- Weightman, Gavin. The Frozen-Water Trade. New York:
Hyperion, 2003. ISBN 0-7868-8640-4.
- Those who scoff at the prospect of mining lunar Helium-3 as
fuel for Earth-based fusion power plants might ponder the fact that,
starting in 1833, British colonists in India beat the sweltering
heat of the subcontinent with a steady, year-round supply of ice
cut in the winter from ponds and rivers in Massachusetts and Maine
and shipped in the holds of wooden sailing ships—a voyage of some
25,000 kilometres and 130 days. In 1870 alone, 17,000 tons of ice
were imported by India in ships sailing from Boston. Frederic Tudor,
who first conceived the idea of shipping winter ice, previously
considered worthless, to the tropics, was essentially single-handedly
responsible for ice and refrigeration becoming a fixture of daily
life in Western communities around the world. Tudor found fortune
and fame in creating an industry based on commodity which beforehand
simply melted away every spring. No technological breakthrough
was required or responsible—this is a classic case of creating a
market by filling a need of which customers were previously unaware.
In the process, Tudor suffered just about every adversity one can
imagine and never gave up, an excellent illustration that the one
essential ingredient of entrepreneurial success is the ability to
“take a whacking and keep on hacking”.
- Olson, Walter K. The Rule of Lawyers. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 2003. ISBN 0-312-28085-8.
- The author operates the
valuable Overlawyered.com Web site. Those who've observed
that individuals with a clue are under-represented on juries in the
United States will be delighted to read on page 217 of the Copiah
County, Mississippi jury which found for the plaintiff and awarded
US$75 billion in damages. When asked why, jurors said they'd intended
to award “only” US$75 million, but nobody knew how many zeroes to
write down for a million, and they'd guessed nine.
- Walsh, Jill Paton and Dorothy L. Sayers. A Presumption of Death. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-29100-0.
- This is an entirely new Lord Peter Wimsey mystery written
by Jill Paton Walsh, based upon the “Wimsey Papers”—mock wartime
letters among members of the Wimsey family by Dorothy L. Sayers,
published in the London Spectator in 1939 and 1940. Although
the hardcover edition is 378 pages long, the type is so large that
this is almost a novella in length, and the plot is less intricate,
it seems to me, than the genuine article. Walsh, who was three years
old at the period in which the story is set, did her research well:
I thought I'd found half a dozen anachronisms, but on each occasion
investigation revealed the error to be mine. But please, RAF pilots do
not “bale” out of their Spitfires—they bail out!
- Muirden, James. A Rhyming History of
Britain: 55 B.C.–A.D.
1966. Illustrated by David Eccles. New York: Walker and
Company, 2003. ISBN 0-8027-7680-9.
-
- Rucker, Rudy. Frek and the Elixir. New York:
Tor, 2004. ISBN 0-7653-1058-9.
- Phrase comments in dialect of Unipusk aliens in
novel. Congratulate author's hitting sweet spot combining
Heinlein juvenile adventure, Rucker zany imagination, and Joseph Campbell hero myth. Assert
suitable for all ages. Direct readers to extensive (145 page) working notes for the book, and book's
Web site, with two original oil paintings illustrating
scenes. Commend author for attention to detail: two
precise dates in the years 3003 and 3004 appear in the
story, and the days of the week are correct! Show
esteemed
author and humble self visiting Unipusk saucer base in July 2002.
- Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: An Abridged
Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1918, 1922,
1932, 1959, 1961] 1991. ISBN 0-19-506634-0.
- Only rarely do I read abridged editions. I chose
this volume simply because it was the only readily-available
English translation of the work. In retrospect, I don't think
I could have handled much more Spengler, at least in one dose.
Even in English, reading Spengler conjures up images of great
mountain ranges of polysyllabic German philosophical prose. For
example, chapter 21 begins with the following paragraph. “Technique is as old as free-moving
life itself. The original relation between a waking-microcosm
and its macrocosm—‘Nature’—consists in a mental
sensation which rises from mere sense-impressions
to sense-judgement, so that already it works
critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing,
causal-analytically”. In this abridged edition
the reader need cope only with a mere 415 pages of such text. It is
striking the extent to which today's postmodern nostrums of cultural
relativism were anticipated by Spengler.
- Lileks, James. The Gallery of Regrettable
Food. New York: Crown Publishers,
2001. ISBN 0-609-60782-0.
- The author is a syndicated columnist and pioneer blogger.
Much of the source material for this book and a wealth of other works
in progress are available on the author's Web site.
- Verne, Jules. Voyage au centre de
la terre. Paris: Gallimard, [1864]
1998. ISBN 2-07-051437-4.
- A free electronic edition of this
text is available from Project Gutenberg. This classic adventure
is endlessly adaptable: you may prefer a translation in English, German, or Spanish. The 1959 movie with James Mason and Pat
Boone is a fine flick but substantially departs from Verne's story
in many ways: of the three principal characters in the novel, two are
rather unsympathetic and the third taciturn in the extreme—while Verne
was just having his usual fun with Teutonic and Nordic stereotypes,
one can see that this wouldn't work for Hollywood. Rick Wakeman's musical edition is, however, remarkably
faithful to the original.