Galileo to renounce his conclusion that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. |
Reading about the Inquisition which forced Galileo to choose between his deep faith and what he knew to be scientific fact, I was reminded of the later, fictional, 1984 and Darkness At Noon, and the non-fictional Reading Lolita in Tehran and the recent efforts in the United States to ban the teaching of evolution. What is it about power that drives people in authority to force scientists to renounce what they know for what the powers-that-be think they should profess?
In Galileo's case, it seems to me, many of those who reviewed his writings understood that Galileo was correct. And yet, what was required was Obedience rather than Truth.
Why does this happen? Is it, as Ayn Rand seems to think, because those lacking in intellectual gifts resent those who are more intelligent than they are? Or, can it be that theologists and ideologists truly believe that what they believe is not only true, but also that anyone who disagrees must be destroyed? |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Galileo's Daughter |
Posted in Biography, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Death is a central theme, Female protagonist, Gifted, History, Reading level: age 12 and up, Science | Comments Closed
Saturday, August 12th, 2006
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| Author: | Annie Dillard |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | non-fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1988 |
Annie Dillard aims her clear scientist's eyes and the evocative Voice of the Pilgrim At Tinker Creek at the lives of upper class families with children in Pittsburgh, PA in the fifties. She reveals a great deal about Pittsburgh; and just about nothing about herself. |
As long as one isn't determined to read this as an autobiography, it will not disappoint.
Dillard's reflections on the differences between her fascination with the French and Indian War versus her obsession with reading about World War II (one was history, the other was an open wound), about the good that Andrew Carnegie did for the people of Pittsburgh and the good that he could have done if he'd made different choices, about her father's aborted trip down the Mississippi, and, especially, about Dillard's growing awareness as she grew up that Pittsburgh high society was not the box she wanted to be in -- made me grateful to have read this book. |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: An American Childhood |
Posted in Biography, Child-raising, Conceptual: age 12 and up, Culture, Female protagonist, Gifted, History, Reading level: age 12 and up, Science | Comments Closed
