Of all things Geek. I am…
Are we as clean today as our parents were? As our grandparents? What about our great grandparents? Probably not. Are we healthier? I don’t know.
I can answer the first questions, though, because I just finished reading Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt, which “is about us as a people, a people who developed and nurtured over a century and a half a love affair with cleanliness. This book is, in fact, the first general history of cleanliness in the United States.”
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Michael Crichton’s Prey is a parable for technological advancement gone amok. It starts with an introduction to “Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century,” which allows Crichton to weave a better story and set the stage for Prey to read more like a play than a novel.
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Mel Brooks is a legend. And he spent the pandemic doing what writers do… writing. So in addition to The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and many others, you can now add the autobiography “All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business.”
As much as this is your standard autobiography written by someone famous who came from nothing and made their mark, this is comedy icon Mel Brooks, and while not all of his stories are funny, they all involve funny and talented people. You can’t help but smile as you read it.
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JPod by Douglas Coupland Spoiler Free Book ReviewMaking a video game isn’t easy. If your name is Ethan Jarlewski, your day job coding video games is the last thing you need to be worrying about, especially when your personal life is complicated by “Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China.”
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You know the movie, and perhaps you know the series. Both of those, however, were based upon the best-selling Tom Wolfe penned The Right Stuff. The book, as the movie and the series are, is based around the early beginnings of the space race, and it follows the exploits of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, test pilots, and the cultural issues surrounding the men and engineers tasked to get it done.
Wolfe paints the portraits of the Mercury program as a large landscape on which he can include a little editorial here and there as trees that dot the scope of the picture.
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